Using WP for a portal

  • I’ll be as technical as possible, albeit brief in this overview.
    Wordpress is running on IIS 7.5

    This is an academic website, where I am hoping WordPress can be the portal for our university library. Several pages of basic info generally points the prospective student to our primary academic web site, powered by Moodle. However, our server space is lean there, and this new machine is terra-byted up to serve as our library. So I will be linking moodle course documents back to this server for student download of primarily text files.

    The goal is having an Excel Spreadsheet (perhaps saved as an XML file or something?) as the starting point for the e-version of the Dewey-Decimal system into this library. (As such, one can sort columns by author, book title, year of publication, etc.) There are hundreds of documents — literally. Books (like all 50+ of the Harvard Classics just for starters) video lectures, you name it. So I need three things —

    1. How can I grab the link from the folder structure in the back end to plug into the spreadsheet [one by one, hyperlinking each document individually into this master file]? It’s not like I have an FTP spot on a remote server — WordPress is on the same machine as the folders with the files, so it’s a different view than typically might be found; [This might not be a WordPress question specifically, but it all wraps around together…]

    2. Then what is the best way to set up such a massive single document (PDF, “save as web page,” XML, HTML or what) from Excel INTO A WORDPRESS-friendly Page (and how do I upload it properly).

    3. And finally, we must SECURE IT with a requirement that the person accessing the file(s) provide a username/password. Bandwidth being an issue, we can’t have the world downloading this library — enrolled student access only.

    Anyone have any good ideas on this implementation for WordPress? Granted, it’s not the typical three-part question. ??

    I do have a few other real simple questions, but this is the heart of my current dilemma. A tech recommended WordPress, so here we go. We have it launched, I’ve built a few pages in it, and have some of the basics under me 3 days into this project. Any assist would be appreciated on this more complex scenario.

    Thanks!

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  • Thread Starter discipleaaron

    (@discipleaaron)

    Another item of technical interest in this situation is that the “library” of WordPress is limited to 2 MB per file. So using the “media library” seems not do-able, unless there is a plug-in allowing for unlimited file size, or some other plug in that creates a multi-search feature for all files in a structured directory tree–like a glorified FTP site. (Videos are in one folder, PDF’s another, E-Pubs another, etc.) Some of the PDF’s are near 100 mb in size, not to mention the video lectures, etc. So merely grabbing the link from the existing folder would make the most sense, if there be an easy way to do that.

    Ideas?

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