Thanks for your detailed question and for the link to you client’s web page; very helpful.
MLA can provide assistance with this application. You should be able to do the job without actually resorting to PHP coding. Here are my initial thoughts:
-create categories for the PDFs MLA adds taxonomy support for Media Library items. You can use MLA’s “Att. Categories” and/or “Att. Tags” taxonomies to assign terms to the documents. For example, you can assign a term for each of the headings on the web page, e.g., “SigmaFire Steam Generator Specifications” or something shorter like “SigmaFire”. Terms can be assigned during the upload process using MLA’s “Bulk Edit area” on the WordPress Media/Add New (Upload New Media) admin screen. They can be added or modified later using the Media/Assistant Bulk Edit or Quick Edit areas, or on the WordPress Media/Edit Media acreen.
-upload PDFs As noted above, users can upload new documents with the WordPress Media/Add New (Upload New Media) admin screen. MLA does not have or require a process of its own, but it does add the “Bulk Edit area” to the WordPress admin screen.
-assign them each a name WordPress will derive a Title for each item from the file name. Your client’s file names are not very helpful for this purpose. Once the documents are uploaded you can use the Media/Assistant Quick Edit area or the WordPress Media/Edit screen to update the Title value.
-permit them to put them in specific order You can use the WordPress-standard “Menu Order” field to arrange the documents in a specific order. You could also sort on the document Title, but this would put “Model E154” after “Model 1004”, which would look odd. You could define a custom field and assign values like “E0154” and “E1004” to fix the sorting problem in a more logical way than using the Menu Order.
-automatically render the list with categories on their “Literature” page. You can use the [mla_gallery] shortcode for this purpose. There are several ways to implement the page; the simplest would be to have a separate shortcode for each of the headings on the page. For example:
<h2>SigmaFire Steam Generator Specifications</h2>
[mla_gallery attachment_category=sigmafire post_mime_type=application/pdf orderby=menu_order]
<h2>E-Series Standard and FMB Burner Steam Generator Specifications</h2>
You can also use the IPTC metadata support for PDF documents to pre-populate values like the Title and categories and then use MLA’s mapping rules to extract the metadata and use it to update your items. I had a look at one of your client’s documents and aside from “Author” the fields are empty. Adding the metadata you want would be a separate step.
As you’ve observed, MLA is powerful but can be complex. I know the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab is more reference than tutorial. I do my nest to answer questions here in the support forum and fill in the blanks. You may be interested in these earlier topics along similar lines:
Just start with it
Generate a table with pdf-files
Problems with PDFs
I hope that gets you started on a solution for your client. I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it or start another topic if you have problems or further questions regarding the above suggestions. I am happy to give you whatever help I can in using MLA; thanks for your interest in the plugin.
