Help making an online pdf library

ikkoup · August 2020

Hi,

I've archived a lot of government files that are no longer available on the web since we had so many political changes (Libya) and I'd like to make them available again for other people to browse/download.

I've organized them over the years and tagged/sorted them using Calibr and I'm looking for a way to do that but every "pdf e-library" solution is paid and since I'm on a tight budget and doing it for free I thought about using WordPress+Pods to make "custom posts" that look like "book entries" or use some knowledge base then Wget or Httrack to turn "the library" into static site to reduce resource usage.

I'm going to host it on a VPS at first because of the initial load and visitors influx, then move it into a Francisco's BuyShared to minimize the costs.

So essentially I'm looking to make a static pdf library, I'm not familiar with WP or any CMS for the matter so I'm open to any suggestion. The library can be as simple as one page with a filtered table that has four rows (name of document/brief description/government branch/download link) as simple as that, just click download and it's done. No logins/comments/etc. As static as it can be.
Sadly I can't do it by hand since there are more than 3000 PDFs and that's gonna take a lot of time to do it HTML5 style, that's why I'm thinking about using CMS to speed things up a bit.

Self-hosting using Calibre isn't an option due to horrible upload speeds in here.

Sorry for the wall of text.