Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with plug-ins for RapidWeaver (by RealMac) and Stacks (from YourHead) to find a way to have a password protected page on my personal website (planchenault.be) on which members of the family as well as close friends can share files up to 4000 MB without timing limitation.

Although there are a number of good third party solutions out there (like WeTransfer, Dropbox, …), most of them are either free but with limitations on file size and with a maximum number of days the uploaded files are available, or they are payable and can be quite expensive for a private user. Also, in all the cases that I know of, for uploading or downloading files the visitor of your website would be redirected to the third party website.

As of today, on my private website I have a file sharing page that avoids all of those concerns.

The password protection is built into the page using Sitelok (from Vibralogix). The Userfiles plug-in for Sitelok (also from Vibralogix) is used to manage the display of all uploaded files, and it also offers a very simple, user-friendly way of adding files.

For the moment, the Vibralogix software is limited though to approximately 250 MB per file, and since I needed a solution for much larger files, I added a second possibility (one additional click) using the FormsPlus stack from Chillidog Software. Through “File Chunking”, this software circumvents the limitations on the server side associated with large files (basically, each file is cut in smaller “chunks” which are uploaded individually, and then pieced back together on the server).

If you are interested in having a website of your own with similar functionalities (“membership pages” with password protection, file sharing integrated in your site), contact me through the contact form on the website of pi-ProductivITy.