How to activate and use the new Joomla file previewer in Dropfiles

Files managers are essential when we talk about websites, this is just useful as we can share important documents or also sell digital products but let's be honest! How can we offer digital resources to a user or customer with just a title? It could be not easy! That's why Dropfiles provide the possibility to allow your users to preview your files before downloading.

As awesome as it sounds! A previewer that will work and allow the users of the site to see what they are going to download before downloading it, and also using a really powerful server that will work fast and will look just perfect.

In this post, we will see how easy is to enable this previewer and use it.

Enabling the Dropfiles file previewer in a few steps

Now that this feature was added to Dropfiles, all we will need is to install Dropfiles on our Joomla site and have it enabled.

Now, enable the JoomUnited Previewer Server, to do this, in your Administrator go to Components > Dropfiles > Settings.

Now that we are on the Settings from Dropfiles, we will need to navigate to Main Settings > Frontend.

Now that we are in the Frontend settings, we need to look for the JoomUnited previewer server option and toggle it so we can enable Previewer server, finally, we will see a Generate Preview option that will allow us to generate the preview for all the files that we have uploaded in Dropfiles.

NOTE: In order to run tun the Preview/thumbnail generation you will need to have your JoomUnited Account connected to your site.

Now that the generation process started it will show a process bar with the number of files that needs to be regenerated.

This will only generate/show the supported file extensions by the file previewer, these extensions are: ai, csv, doc, docx, html, json, odp, ods, pdf, ppt, pptx, rtf, sketch, xd, xls, xlsx, xml, jpg, jpeg, png, gif.

But no worries! The nonsupported files will be still previewed using Google Previewer.

We will see an option called Secure generated file, this option will allow us to secure our previews using the same restrictions used in the file, for example, if the file is under an access limitation, the preview will also have that limitation.

When the generation is done you will see the message of the files generated.

And that's all! As easy as clicking a button and waiting for the Extension to do the magic!

Using the file previewer in the site

Now that we have enabled the file previewer, we can add our files category and use the awesome previewer without any other extra setup.

All you need to do is add the Category using the Dropfiles button usually available under the CMS Content option in the editor available in our Joomla site.

All we need to do is click the category that we want to add on the left section and finally, click on Insert this Category on the right section.

Finally, after saving the article (or where we added it ;) ), we will be able to see the category added with the preview buttons as well.

And what we have been waiting for! The Previews, all we need to do is click on Preview, the box will appear with the document preview that we want to download.

Of course an image preview is easy but what about a PDF file? That could be tricky to be shown in a previewer but no worries!  Dropfiles is here to help, let's see how it looks like!

Awesome! Isn't it? And what about the files that can't be served from the server? Will these look as awesome as other supported files? The answer is yes! The files will look awesome and load fast too using the Google previewer, let's see it!

In order to show how it is shown, we did add a file without generating the preview.

That is an XML file as you can see and it is shown as awesome as any other file with the preview already generated an awesome Fallback! 

Start serving your files with awesome previews

As you can see, this is an awesome tool and the preview is just one of the features that Dropfiles offers, you will be able to use cloud services like Google Drive, and Dropbox to serve the files directly from the cloud and save your hosting storage so what are you waiting for? Go here and get your own copy!