What web portal software for PDF/HTML search?

May 23, 2008 12:35 PM

I’m trying to build a simple web portal to share PDF and HTML documentation with our customers, and allow them to search the documentation. I figured this would be many FOSS tools available to do this, but I keep running into roadblocks…

My requirements are fairly simple (at least I think they are):
1. Indexing and search of PDF and HTML files (ideally with Lucene or another search engine with similar capabilities)
2. Indexing and search of files not directly linked from portal pages (e.g. HTML sub-pages within Doxygen docs)
3. Access control so customers can only see and search content they‘re entitled to
4. Easy file upload would be nice

I’ve looked at a bunch of different Content Management Systems and Portals (Drupal, Joomla, Jahia, Liferay, Hippo, Magnolia and others), all of which have many other nice features, but none so far have been able to do simple PDF/HTML search with access control.

From the feature list on cmsmatrix.org, most CMSs seem focused on other areas (blogging, news, portlets), so I'm not sure anymore that a CMS is even what I'm looking for.

Any recommendations? Am I missing something obvious here? Should I be looking for something other than a CMS?

posted by RecalcitrantYouth to technology (2 comments total)

PDF search, CMS, and access control? Those three things together sound more like an enterprise-level product to me.

Is there a budget for this project? If you didn't need access control, I'd suggest using your favorite CMS plus a Google custom search engine. If you have $3000 or so to spare, take a look at the Google Mini.
posted by expialidocious at 9:28 PM on May 23, 2008

You could use a system like Nutch (which I think does PDF) or Solar and just present the search results including the hits that they are not entitled to. When they click on a hit for a item they are not entitled to, return a page that asks them to upgrade their subscription.
posted by bdc34 at 1:00 PM on May 27, 2008