Why another DMS?

My favorite web space provider - DreamHost - offers 50GB for "personal" use, meaning space for files not intended to be used for a web site. This was enough for the decision to put most of my personal files on their remote machine. Well, having almost the whole stuph out there, on a remote machine running a web server, requires a good tool for sorting and finding the right piece at the right moment.

I took a look at the most OpenSource Document Management Systems and had to acknowledge that most of them have a *SQL back-end for storing the "meta" information about the documents/files. None of them had everything I wanted. So, as you can imagine, the decision was made to write an own one.

What I wanted was a "Simple and Stupid" system, storing the information in plain text or similar files ("XODA" uses plain php-files). It should be not so difficult to have a "file manager", which shows a description of a file/directory and allows applying additional filters on these items (some people prefer to call these filters "categories", "tags"...) for easier sorting. The features of a good file manager (moving, deleting, renaming, up- and downloading, creation of files/directories and editing of allowed files) should not be missed. All of this should be possible using fast solutions (AJAX) and possibly be available in few or even just one file. It should be easy to hack for the purpose of allowing more users to improve it and make good suggestions.

Here you have it - "XODA".

I hope, you can find some benefits using it for your personal files and give me a feedback, maybe with some ideas, how to improve it.

Thank you for stopping by and enjoy the freedom of OpenSource!
:)