Changelog

A restricted document can point at a file hosted somewhere else, such as a link to cloud storage or another website. The people you shared it with could see it in your library, but its Download button gave them an error instead of the file.

Fixes & improvements

• Signed-in visitors who are allowed to see a restricted document now get its file when the file is a link to another site. This covers documents restricted to logged-in users, named people, groups or membership plans, and documents in restricted categories and client areas. Visitors without access still get no download link.
• The same fix covers the occasional restricted uploaded file whose Download button showed that error to the people it was shared with.
• On the AI plan, a view-only document whose file is a link to another site no longer shows a Download button, so it stays view-only.
• No setting needs changing: the fix takes effect the next time the page loads.

Searching or filtering a table library no longer reshapes it under the visitor's cursor.

Columns keep their width

Each column now holds the width it had when the library first appeared, through every search, filter, sort and page change. Before, the columns re-flowed to fit whatever rows matched, so typing a few letters could send the titles, dates and download buttons sliding around. A table too wide for its space still scrolls sideways, with its columns held just the same, and on phones, where rows stack as cards, nothing changes. To let columns resize again, add stable_columns="0" to the shortcode.

Optionally, keep the height too

A search with only a couple of matches still makes the table shorter, which moves everything below it up the page. Add stable_height="1" to the shortcode and the library keeps its first-page height as well, so the page around it stays still. It's most useful when the library sits above other content or inside a fixed-size frame.

When you send scanned PDFs for OCR, the whole batch now gets processed, and the Search Index tab shows how far it has got.

Failed documents retry on their own

If the OCR service timed out on a document or was briefly unavailable, that document used to stay queued with no retry scheduled. Now FileDeck tries it again automatically, waiting longer between each attempt. A large scan also gets five minutes to finish instead of two, and a batch is spaced out so one background run isn't handed the whole backlog at once.

See what's queued and what stopped

Documents → Settings → Search Index now shows how many scanned PDFs are queued for OCR. When OCR stops on a document, for example because the service didn't accept the key, the tab tells you why. Click Send scanned PDF(s) for OCR to try those documents again.

OCR for scanned PDFs is now included with your Pro license. Switch it on and it works, with nothing to request or paste.

Turn it on in one step

Go to Documents → Settings → Scanned OCR and tick Enable OCR. FileDeck uses your activated license to connect to the FileDeck OCR service, so there is no Service URL or OCR key to fill in. Then open Documents → Settings → Search Index and run OCR on your scanned PDFs as before.

Until now, the settings asked for an OCR key that you couldn't get anywhere in your account. You had to email us for one. That step is gone.

If you already have a key

If we sent you a site key, or you run your own OCR service, nothing changes. Your settings are now under Use your own OCR service instead on the same screen, and they keep working. To switch to the included service, empty the Service URL, tick Remove the saved key, and save.

Only PDFs with no text layer are sent for OCR, and the service deletes each one as soon as it has extracted the text.

FileDeck's bundled translations now work alongside a wordpress.org language pack, and two more pieces of text follow your site's language.

Language packs and bundled translations together

When translate.wordpress.org has a language pack for your language, WordPress normally installs it for you. Until now that pack replaced FileDeck's bundled translations, and because a language pack covers only the free plugin, Pro and AI tier text would have gone back to English. The two now work together: the language pack is used for the strings it translates, and the bundled translations fill in the rest.

Fixes & improvements

• The Document Library page FileDeck creates when it is first activated is titled in your site's language when FileDeck has a translation for it.
• AI tier: the footer on watermarked PDFs is translated. It is printed in plain ASCII, so accented letters become plain ones where the server can transliterate them; otherwise, and for languages such as Chinese, the footer stays in English.
• AI tier: the Smart Collections list shows when each collection was refreshed in the word order of your language.
• Security and reliability improvements.

On sites set to another language, some of the notices FileDeck shows on document pages were still in English. They now use the bundled translations, in all nine languages.

Notices in your site's language

The superseded notice on a replaced document, the Attached documents heading at the end of a post and the message an empty document changelog shows now follow your site's language (Pro). So do the read-and-confirm prompt with its button and confirmation messages, the Related documents heading and the message an empty collection shows (AI tier).

Fixes & improvements

• The Document Category and Document Tag names at the top of category and tag archive pages are translated.
• Pro: the empty "— none —" choice in dropdown document fields on the front-end submission form is translated.
• The Bricks document embed element's settings and its reminder to pick a document are translated.
• In wp-admin, the Documents menu, the add and edit screen titles, and the Document Fields (Pro), Acknowledgments, Smart Collections and AI Index (AI tier) screens follow your admin language when it is one of the nine. Other admin screens stay in English.

Activating FileDeck on a new site now asks one short question, then opens the setup wizard — and FileDeck's screens work while that question waits for an answer.

The opt-in question comes first

The free version asks whether you'd like email about security and feature updates, tips and occasional offers, and to share some basic WordPress environment info. On a fresh install, the setup wizard used to open before that question could appear. While it stayed unanswered, the Documents menu held only the question, and screens such as Upload Documents and Settings said "Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page."

