Funny thing, we talked about adding this kind of functionality internally at great length just last week… although our primary concern was office documents.
So here’s my thoughts on this functionality, in raw brain-dump form:
Technically speaking, this is definitely doable and certainly would require some htaccess magic. WordPress stores all uploaded files in /wp-content/uploads/ so you would add/modify the htaccess file there to serve up a page that can check permissions any time one of a certain type of file is requested (pdf, doc, docx, etc). Assuming the permissions check passes, you would then serve up the originally requested file. The permissions themselves would need to be set from WordPress’s media management screen, the same way permissions are set for posts right now.
Difficulty wise, this kind of feature is 5/10… but it’s not on the release roadmap yet for one reason: ultimately, we decided to use Google Apps and integrate with the Google Docs API instead – as this allows us to use all those awesome collaboration features too.
Now the API stuff won’t be in PSC as it’s WAY WAY out of scope, but we may pluginize it in the future as the existing Google Docs WP plugins are old, abandoned, pieces of broken junk.
That said, the ultimate goal of PSC is to offer intuitive, functional, reliable protection options for EVERYTHING. This includes taxonomies, media, commenting, and everything in between. But it’s still just a free-time project – albeit one we add to every time we need a new feature ourselves… so there’s no telling when we’ll actually get around to it.
Hi Veraxus, thanks for the update and sharing your thoughts on this. Although it is not fitting our needs for now, I’ll keep a watch on this plugin!