Building File Management Site with Drupal
Sat, Aug 29, 2009 by Arnold
I recently came across an article about 16 Different Clones you can Build with Drupal. I have seen most of the clones on the list such as Digg clones and Facebook clones. The one clone that I have not seen is a file management web site clone.
In the past we have built a lot of projects using Amazon S3 and the Media Mover module mentions in the post. We have however only used that for basic document management to support content editing, as oppose to building a complete site like Box.net.
This article reminds me of a recent email discussion in the IT mailing list of the University of Chicago where there is a question about a Drupal theme to build a file management site. Back then the discussion pointed towards using Alfresco as the document manager.
Looking at it now, and having been exposed to both Alfresco and Drupal (we provide services in both platforms), I would still say that Alfresco is a better document manager. I see Drupal as a great web content management, however, when we start talking about repositories and file folder structures, Alfresco remains to be more superior. As an example, it will be quite a bit of work to set up a shared drive in Drupal with a complete interface.
I think that part of this is that both systems have a different focus. Drupal started as and has always been a web site management tool. This includes intranets and extranets. Alfresco started as a competitors of Documentatum which is primarily used internally by staff members. While all of these systems can support web sites, Drupal is the one that is dedicated for it.
fredrik posted on August 31, 2009 3:10 pm
@admin - no, i have not really worked on that. but it might be coming up in project.
alfrescos jlan-shared drive-implementation (CIFS/ftp/etc.) is actually available as a open-source standalone product. it uses the filesystem for storage (speed) by default and can expose filesystem-attributes like mtime, ctime, deletion via mysql that would be important for synchronising w/ e.g. drupal. setting it up is actually really easy ...
http://www.alfresco.com/products/aifs/ source & jars:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/alfresco/files/JLAN/Alfresco%20JLAN%205....
if one keeps all the metadata in drupal (like indytech seems to have done), one could skip the alfresco "on top" of jlan. basically that would be less complexity, less moving parts, but alfresco obviously offers a lot more than a shared drive.
best,f.
indytechcook posted on August 30, 2009 1:09 pm
I've used the Alfresco module (http://drupal.org/project/alfresco) to integrate Drupal with Alfresco. It was very easy. Since it turns the Alfresco documents into node, you are really limitless to what you want to do with the documents in Drupal.
We used Alfresco just as a document repository (the "share drive feature"). Then we tagged taxonomy terms against the nodes to tag the documents. We also a issue tracker and change control system in Drupal. This allowed us to relate issues and changes to documents on the "shared drive"
admin posted on August 30, 2009 3:49 am
We havent integrated Alfresco and Drupal yet, but is looking it for a few of our client projects. Have you done that?
fredrik posted on August 29, 2009 10:27 pm
hi arnold,
i think that is a really important point you're making here. without doubt, alfresco plays in a totally different league in terms of DM and file management compared to drupal.
i only recently discovered the "fileframework" (http://drupal.org/project/fileframework). it seems really impressive (including a Webdav-Interface), but i am not sure that trying to reimplement alfresco in drupal will really cut it considering where alfresco is already now (not that trying that would not be "very drupalish" to do!)
i think what is really at stake is to get seamless interoperation between drupal + alfresco. there have been some recent and really interesting efforts to bring confluence and alfresco closer together (http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/2009/06/integrate_confluence_alfres... and http://code.google.com/p/confluence-alfresco/). i guess, more and more offices need shared folders they are accustomed to and "social", hyperlinked easily-edited-content management ("wiki") - all at once and integrated.
The points outlined on the homepage of the confluence-alfresco integration project strike me as an apt summary of the best approach und features that drupal needs to "cut it" in the intranet/extranet in the middle run:
- Reference & Embed (display directly) Alfresco Content in drupal nodes / wiki
- Browsing / Querying / Search integration with Alfresco (Opensearch)
- Use Alfresco to "offload" thumbnailing, text extraction, previews etc. (Webscripts)
The cmis stuff in drupal and alfresco looks really good, but from my testing for a current project, is seems not entirely "there" yet (http://drupal.org/project/cmis_alfresco); the SOAP-based project Alfresco (http://drupal.org/project/alfresco) seems pretty stable but CMIS is definitely more promising in the long run ...
Have you worked on integrating drupal and alfresco?
best,
fredrik
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