Hi,
I am making a big Discourse forum to connect groups of people working on the same CAD files.
We need to be able to share CAD files, PDF, DXF, jpeg ect… But keep them organised in one place instead of links mixed inside of post.
Is there anything that do this or similar in or out of Discourse?
Cheers,
Not sure what you mean by “mixed up in one post”. If you upload a file to a post, it is not actually stored in that post but somewhere on your server (or on Amazon S3, if you set up the forum like that). What is stored in your post is only the URL of the file on wherever it is stored.
That URL can be used over and over again in many posts, without having to re-upload the original file.
But if your point is that you want to also have those files neatly stored somewhere in a single folder, then it’s probably better to use a cloud storage provider of your choice, upload the files there, make them publicly available via URL and paste that URL in your forum post.
Thanks for your reply
So could i use Google drive embedder or similar inside the Discourse forum so that members do not have to go to a new page or login to another platform to access the files?
I don’t know what Google drive embedder is but there is no need to embed anything. You just use the url that you get from services like Dropbox or Google drive when you use their share feature. Just paste it in your post and you’re done.
I guess in the context of sharing CAD files, etc. one thing one would like is an index of those files. So far I did not see a plugin that displays a list of uploaded files.
That’s because attachments are managed by their association to a topic. Delete the topic and the upload is purged.
Storing these documents in Discourse probably isn’t the right move, you’re probably better off using Google Drive as you mentioned, there are ways to embed the contents of drive into pages on other systems.
Although I understand the current situation you’re describing, I have no interest in Google products, so the question remains opened to address the topic at hand, which is about organizing files that have been uploaded within the forum.
I‘ve had a similar feature request some time ago:
Discourse is not intended to be used an an organized document store.
That said, you could perhaps use a series of Wiki Topics into which people would upload files.
Or a custom plugin to gather up “similar” files and update index topics automatically.