About this plugin
WordPress’s built-in file-management is built primarily for handling “media”. But sometimes there’s a need for curating collections of files within WordPress, not necessarily as media which will be displayed, but simply as files.
This plugin adds an abstraction called “file groups” to WordPress. Each file group can contain multiple files, which are presented elegantly to the user. All files in a file group can be downloaded together as a zip archive as well.
In addition, file groups can be tagged and these tags are used to associate particular file groups to your posts. Two widgets, “related file groups” and “upload related file group”, are supplied to make it easier to integrate the display of related file groups with your posts.
The plugin currently uses the PHP ZipArchive extension to support the batch download functionality.
This plugin is a component of the MIT Educational Collaboration Space project.
Migration
File Groups has some tools which make it easy for you to migrate files which are not in file groups (known as “orphans”) into file groups.
php file:
define( 'FILE_GROUPS_HIDE_NATIVE_MEDIA', false );
In the Media Library, you will now see a drop down which will let you “show only orphans”. Select any collection of files there which you would like to migrate into a file group, and then select the “create new file group” action from the “Bulk actions” menu and click “apply”. A new file group will be created for the files you selected.
Alternatively, individual orphan files have an action called “create singleton group” available to them if you hover over its row in the table.