Dealing with Files¶
This chapter will show you how to present minutes of your club meetings on a private page of your club’s website, organized by year (note: “Procès-verbaux” means “Minutes” in English):
and in the mobile application, since version 7.0:
Note
As you see, the mobile application does not show all minutes unlike the website. This can be easily controlled so that you do not show too many useless documents to your members in the mobile application.
Uploading and Organizing your Minutes¶
To start with, you need to open module File > Filelist:
You are totally free to organize documents the way you want. In this club, the minutes are organized by (civil) year and saved in a dedicated “Minutes” folder, so that the folder only contains minutes and no any other documents. This is particularly useful when you want to easily prepare an organized list of minutes as we have shown on the very first screenshot of this chapter:
Hint
If you possibly wonder why there are more command icons than what you see for your club folder, please pay attention to the checkbox “Extended view” which we checked at the end of the list.
Note
You should know how to upload a document or create a folder but if not, upload best works by drag-and-dropping one or more documents from your computer to the zone slightly above the list of files, below the title. As easy as that! and to create folders, use the icon with a “+” in the toolbar.
Showing Documents in the Mobile Application¶
We will first describe how to show some documents in the mobile application since it is quick and part of the workflow will be useful when you prepare the page in the club’s website.
You will need to edit the metadata of your (minutes) documents by either clicking on its file name or clicking the well-known pencil command icon:
We will concentrate on important steps only, feel free to test other settings. On tab “General”, you may want to adapt the title of the document:
Note
The title is automatically extracted from the metadata of your document when you upload it. But this works naturally only if you took care of well-prepare your document before uploading it.
Then move on to tab “Access”. The checkbox “Visible” should naturally be checked but this is the default. You may want to restrict access. Please note that for club documents this only makes sense if documents should be restricted to the committee only as club documents will never be visible to members outside your club, even if you do not configure special access restrictions (please read section More on File Access Restrictions below if you want to learn more).
This could be useful if within the “Minutes” folder you want certain documents to be invisible to standard members.
Note
In the context of the club’s website however, if the page we will configure later on is accessible by any Lions member, then you may want to select your club and restrict access to the given file. But this is your choice and your responsibility to properly configure access to your content and documents in your club’s website. Don’t worry, this chapter will tell you how to properly restrict access using sensible defaults.
Final step is to categorize your document with one (or more) of the “Documents” categories on tab “Categories”:
That’s it! Save and instantly your document will be available in the mobile application:
Note
Following types of documents are supported: PDF, Word (doc, docx) and Excel (xls, xlsx).
Hint
It’s worth mentioning that the way you choose to organise your files in your club folder will have no impacts on the way those files will be made accessible within the mobile application. In fact, the mobile application will logically organise the various files available to a given user based on their associated categories, where they come from (the club, the zone, …) and will use sub-folders based on the (creation) year if too many files are present in a given directory. This is automatic!
How extracting of the “year” of a document works¶
You may wonder how the grouping by year is done. Here are the rules:
We try to extract the year from the title (metadata), and then from the file name itself.
If we can match something that looks like a full date in ISO format (
yyyy-mm-ddoryyyy.mm.dd), then the corresponding year part is taken as the “year of the document”.Otherwise, if we can match something that looks like a full date in common European order (
dd.mm.yyyyordd-mm-yyyy), the same applies.Otherwise, if we can match something that looks like a year (4 digits starting with either
19or20for 19xx or 20xx, the same applies.Finally if nothing works, we take the date of creation of the document and use the year part.
Note
That business logic will not work for (real-life use case!) a document
without any meaningful “title” and whose name is
LcRs01Cj2022-2023.05.07.2022.pdf. As a human you will understand that the
2022-2023 part is a Lions year, whereas the document has the date
05.07.2022. But the algorithm will wrongly match on 2023.05.07
instead and thus group that document with year 2023.
As such, we highly suggest that you never ever publish documents with cryptic names but take some time to give your documents meaningful and helpful titles.
Showing Documents in the Club’s Website¶
TYPO3 makes it extremely easy to prepare once for all a dedicated page showing all available documents within a given directory / folder:
To do so, we suggest that you create a new page in your website, for instance under “Private Pages” and possibly edit it to restrict access to your club’s members only.
Using module Web > Page, select your newly-created page in the page tree and click the button to create a new content element:
Then choose the plugin “File List - List of files”:
And finally configure the plugin to fit your needs (you will need to choose the folder to show content for, that is our “Minutes” folder) and certainly tick the checkbox to allow browsing to sub-folders if you have sub-folders by year and want to let your members browse them as well:
Note
The checkbox to allow browsing to sub-folders may be only visible once you save the plugin for the first time.
More on File Access Restrictions¶
So you master everything on this page and would like to know more about access restrictions to the files you upload. This section is the transcript of a topic raised in the LionsBase Slack channel, do not hesitate to join us.
The question was: How do access restrictions on files work and how does it behave when no special restrictions are specified. No special restrictions here means nothing selected for “Access”:
Note
Disclaimer: information given may differ slightly if you are not in the context of your club’s website.
We have to consider mainly 2 to 3 contexts where documents are listed (and thus made accessible):
When using the File List plugin (see section).
When sharing documents in the mobile application (see section).
Direct link to a file within the website.
First of all, don’t be afraid, prior to the preparation of mobile application version 7.0, all documents were “public” (no access restrictions). So now that you are able to define access rights, you can fine-tune access but your existing documents are not suddenly “more public” than before!
Context #1
Let’s start with the first context, when you use the File List plugin (which allows to create galleries of photos as well). E.g., when you configure this plugin on a page to show any document you have in a specific club folder (and possibly sub-folders).
Access restrictions are based on capabilities of the underlying TYPO3 extension “file_list”. This is a public TYPO3 extension of Xavier Perseguers, nothing LionsBase-specific and since February 2020, it respects those access rights as well: https://extensions.typo3.org/extension/file_list (naturally your LionsBase instance is using the latest version of that extension). So since that point of time, you could have e.g., a page restricted to your club members with a plugin showing all files within a given directory, but if you mark some files within the directory to be accessible only by the committee, then the very same page in your website, with a single access configuration will behave differently if you are only a member of the club or if you are part of the committee. One plugin, easy to configure!
Context #2
Second context is when you share documents within the mobile application. Documents you share within your club are made accessible by your club members solely, even if you do not configure any access restrictions, members outside your club will not see those documents when they use the mobile application.
Context #3
Direct links to a file is when you create some content within your club’s website, like a block of “Text with images” and you configure a link to a file within your text content or on an image. Since this is purely a core TYPO3 context, TYPO3 will naturally respect any access restrictions. What might have changed since the release of the mobile application version 7.0 when we enhanced the view so that you may now granularly restrict access is that you possibly had some public news with a direct link to a document and once you restrict access on that file, the previous public link will vanish; but that is exactly what you would expect!