Question

I have a user registration page where the user signs up for an event and then submits a paper. A reviewer will then read the paper, and approve/decline it. I finished all the registration, validation, login, and user authentication stuff. Now I need to design a way for the user to upload his/her paper on the website and then view the status of it. I’m kind of lost for ideas about how to structure this whole thing.

I need to know 2 things
1) Where should I store the papers (docs files)? Should I put it all in a folder within the website directory, use google docs, jquery plugin? What’s the normative procedure here?
2) How should I structure the reviewer? Should he/she have a master account on the site, that can view all submitted docs and then approve or deny them? If so how do I setup a master account, make all the docs viewable, and mark the status?

I have a rough idea for the status. I can have a Paper Status column in the database and have two checkboxes on the website; when the reviewer finishes reading the paper, they can just select one of the checkboxes and that information will get put into the database. Then I can retrieve that information and present it to the user.

Answer 1

Storing them on your server should be no problem. If they need to be secure you should keep them above your public folder. For instance if your path is /user/public_html you should make a folder for these papers somewhere like /user/papers.

Then when loading one of them in you should use the header() function to serve up the proper force-download headers, then readfile() to actually send the file contents to the browser so a reviewer can download the file. This also gives you a chance to authenticate the user before they actually get access to the file — this is important so that a link cannot just randomly be ‘discovered’, giving access to all of your papers away.