Document Library Lite - Manage & Display Downloads

This free download and file manager plugin adds a 'Documents' section to the WordPress admin. This is where you add and manage your downloadable files. Each document is added as a separate 'Post' within the Document Manager. You add all the information that you want to display about the document, such as the title and a short description. Of course, you also upload a downloadable file. This is what people will click on in order to download the document to their computer/mobile device. Once you have added the documents to the library, they will appear in a searchable table on the front end of your website. They appear on a page called ‘Document Library’.

To control which columns appear on the list of downloads, enter a comma separated list of the following options. You should enter this on the plugin settings page to set the columns for all your document libraries, or enter it as a shortcode option. For example, you might enter title, content, link to create a library containing 3 columns.

• id - The document's WordPress database ID.
• title - The document title.
• content - The document description or summary that you entered on the 'Add Document' page.
• image - The document's featured image.
• date - The date that the document was added to your WordPress site.
• doc_categories - A comma separated list of the document categories.
• link - A download button for each file.

The main ‘Document Library’ page will list all your documents, and you can delete this if you don’t need it. Instead, you can use the [doc_library] shortcode to list different documents in different parts of your WordPress website. For example, you can list documents by category. See the complete list of shortcode options above

With the free WordPress document library plugin, the number of documents depends on the overall speed of your website and how good your hosting is. Most sites can happily list several dozen documents per page. If you want to list hundreds (or even thousands) of downloads on the same page, then we recommend upgrading to Document Library Pro. This comes with built-in lazy load and caching options which allow you to list an unlimited number of documents without any performance issues.

If you want a private WordPress file manager then we recommend using Document Library Lite with our other plugin, Password Protected Categories. This lets you restrict access to any or all of your download categories. For example, you can make all the categories private, or show different categories to different people. For each category, you can:

• Make it password protected so that anyone with the password can see the hidden documents and download files.
• Restrict it to specific WordPress user roles only.
• Give access to specific logged in users only.

Absolutely! You can see the Document Library Lite plugin in action on the demo site.

We have designed the free Document Library Lite plugin to have all the essential features that you need to create a fully functional document library. For more advanced document management and display options, you can upgrade to Document Library Pro. This incredibly popular plugin will supercharge your document library by giving you extra column and layout options, more ways to list documents, plus time-saving features including bulk document import. Compare the free and pro plugins and choose which is best for your site.

We developed this free plugin to be flexible and easy to configure so that it will be suitable for many different websites. The premium version adds most of the features which you are ever likely to need. If you would like to modify the plugin to suit your exact requirements, then we recommend posting a task on Codeable. They have lots of excellent developers who are experienced in customizing our plugins.

Like all Barn2 plugins, the free file manager plugin comes with in-depth documentation. You can either read the instructions above, or the dedicated documentation page on the Barn2 site.

Please report any security bugs through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team will assist you with verification, CVE assignment, and notify the developers of this plugin.