Now the question shows first, Allow & Continue and Skip both lead on to the setup wizard, and FileDeck's screens work whether or not you have answered yet. FileDeck Pro asks for your licence key at that point instead, and opens the wizard once the key is activated.

Fixes & improvements

• Uninstalling FileDeck moves the auto-created Document Library page to the trash when its title and content are still exactly as FileDeck created them, rather than leaving it published with a bare [filedeck] shortcode on it. It stays if you changed it, made it your homepage, added it to a menu or gave it child pages — and on a site with the trash turned off it becomes a draft.
• The deactivation form's "The plugin didn't work", "The plugin broke my site" and "The plugin suddenly stopped working" answers now offer an optional box to say what happened, with a link to tell us directly.
• The setup wizard's browser tab now reads FileDeck Setup.

Some of the library's buttons and messages stayed in English on sites set to another language. They now follow your site's translation, and FileDeck ships the template that translation tools start from.

Buttons that stayed in English

Copy link and its Copied! confirmation, Load more, the Previous, Next and page-number buttons, and the ⌘K search palette's label and messages now come from your site's translation, like the rest of the library. The bundled translations include them in all nine languages.

A translation template in the plugin

FileDeck now includes a translation template (a .pot file). Loco Translate, Poedit and similar tools read it to list the strings to translate, so a new translation starts with the full list — the block editor's labels included — instead of whatever the tool finds by scanning the plugin's files.

Fixes & improvements

• Sites set to Canadian French (fr_CA) now get the bundled French translation instead of English.
• FileDeck's blocks now use a translation of their block editor labels when one is installed, from a wordpress.org language pack or your own.
• The bundled translations now cover the year filter and the Reference column.
• Pro: the preview window's screen-reader name, the zip download's error message, the embedded library's frame title, the embed's PDF loading message and the Bulk Add file picker are translatable too.

On a narrow screen a document library turns each row into a card, with a label beside every value. Two things on those cards could come apart.

Fixes & improvements

• A restricted document's card showed a padlock where Download would be and a dash where Preview would be, with no label to explain either. Those lines are labelled now, laid out like everything else on the card. Cards for documents the visitor can open look exactly as they did.
• A category name too long to fit beside its label ran off the edge of the card. Categories that do not fit now move onto their own line, and a single name longer than the whole card wraps inside its tag.

When you deactivate a plugin, WordPress asks why. FileDeck's version of that form recorded the most common answer — “Expected something else” — as a bare count, with nowhere to say what you were expecting. That is the answer we would most like to act on, and it was arriving with nothing attached.

Fixes & improvements

• “Expected something else” now offers an optional box for what you were hoping it would do, alongside a link to tell us directly.
• “Great, but I need a specific feature” asks which feature, and “Didn't work as expected” asks what it did instead.
• All three are optional, and none of them replaces an input the form already had — choosing “Found a better plugin” still asks which one, as before.

Three things libraries were being bent into shape to do — filing by year with a category per year, carrying part numbers in titles, and stacking one library per category down a page — now have a control of their own.

Filter a library by year

Minutes, newsletters, accounts, annual reports: a lot of libraries are filed by year. Switch on Show a "year" filter under Documents → Settings → Features (or show_year_filter="1" on a library, or the Year filter switch on the Elementor widget) and a dropdown lists the years the library's documents span, newest first — read from each document's date, so there is no "2026" category to create every January. It only appears once the library spans more than one year, it works with every other filter, and a visitor's pick lives in the address bar like the rest.

To pin a library to one year with no control at all, year="2025" on the shortcode gives you "the 2025 minutes" as a block of its own.

Reference numbers

Every document has a new Reference number field, on its edit screen under the file: a part number, a document code, a form number, an exam paper code. It is searchable in the library and in content search, with partial matches (0208 finds DOC-0208), and it is available as a sortable Reference column in the table and folders layouts, including libraries large enough to run in server mode. The Pro CSV import reads a reference column and the export writes one.

One library, a section per category

group_by="category" renders a library as titled sections, one per category with its document count, in the same order the folders layout uses (Folder order first, then alphabetical, uncategorised last under "Other"). One search box and one set of filters cover every section; a section with nothing left after a search hides until something matches again. It works with the table, grid and gallery layouts, on the shortcode, on the Elementor widget as Group by category, and as a site-wide default under Documents → Settings → Display → Group by. A page that stacked a library per category for the sake of headings can be one library again.

Fixes & improvements

• The date-added filter now filters correctly in every library; it could previously let older documents through.
• Grid and gallery cards carry the document's date, so the date filters apply to them as they do to table rows.
• Pro: a search the library matched by title, reference number, category or tag is no longer recorded as a content gap when the file text did not also match. The content-gaps report now lists only searches nothing matched.

The sample library is now for the people building the site, not its visitors; the starter page steps aside once you have built your own; and the front end of every library renders in Hungarian, Slovak, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese without a language pack.

