I don't know if this is possible but before I went to a lot of work I thought I would ask, and this may not be the correct forum in which to ask but I had to start somewhere.

On the website I built and am now managing I have a folder called "Documents". Inside that folder are other folders, and inside those folders are actual documents.

I would like to create a page called "Document Center" that the visitor can go to to find a certain document, say an application.

I like the idea of a collapsible menu so the visitor isn't hit with a huge long list of documents to sort thru, however, it seems like it will be a pain to maintain since every time I upload a document, I then have to go and update the menu.

Is there anything out there that I can use that will "automatically" see and list what is in that folder? Similar to Windows Explorer. I don't have to tell my computer each time a file is added, if I go to Explorer and click on the folder it shows me everything in there.

Does this make sense? BTW, I am a newbie at this so take it easy on me please!

To read files on the server, you need a server side code, such as ASP, Coldfusion, PHP, etc. Reading a list of all files in a directory is a trivial task with one of these, with a small amount of programming, but there are no facilities in the browser to manage this task.

I know the server supports PHP but I am not fluent in it.
If I was going to do a search to find a tutorial on this, what should I search for? I haven't had any luck so far.

In PHP it works like this:

PHP Code:

$dh = opendir('/absolute/path/to/');
while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false) {
    if(filetype('/absolute/path/to/' . $file) == 'file') {
        echo $file;
    }
}
closedir($dh); 


The line:

echo $file

simply means output the file name to the browser, without the path info. Of course you could do may other things, such as:

PHP Code:

echo '<a href="/directory/' . $file.'">'.$file.'</a>'; 


Of course, none of this is directly related to a collapsible menu, which is more a JavaScript issue, but since PHP processing happens before any code hits the browser, it is a separate task entirely.