Yet Another File Manager Question

December 2, 2008 5:07 PM

Help me find an online file manager that doesn't suck! Everything I've found so far falls into two categories, either (a) sucking, a lot, or (b) requiring, for inexplicable reasons, a database backend. I just want something that will handle file uploads and basic file management (move, rename, delete, copy).

The solution should not try to provide any form of authentication. This is what my web server is for! Bonus points if it has (a) actually been touched in the past few years, (b) makes good use of CSS and (c) does a good job of separating logic and presentation in the code, because this makes my life much easier if I need to change something. I am reasonably language neutral -- in no particular order, Python, Perl, and PHP are preferable, because those are already installed on the target system and I'd like to avoid introducing any additional requirements.

I am trying to avoid getting a number of non-technical people to install WinSCP, since, among other things, this means I wouldn't be able to take advantage of our web single sign-on infrastructure. I would also like to provide people access that does not first require software installation.

posted by larsks to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Can't immediately give you the answer you're looking for, but if you've an urgent need to give a few people access to your files while you're waiting for what you want, have a look at the FireFTP extension for Firefox as a possible alternative to WinSCP. Very small download (small enough to be a reasonable email attachment, even), easily configured (it uses the normal Firefox preferences mechanism for config, so you could even ship your users a user.js file with all the necessary preferences preconfigured) and nicely integrated with the browser.
posted by flabdablet at 5:29 PM on December 2, 2008

I don't know about the b and c of your question, but for the main question have you tried Google Documents? Very basic but pretty straightforward.
posted by zardoz at 6:39 PM on December 2, 2008

Judging by your "Yet another..." title, I imagine you have seen previous #1 and previous #2? I keep reading these file manager threads but no totally awesome solution turns up. So I look forward to seeing if this is the thread that finds the perfect solution...
posted by misterbrandt at 7:03 PM on December 2, 2008

I assume you've already looked at this, this and this?

I use the FTP portion of this and it's very basic, but it works and it's easy to set up.
posted by ostranenie at 10:27 AM on December 3, 2008

Response by poster: Hello all, and thanks for your input. I have looked at all of the above mentioned tools and found them lacking in one way or another. Google Documents isn't an option because we specifically need something to provide access to a *local* filesystem.

We've actually ended up using Plone, because we're already using that in house, and the Reflecto plugin, which provides a view into the local filesystem. So while we have something that works (the interface is simple, it interacts well with our web server's authentication, and it doesn't require any software installs for the users), it is a large hammer for the problem.
posted by larsks at 12:56 PM on December 3, 2008