Something like Quick View Plus?

http://www.avantstar.com/metro/home/products/quickviewplusstandardedition

john



-----Original Message-----
From: Shearer, Timothy J [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2012 6:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] clarification about file visualization

Hi Folks,

My query may have been poorly expressed...

What we have is a webserver with 64,665 files (html, css, js, jpg, you get the idea) and lots of directories with subdirectories.

The goal is to be able to conveniently take all that in in a way that makes it pretty simple to see/navigate (say for a public services staff member tasked with doing a survey of the old content) so that we can get a handle on what's there (prior to say, moving from a php+html template approach to a CMS).  It's about exploring the website from under the hood.

In my limited imagination it might look like: the document tree represented in xml as viewed through a web browser.  Expanding/contracting nodes (and being able to recursively explode the view at at any node).
Maybe choose to hide things like image, css, and js files.  Annotation would be lovely (say at a subdirectory be able to say: "this one's old and needs to go", "this one we keep as is", "this one needs to be reworked entirely").  And in an ideal world state could be preserved...if you'd expanded/contracted chunks as you were exploring, you could come back later and be where you were in your exploration.

tree expresses the file system as (strangely enough) a tree, but the output is not interactive and it's huge and unwieldy to deal with.  If you find a subdirectory that's full of thousands of files that are irrelevant to the task of getting a handle on the overall content, they're on the screen and you page and page down and eventually lose track of where they are in the directory hierarchy.

I'm more interested in how other shops help users understand a huge old webserver's content than focusing on a specific tool such as the one my brain imagines.

Thanks for the feedback so far!

Tim