I-Soft File Manager: Foundation

The Media Library flattens everything into wp-content/uploads/YYYY/MM/, which breaks predictable automation and makes category-based permissions impossible. Foundation keeps files organized by category — which is what large organizations actually need when managing thousands of documents.

Foundation stores files outside the Media Library in a predictable per-category folder tree (wp-content/uploads/isoft-fmf-files/). The filesystem is the source of truth. Moving a download to a different category auto-moves its files on disk. This lets external automation tools (Rclone, SFTP, scheduled scans) sync files in and out without having to understand WordPress internals.

No — each download lives in exactly one category. Categories are physical folders on your server, and a file can only sit in one folder at a time (just like on your computer). If you need a document to appear under several groupings, use tags instead — those are intentionally many-to-many and don't affect storage. Heads up on 0.11.0: WordPress's standard category picker still shows checkboxes that let you pick multiple, but only the first one is actually honored. A patch coming right after this release replaces that picker with a proper single-select dropdown so the UI matches the underlying rule.

Yes — but via a separate companion plugin, I-Soft File Manager: Arbiter (coming soon). Foundation's data model is intentionally close to jDownloads to make a one-shot import practical; Arbiter reads the legacy tables directly and rebuilds the category tree, downloads, files, and counters into Foundation, preserving slug paths so existing URLs keep working.

Open their user profile (Users → Edit User), scroll to I-Soft File Manager: Foundation — Allowed Categories, and check the boxes. Users inherit access to every descendant of a checked category. Administrators bypass all access checks.

Deletion is blocked if any download is still assigned to that category — the files would otherwise be orphaned. Reassign or delete the downloads first, then delete the category.

Configured under Settings → General → Allowed File Extensions. The default list covers common document, archive, image, audio, and video formats. Executables (.exe, .sh, .bat) are not in the default list and should only be added if you know what you're doing.

Yes. Uploaded filenames and category slugs are automatically transliterated from Serbian Cyrillic to Latin for disk storage. Display titles keep the original characters. A setting under Settings → General → Cyrillic Titles can auto-fill download titles in Cyrillic from uploaded Latin filenames.

Yes. The plugin detects FSE themes and injects the download card via the the_content filter. Classic theme templates under templates/ are used as a fallback.

Yes. Foundation ships eight shortcodes that drop into every major builder's HTML or Shortcode widget. See the full shortcode reference below for attributes; the builder widget table at the end of that section shows which widget to paste into in each builder. Native, point-and-click widgets for each builder are planned as separate companion plugins.

Your WordPress database user almost certainly lacks the CREATE privilege, so the plugin's tables never got created on activation. As of 0.10.19 every admin page shows the exact MySQL error plus a ready-to-paste GRANT statement to fix it; visit any plugin admin page to see the notice. On many cPanel hosts you'll need to also re-add the user to the database via cPanel after granting in SQL — the literal-vs-wildcard underscore escaping bites here.