Visitors never see the sample library

The nine sample documents exist so a new library has something to show while you set it up. From this release they show only to logged-in editors, badged Sample so you can tell them from your own files. Anyone else — a visitor, a subscriber, an embedded library on another site — never sees them, in any layout, on a document's own page, or in the REST listing. You can leave them in place as long as you like and remove them when you are done; nothing you have not written reaches the public.

If you trash or delete the last sample by hand instead of using Remove sample documents, the empty sample categories are removed with it, so *Forms*, *Policies* and *Reports* do not linger as stock categories in your library.

The starter page steps aside once you have built your own

Activation creates a Document Library page holding a plain library, so there is something to look at on day one. Most sites go on to build their own page — one per product line, one per year group, one per client — and the starter page lived on beside it, published and in the sitemap, listing every document unfiltered.

Now, the moment another published page or post renders a library, an untouched starter page is unpublished. It becomes a draft, never deleted, and a notice in wp-admin says which page superseded it, with a one-click Restore the starter page if you want it back. "Untouched" is strict: only a page still carrying exactly the title and content activation wrote qualifies. Rename it, add a sentence, change the shortcode — it is yours, and it stays.

The library speaks nine more languages

The front end of every library — the search box, the filters, "No documents match your search", "Download", "Show 25", the document count and everything else a visitor reads — now ships translated into Hungarian, Slovak, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese. Nothing to install: the site's language setting picks the translation, and a community language pack from wordpress.org still takes precedence where one exists. Admin screens are not covered.

Fixes & improvements

• A folders or grid library with no documents now shows "No documents found" instead of rendering an empty frame.
• The Document Categories screen notes how many categories hold no published documents — directly or in a sub-category — since an empty category never appears in a library.
• The licence screen now calls the paid build "Pro version" rather than "Premium version".
• A site five or more releases behind sees a reminder on FileDeck's own screens, with the number of releases and an update link; dismissible per version.

If you brought your library over from another plugin, some of your documents may have been missing the zip checkbox, the Preview button and their thumbnail. Those come back.

Files on your own site are attached, not linked

When an importer meets a file the old plugin managed in its own folder on your site, FileDeck now registers it in the Media Library where it already sits — nothing is copied or moved. Previously that file was linked by its URL, and a URL-linked document quietly missed everything an attachment unlocks: multi-select zip downloads, the preview lightbox, PDF thumbnails and vault protection. Every importer now does this; the old plugin's protected folders are still copied in, as before, because a file there is unreachable by URL.

One click for libraries migrated earlier

Go to Documents → Settings → Health. It counts the documents that still link a local file by URL and offers Attach them now, which registers them in place in batches of 100. A large library can be done in one go from the command line with wp filedeck attach-local-files.

Fixes & improvements

• The weekly health scan now lists those documents under their own check instead of probing each one as an external link.

Hovering a document in a library no longer pops up a preview card unless you ask for one. The card itself also draws properly on every theme now.

Hover preview cards are off by default

The card that appeared when a visitor paused the cursor over a document — a thumbnail, the title, category, type, size and date — is now an opt-in feature rather than something every library does out of the box. It suited some libraries and got in the way on others, particularly dense tables where the card covered the rows beneath. Turn it on under Settings → Features → Hover preview cards if you want it back. Sites that already saved their settings keep whatever they chose.

Fixes & improvements

• The hover card could render see-through on some themes, with its text overlapping the rows behind it. It now always has its own background, border and shadow, whatever the surrounding theme does.

FileDeck Pro adds a Share button to every document — beside Download in the library, and on the document's own page — so a visitor can pass a document on without leaving the page or hunting for its address.

The Share menu

Click Share and a small menu opens:

• Copy link puts the document's link on the clipboard.
• Share… opens the device's own share sheet — AirDrop, Messages, Slack, whatever is installed — on phones, tablets, and the desktop browsers that offer one.
• Email starts a new message with the title as the subject and the link in the body.
• X, Facebook, LinkedIn and WhatsApp open that network's share page with the link filled in.

It is off until you switch it on: tick "Share" button on every document under Settings → Features, and untick any networks you would rather not offer — keep only Copy link and Email on a client portal, drop Facebook on an intranet. One library can differ from the rest with enable_share="1" (or "0") on the shortcode.

It shares the page, not the file

What goes on the clipboard is the document's page on your site, never the file itself. A download link can be signed and expiring, sit behind a form or terms, or be restricted to certain people — none of that survives being pasted into a group chat. The page does: whoever opens the shared link gets exactly what they would get arriving any other way. A restricted document shows its padlock, a gated one asks its question, and with supersede the link keeps resolving to the current version after you replace the file. A document a visitor cannot open gets no Share button at all.

Nothing is loaded from any network until a visitor picks one: no share scripts, no like buttons, no trackers. Each item is a plain link, opened when it is clicked.

Fixes & improvements

• The Share menu follows the library's light or dark colour scheme, works from the keyboard (arrow keys move, Escape closes and returns focus to the button), and is never clipped by a fixed-height library.