From a simple blogging platform, WordPress has evolved into a powerful CMS tool that people are using in their own unique ways. Previously, we showed you how to do collaborative editing in WordPress. In this article we will show you how to use WordPress as a document management system. The goal is to use WordPress as a collaboration platform, allowing teams to work on documents at the same time and handling file management, workflow, and file hosting.

Setting up your Document Management System

First thing you need to do is to install and activate WP Document Revisions plugin. Once activaed, the plugin will add a “Documents” menu item in your WordPress admin sidebar. Clicking on it will take you to Documents page.

Working with Documents

To add a new document click on “Add Document”. This will take you to Add New Document page where you can give this document a title and upload it to WordPress. You can also choose a workflow state from the Workflow State drop down menu. By default you have initial draft, in progress, final and under review states. You can assign the ownership of the document to any other user in your WordPress. The default publish status of a new document is “Privately Published”, which means that the document is available for other users in your system. You can also make a document password protected or make it publicly available on the front end of your website.

WP Document Revisions allows users to check out a document. The document management system locks down a document that has been checked out. If another user tries to edit the same document they will see a notification that another user is currently working on the document, and they have locked it. However, if the second user has the privileges they can override the lock.

User Role Management in WP Document Revisions

WP Document Revisions take advantage of your existing WordPress user management. The capabilities of users in the document management system are similar to the capabilities of users in WordPress as a blog.

Contributors can create new documents, but they cant upload documents. Contributors can also download published documents. However, they can not view privately published documents created by other users.

Authors can create and upload new documents. They can also download publicly published documents and edit their own documents.

Editors can work on all documents, delete documents and manage workflow. They can not add new users to the system.

Administrators can perform all tasks and they can also add new users to the document maanagement system.

Document Workflow States

By default you have Initial Draft, in progress, final and under review workflow states. Go to Documents » Workflow States to create new workflow states or edit the existing states. WP document revisions also works well with Edit Flow.