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WPBeginner» Blog» Plugins» How to Use WordPress for Document Management or File Management

How to Use WordPress for Document Management or File Management

Last updated on July 23rd, 2014 by Editorial Staff
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How to Use WordPress for Document Management or File Management

From a simple blogging platform, WordPress has evolved into a powerful CMS tool that people are using in their own unique ways. Previously, we showed you how to do collaborative editing in WordPress. In this article we will show you how to use WordPress as a document management system. The goal is to use WordPress as a collaboration platform, allowing teams to work on documents at the same time and handling file management, workflow, and file hosting.

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If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

Setting up your Document Management System

First thing you need to do is to install and activate WP Document Revisions plugin. Once activaed, the plugin will add a “Documents” menu item in your WordPress admin sidebar. Clicking on it will take you to Documents page.

WordPress Document Revisions List View

Working with Documents

To add a new document click on “Add Document”. This will take you to Add New Document page where you can give this document a title and upload it to WordPress. You can also choose a workflow state from the Workflow State drop down menu. By default you have initial draft, in progress, final and under review states. You can assign the ownership of the document to any other user in your WordPress. The default publish status of a new document is “Privately Published”, which means that the document is available for other users in your system. You can also make a document password protected or make it publicly available on the front end of your website.

Adding a new document to the document management system

WP Document Revisions allows users to check out a document. The document management system locks down a document that has been checked out. If another user tries to edit the same document they will see a notification that another user is currently working on the document, and they have locked it. However, if the second user has the privileges they can override the lock.

User Role Management in WP Document Revisions

WP Document Revisions take advantage of your existing WordPress user management. The capabilities of users in the document management system are similar to the capabilities of users in WordPress as a blog.

Contributors can create new documents, but they cant upload documents. Contributors can also download published documents. However, they can not view privately published documents created by other users.

Authors can create and upload new documents. They can also download publicly published documents and edit their own documents.

Editors can work on all documents, delete documents and manage workflow. They can not add new users to the system.

Administrators can perform all tasks and they can also add new users to the document maanagement system.

Document Workflow States

By default you have Initial Draft, in progress, final and under review workflow states. Go to Documents » Workflow States to create new workflow states or edit the existing states. WP document revisions also works well with Edit Flow.

Managing document workflow states

WordPress as the platform and WP Document Revisions as your document management system provides an open source alternative to costly collaboration tools. Let us now what you think about using WordPress as a document management system?

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16 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. Lior says:
    Aug 18, 2017 at 4:02 am

    What about batch uploads? What if you have dozens if not hundreds documents to upload?

    Reply
    • Ron says:
      May 4, 2018 at 2:20 pm

      I have multiple files to migrate from a third party cloud. I want to have my documents available through my website but don’t want to spend more time than necessary. So, I’m also wondering about being able to bulk upload.

      Reply
  2. tushar says:
    Jan 12, 2017 at 7:47 am

    Hi, thank you for this post I agree with you that WordPress as the platform and WP Document Revisions as your document management system provides an open source alternative to costly collaboration tools. very useful information

    Reply
  3. Maria ahsan says:
    Aug 29, 2016 at 8:06 am

    it was an awesome post and it became very useful for me . it stated about how to use wordpress for document management software , after trying that i had a positive response and it became useful for me and my company .

    Reply
  4. Michael Adkins says:
    Nov 27, 2015 at 2:26 pm

    I think this plugin will work for me. But stull have questions. I want to use the plug-in to display a list of our club minutes on a secure page. The documents will be uploaded by the secretary in their final state. So there will be no revisions. I just need to be able to add a slug to a page that provides a list of the documents and a user can then click and download the document to read.

    So here are my questions.
    1. When uploading a document can I state the category of the document and then only display the list of documents in that category on a wordpress page?
    2. Where does the plug-in produce the slug or how to I care a slug.
    3. Can documents be set to defult as a final state?
    4. If someone downloads a final state document does it still lock out other users from downloading the same document.

    Thank you so much for your time and plugin.

    Mike

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Nov 27, 2015 at 7:54 pm

      Please contact plugin support they will be able to guide you better.

      Reply
      • manu says:
        Oct 5, 2016 at 5:44 am

        who can review the documents , ?

        Reply
  5. Matt Griffin says:
    Sep 23, 2015 at 9:45 am

    If you want a more powerful plugin for document management in wordpress, look up SP Client Document Manager. It has a lot more control over who can see different files (permissions) and a ton of other features as well.

    Reply
  6. Chris says:
    Sep 8, 2014 at 3:48 am

    Hi there, thanks for this good article. Is there a way to make the document status ‘Public’ by default? Thanks in advance!

    Reply
  7. Sarah Stanley says:
    Apr 2, 2014 at 11:45 pm

    I have just installed WP Document Revisions and have loaded up some documents that are for public consumption.
    I can link to these documents individually within posts and pages, but I want to have one page on my site that will show all published documents without having to add the links manually.
    Is there the functionality to do this?
    I thought I would be able to just add the Documents header to the menu bar to do this, but it doesn’t seem to work this way.
    I would like just one menu button that takes users straight to this page so they can see all published documents without having to run all over the site trying to find them.

    Reply
    • justsayno says:
      Jul 7, 2014 at 5:31 pm

      This would be trivial to do you just need to make a custom template to do so. Then use WP_Query to query published documents and then show the links inside a loop. http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query. You can query basically anything with WP_Query. What you are asking for requires some coding but its not difficult coding

      Reply
    • Pablo Zaltz says:
      Aug 16, 2014 at 8:51 am

      Just use the shortcut [documents] into a new page and check how it looks.
      For further customization, you wil need to add some code.

      Reply
  8. Erick Lacayo says:
    Feb 25, 2014 at 3:21 pm

    How would you use this plugin? Who can benefit from this plugin?

    Reply
  9. Chad says:
    Aug 21, 2013 at 2:48 pm

    I installed this… How come I can upload *.doc and *.docx? I imagine there are more since these are the first two I’ve attempted.

    Reply
  10. robert conor says:
    Apr 11, 2013 at 7:41 pm

    Thanks for the lesson on setting up a document system!

    Reply
  11. Steve Eilertsen says:
    Apr 11, 2013 at 9:17 am

    Awesome post! Thanks

    Reply

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