Born in early 2022, Frappe Drive is one of our oldest products in the productivity suite. Many of you might have heard of it, but most wouldn't have used it. Multiple engineers have worked on this product, but it never really picked up. In fact, this is the first blog post on Drive.
Perhaps this was because Drive is more of a personal app than a business one. In Frappeverse 2025, we announced our plans for our productivity suite. Drive is at the forefront of this idea. In any case, this was a good year for the product - we now use Drive rigourously inside Frappe.
I'm excited about where this will go - but today, I'm announcing a new release: v0.3.
How we got here
I have long been interested in Drive solutions, being a power user of Dropbox myself. When I first learnt of Frappe, I checked out the products page, and the two that interested me the most were Mail and Drive (they sounded sufficiently complicated).
I joined Frappe last November. I first worked on Gantt for a month, tying up loose threads from my internship. Then, in a happy surprise, I learnt that Drive was an "orphaned project" (we have quite a few of those at Frappe). I took it up, looking forward to some exciting work. It has certainly been that, but also hectic and nerve-wracking at times.
At some level, the drive solutions market has stagnated. This isn't surprising - how, really, can one innovate in file management? By extension, Frappe Drive was always envisioned as a Drive solution for Frappe users, not as a standalone product.
That said, I wanted to change this. There are many things that are irritating about existing drive software, and this area deserves some new software that's truly delightful to use. Drive is not there yet, but over this year, that's the direction I've worked towards. In this release, you'll see both notable features - like our S3 integration, allowing you to have a great frontend to work with files in your S3 bucket - and small ones, like Smart Sort, that make working with files more hassle-free.
What's new
Teams
Previously, Drive used to cater to individuals alone - if you're working in a company, files became pretty hard to manage as you have to individually share files. In our own company instance, our Shared page quickly became very cluttered, hundreds of files lying about without any structure.
This feature solves these problems. When you create a team with specific users, they all have a common view of the folders and files in the team, and they can upload files too. You can also share files from your home folder with a team. Want some people with only read access? Add them as a guest user!
Teams becomes especially useful with our S3 integration.
S3 Integration
We added S3 support in in the v0.2 release, but it was quite basic - you could change your backend to S3, and Drive would store your files there. While this helped new users to Drive who wanted cheap storage, it only worked for people who didn't have files already.
Let's say you already have your files in an S3 bucket. How do you connect it to Drive? Previously, people had to write complicated migration scripts, and also move the files in the bucket to fit Drive's format (for example, Home files have to be inside a <username> folder).
v0.3 solves that with our Sync feature. No scripts or changing your existing folder format - just add a new team, connect it that specific bucket, and sync to replicate your files in Drive immediately.
You can also choose a specific folder inside that bucket if you want.
Other Integrations
Our long-awaited Framework/ERPNext integration is here - now you can attach Drive files in Desk. In all honesty, this is not as feature-rich as we'd like, so give us your feedback!
We've also added integrations with other products, such as Frappe Slides: you can add and manage presentations directly from Drive.
As always, UX first
We redid most of our file previews. In particular, we added the official preview for Office files like Excel sheets or Word documents:
In the list view, sorting alphabetically is not always what we want - for example, if files are named by the month, the "human" order is more intuitive than the alphabetic one. We added smart sort for this:
Dozens of small UX features have been added to Drive. For our international users, multi-lingual support is here; for our night owls, Drive now has dark mode; for people like me, keyboard shortcuts make Drive a lot more usable.
Bulk actions allow you to quickly manage dozens of files. With public uploads, people can upload files to your folders even if they don't have an account on your site - and when you share files, you can restrict the download. We also greatly expanded the thumbnails - you can see them not just for images and videso but for PDFs, Office files, and more.
Read on if you want to learn about Writer. Alternatively, check out our website, or try out Drive now.
Writer
We have another product nested in Drive - Frappe Writer, our open-source document editor. While this existed previously, it was buggy and unpolished. This June, we rewrote it from scratch.
Collaboration
The most important feature for teams - the ability to collaborate realtime on documents:
Commenting, redone
It's not just a redesigned UI. Comments are now rich text, which means you can format your comments as you wish, or mention (@) someone to get their attention.
Style settings
Want to change the look and feel of your document easily? Just head over to the document settings and change the default font family, size, or line height.
Versioning
Both automated and manual versioning is supported, ensuring you can travel through the document's history, and restore as you wish. Configure how often you want your versions in the document settings.
And that's the wrap for v0.3. Join our Telegram group for announcements, feedback, or quick support.
There is a long road to be travelled, but this is a good start.
