Feature Proposal: Improve attachment handling

See also: SharePointVsTWiki. Related: Document Management System, DMS

TWiki's current attachment display is made for a small number of files. To be able to use TWiki as document repository we need advanced features.

Ideas

Searching

• Searching within documents. Currently done by SearchEnginePluceneAddOn. Might be sufficient if installing plucene works out of the box. Another possibility is to use Google Mini to index the TWiki server.

Tagging

• Instead of searching (and better than to copy the file hierarchy) use filter view options with the attachment table. Show only documents of type, or uploaded since date.
• Tag documents, or classify them by type; add metadata such as author, document type, document status.
• Tag multiple attachments at the same time.

Viewing

• Show attachments from multiple topics filtered on type, date, author, etc., sorted on date, etc.
• Integrate attachment search/display with edit mode to facilitate referencing files / including images.

File handling

• Move multiple attachments at once to a different topic / to trash.
• Update topic references with attachment move

Impact and Available Solutions

-- Contributors: ArthurClemens

Discussion

Exciting prospect!

If it could look and (largely) behave as a Windows-explorer type document repository, than that'll certainly keep training times down. Being able to create a folder hierarchy would be a part of this.

In MsWordToTWikiMLAddOnDev, i've included a link to a VBA macro available for MediaWiki. Apart from converting the Word file, they are able to instantly upload all data (including all extracted images) to the correct location on the server, making the transition from Word to MediaWiki a snap. Having some kind of central document repository in TWiki could perhaps help us achieve the same thing...

-- JosMaccabiani - 17 Dec 2006