Fighting with obstinate web developer / or is it us???

[spikespiegal]

Company I do IT work just spent a fair amount of money having a fairly elaborate web-site put together. Site is almost done, and it looks great. Web developer has otherwise been easy to work with and quite professional, and we decided to host with them. They have some high profile clients, and don't appear to be idiots.

However, we've been fighting with these guys to provide a very basic capability, and I'm not sure why they are being so obstinate about it given how sophisticated the rest of the work was. I'm not an expert on web-site development, and need help understanding if we're being unreasonable, or they just lack some basic tools and we need to look elsewhere for our hosting.

It's very simple. We want a directory on our new web site where we can upload various catalog PDF's for our products, which will happen fairly frequently, and customers can download them. Doesn't need to be fancy. Just a link on our site that points to a directory on our site where customers can download any of a long list of PDFs if they want to.

To me, this seems quite simple. However, the web developer has been stubborn about this, and making it seem more complicated than it has to. First they asked us to use the control panel that most web-hosts provide for their customers to do site maintenance, which is fine. However, this consists of a fairly poorly written and spartan upload page that took me 10seconds to instead resort to a good old FTP client.

However, after uploading the file, I have to go back into their clunky control panel, and manually type a full hyperlink for each file uploaded before it will even show up on our site. That's both a pain in the a--, extremely time consuming, and easy to screw up forcing you to have to delete the file and re-upload it. We just want a simple linked directory where we can dump files via a smple FTP client and not have to mess with anything else. Real simple. What say you guys and what am I missing that I should be seeing from their perspective?

 

[kamper]

That does seem pretty simple. All that would be needed is a script to read the contents of the directory and generate links to all the files. That was the very first php I ever wrote

Edit: maybe they understand what you are asking. They don't think that they have to write an upload handler do they? Because that gets a little trickier and has high potential for security problems.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: kamper
That does seem pretty simple. All that would be needed is a script to read the contents of the directory and generate links to all the files. That was the very first php I ever wrote

Exactly, as long as you didn't say you wanted to give the links different names than the PDF file names.

A perl or PHP "refresh" script in a password-protected folder that when run does a directory listing and rebuilds the page of hyperlinks should be very easy to write.

Perhaps the designer is embarassed to admit she has no script coding skills and uses generation tools like DreamWeaver?

A second option is the old "folder without an index page" method if you configure the web browser to allow file browsing under that condition. Downloads would be by HTTP but that shouldn't matter.

 

[spikespiegal]

Yeah...exactly. Nothing fancy, and we don't need HTML alias's created for a download page.

J'ever browse through a driver's web-site, and there's always the link that just kind of 'punts' you to a crude list of legacy drivers or documentation? That's all we want.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: spikespiegal
Yeah...exactly. Nothing fancy, and we don't need HTML alias's created for a download page.

J'ever browse through a driver's web-site, and there's always the link that just kind of 'punts' you to a crude list of legacy drivers or documentation? That's all we want.

That's what I was getting at for method #2. Web servers can be set to do this automatically for any webserver-accessible folder (in the website folder tree, Read permission for all) that doesn't have an index or default page.

The link to the folder would be "...../folder/"

This option is now set to off by default on some (all?) webservers because it's less secure, but you might be able to allow it for just the one folder. I've never configured Apache so I can't say how.

 

[Hersh]

Originally posted by: spikespiegalIt's very simple. We want a directory on our new web site where we can upload various catalog PDF's for our products, which will happen fairly frequently, and customers can download them. Doesn't need to be fancy. Just a link on our site that points to a directory on our site where customers can download any of a long list of PDFs if they want to.

I don't want to step on anyone's toes here (especially a fellow web developer, whoever you have hired) but the description of what you want done can be done in less than an hour, more if you want a more elaborate administrative backend designed.

You may need to tell them that you don't have a problem with manually uploading the PDF files, all you want is a PHP script that pulls the list of PDF files in a certain path (which you or the developer can designate) and displays them as a list and have each element linked to the actual document.

They won't need to worry about security of providing a web-accessible upload form and they won't need to worry about handling the PDF files since that is taken care of by the client/browser.

You should also think about HOW your customers are going to access these PDFs, are they customer only or do you want them to be publically available for download by anyone? (The former requires more work since they have to code a client-only part of the site if they haven't done so already.) If you want it to be accessible by anyone, just tell them:

1) find the names of all PDF files in /blah/blah/directory
2) echo them out as links to their exact URL

 

[spikespiegal]

Thanks for the tips.

The files in question are entirely public with no security concerns.

If the developer won't lighten up, we're going to insist they point the file archive link at our home network, and I'll throw apache on a spare box or something.

 

[superjohnyo]

i use index0r for this purpose. I have a directory that is full of files I want people to be able to download, and this script sits in that directory as index.php, reads the contents of the directory, and displays them. Here is an example: link

 

[AdamSnow]

Wow........ that's easy as hell... All of my upload sites are like that...

Example

Just a link, to a bunch of downloadable files.

 

[sourceninja]

Sounds like they are using a framework and not really doing any coding themselves. They problem use something like phpnuke or mamba or some inhouse like thing. They are giving you the run around.

 

[Kev]

i've never heard of a hosting company that doesn't allow you to easily update your own site via ftp. seems pretty retarded to me.