for a project we are actually using joomla + docman.
for some reasons (slow docman plugin evolution) we are evaluating alternatives.
we are operating a public free document librairy with a few thousands of technical documents (pdf).
we are actually using joomla + docman plugin.
docman development is quite on halt.
we are looking with possible evolution alternative
here are our recquirements based on docman functions :
mass import of document from server folder
mass import GUI for uploading pdf documents
automatic creation of document presentation page for each document with preview and download link
automatic creation of category page for each server folder with documents
content creation for each category / document page
user comments on each document and category page
The biggest problem will probably be that in the GUI you can only upload documents (or any sort of files) within the content editor of Ghost.
The automatic creations could work with a separate cloud function that handles it. That would be some custom development, though.
What will work without issues is the (manual?) content creation for each category/document page and the user comments on that.
Full text search within a PDF won’t work. Ghost isn’t very document-focussed, so to be fair, all of these things would be a bit of a workaround.
Probably best if you try that yourself. The quickest would probably be to try Firepress’ Discover Ghost on play-with-ghost. The Ghost versions are a bit outdated, but should be sufficient for you to give it a spin.
If you’re looking for a more up-to-date version of Ghost, you can start a free trial on Ghost(Pro) or also on magicpages.co, the Ghost hosting service I run. Both of these have the most up to date Ghost version.
To clarify: Ghost doesn’t have built-in full text search, even for blog posts.
You can do full text search using Algolia, including for PDFs, as long as it’s a text-based PDF and not an image. I set it up for these folks: https://library.rolltoroll.org/ (unfortunately, their paywall means that you won’t be able to see that the search hits are coming from their PDFs).