Settings overview: what lives where Free & Pro

All of FileDeck’s site-wide options live under Documents → Settings, organized into tabs. The free plugin shows Display, Features, and Data; installing Pro adds the rest (Submissions and Health appear when those modules are active). This page tells you what lives where, so you can jump straight to the right tab.

Display

How every library looks: default layout (table, grid, or folders), the columns manager, documents per page and pagination, accent color, grid columns, download link styles, empty-state messages, and what titles link to. See styling your library and choose and reorder columns.

Features

Front-end toggles — the preview lightbox, multi-select zip downloads, category-click filtering, the site-wide ⌘K / Ctrl-K quick search, and more — plus access and leads options: hiding restricted documents, lead capture with its webhook, activity logging, and moving expired documents to draft.

Scanned OCR

Scanned or photographed PDFs have no text layer, so content search cannot read them. This tab enables the FileDeck OCR service, which extracts that text — the only feature that sends document contents off your server, and files are discarded immediately after processing.

AI search

Optional semantic search that finds documents by meaning, using your own AI provider API key; the vectors are stored in your own database. Keyword search always stays 100% on your server. See AI semantic search.

Ask AI

Configures the "Ask this library" chat widget — grounded answers from your documents — and the chat key that also powers AI summary and tag suggestions in the document editor. See Ask this library.

Lifecycle

Lets visitors subscribe to email digests of new and updated documents (see subscriptions and digests), and adds an approval gate — a "submit for review → approve & publish" workflow — to the document editor. Review dates themselves are set per document or category; see review cycles.

Downloads

Download notifications — an email per download to the recipients you list (capped at 200/day site-wide as a flood guard) and an optional webhook that receives a JSON payload per download, with no cap. On the AI tier this tab also holds PDF watermarking: stamp a footer on every served PDF recording who downloaded it.

Submissions

Settings for front-end document submission: let visitors submit documents through a form with moderation, see their own submissions, and edit them from the front end — no wp-admin access needed.

Privacy

Activity log retention (keep forever or purge older rows daily), IP anonymization, and FileDeck’s integration with the WordPress core privacy export and erase tools. File integrity also lives here: a SHA-256 checksum per file, with optional verification on every protected download.

Health

Configures health scans, which check every published document for missing files, dead external links, and downloads nobody wants — weekly and on demand.

Search Index

Status and controls for the content search index — see how many documents are indexed and rebuild the index (large libraries rebuild in the background in batches).

AI Index

The counterpart for AI semantic search: the vector index’s status and rebuild controls.

Data

One decision: whether uninstalling the plugin deletes all documents, categories, tags, and leads. It is off by default, so your content survives removal — and uploaded files always stay in the Media Library either way.

FAQ

Do settings apply per library or site-wide?

Site-wide. They set the defaults for every library; the block and shortcode can override layout, columns, and scope per page.

Which tabs need extra keys?

Scanned OCR needs a FileDeck Pro OCR key. AI search and Ask AI require your own AI provider API key; a managed option is planned but not yet available.

Where do I turn on lead capture and activity logging?

Both are toggles on the Features tab; leads then appear under Documents → Leads and events under Documents → Activity Log.