The first part of this article discussed the basic design andarchitecture for an intranet document management system. In this concludingpart, get to the good stuff with a discussion of the "check in" and "checkout" process, and add a simple search engine to the system.
That just about concludes this little tour of the various scripts that make up The Vault. Throughout this development effort, I have made widespread use of PHP's session management capabilities, file and string functions, HTTP headers, and mySQL database queries. If you are new to PHP, I hope that the effort has been instructive, and that it has helped you gain a greater understanding of these powerful open-source tools.
It should be noted at this point that this project is by no means complete. Since The Vault was introduced for internal use a few weeks back, a number of minor bugs have been reported, and some additional capabilities requested. Among the features requested: the ability to quickly display documents in specific categories; to sort listings by name, size, date and owner; to search by revision log comments; to limit the number of files displayed per page; to change the default colours; and to display the name of the currently logged-in user.
Additionally, once I have confirmation from users that the system, as designed, meets their needs, I would like to review the design once again, with particular emphasis on further modifying both the database schema and the SQL queries. This process should take place in conjunction with the development plan for new features, so that the addition of new features does not add to overhead and cause performance degradation.
I plan to continue adding features and optimizing code, as and when time permits - if you'd like to give me a hand, or have ideas on how to improve the techniques discussed here, drop me a line and let me know. Ciao!
This article copyright Melonfire 2001. All rights reserved.
