NYCPHP Meetup

[David Mintz]

Anybody have any recommendations for a good web-based, free file manager?
That's pretty much the bottom line, but here's the full story.

I need to put on our office's website a directory structure of documents --
PDFs, whatever -- for the public to browse and download at will. No problem
so far.

But I also want a set of people to be able to add, overwrite, remove files
and directories. That should also be easy. What's wrong with sFTP, for
example? Nothing, except that my users are in a totalitarian Windows
environment and have no client software and are not permitted to install
anything. OK, what's wrong with webFTP or similar? Then all they need is a
web browser. True, but we are on a shared hosting service, and I can make
another user account for everyone to share, and use WebFTP, but that user's
home directory is separate and distinct from my own, beneath which our web
doc root resides, and to which that user does not have access. If I had the
privileges, I could figure something out with symlinks, permissions, ACLs
perhaps -- but I do not, again because it's shared hosting.

I thought, well suppose we use something like Amazon s3 and rig up a way to
mount the remote folder to a point under our web doc root? Then they could
use the s3 web interface to upload etc and there you go. Problem there is,
that additional expense, though small, would have to come out of my pocket
and I already happen to be bearing the cost of this website already, which
is why it's on a dirt-cheap hosting plan.

Then I learned that Dreamhost (our provider) now lets you set a CNAME to
alias a bucket in its DreamObjects (competitor to s3) to a subdomain of
your Dreamhost site. Cool! But what you get, when you access
public-stuff.example.org, is an XML file listing the contents of the
bucket. You have to provide your own interface. Fair enough, but... you
know how it is when something seems like it's getting outlandishly
complicated. You start suspecting you're on the wrong track.

At last I think, dude, all you need is a good free web-based file manager,
no more or less. Anybody have any recommendations by way of that, or
anything other suggestions?


-- 
David Mintz
http://davidmintz.org/
Human needs before private profit:
http://socialequality.com/
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