You’ve come to the end of this two-part series. I hope that you have found this series educational and informative. Hopefully, you could follow the guidelines quite easily because the descriptions were pretty much straightforward and intuitive. If everything went as it should, then by now you should have tried these two web-based file managers.

In the first part of this series, we presented bfExplorer. It sports a simple yet effective design. Its strongest points are the ability to edit files on the fly, a WYSIWYG-based HTML editor, the ability to view images right in the file manager, and the syntax highlighting that’s powered by GeSHi. Altogether, it’s a lightweight utility that is especially useful for a developer, thanks to GeSHi and syntax highlighting. Most developers won’t whine about a somewhat simplistic design as long as the application functions effectively without wasting resources.

In this article, we presented PHPfileNavigator2 (pfn2), which shows off a really aesthetic design; it's sort of Windows XP and KDE (GUI)-like, but it’s a great combination of both. It has an extensive list of features. Unfortunately, it does not support syntax highlighting at the moment. Fortunately, this isn’t that much of a drawback because not that many people actually want or intend to store code on their web space. PFN2 focuses on things like powerful indexing, state-of-the-art search functions, extensive photo managing tools, and so forth.

I won’t say which one is better, because both are definitely great. I personally have both on my server. Nowadays, we all have more than enough web space, so we couldn’t care less about that extra 1MB or so. It’s rather pointless. You can use the same database for both managers without conflicts (tables have different prefixes to avoid problems); therefore, you can have both at the same time.

If you still want to try other alternatives, then check out QuiXplorer, CKFinder, or PHPNavigator, or you may want to try out some commercial web-based file managers, just like the iDC, Omnistar, HTTP Commander, Professional Web File Explorer, and dozens of others. A quick Google search will find them.

Don’t hesitate to join our friendly and ever-growing community at DevHardware Forums or DevShed Forums and tell us what you think. You can also ask us questions and ask for our assistance regarding some issues or dilemmas that you might be facing. We’re a community of experts, professionals, and enthusiasts in our fields of expertise.