Creating a download manager in Drupal

It seems as though when it comes to providing a decent download manager in Drupal, there just isn't much there.  Joomla has DOCman, which is truly excellent.  Drupal has... ummm... yeah.  There are modules such as dbFM and WebFM, which are very nice, but they are more like an OS's file manager than what I consider a download manager to be.  I guess I should explain what I consider a download manager to consist of:

• Categorization of files -- When added, a file can be tagged with one or more keywords to make it possible to group them together.
• User-friendly information about the file in the listing -- When viewing a list of files, it should provide more than just a file name (which doesn't need to be shown at all, really.)  Ideally, it will have a brief name for the file as a title and a description of the file that explains more in depth as to what the file is.  It might also show the file size, date it was added, date of last modification, and a download count.  It could also display a file-type icon, as the following example of DOCman from http://www.joomlapolis.com shows:

   
   

• Distinguish the files -- This could be as simple as having a space or line between file entries, or there could be different colors for the even and odd entries.

These are some of my requirements.  The big thing for me is to have a nice layout which uses user-friendly names and descriptions.  The idea is that the general public needs to be able to know what they are getting, and filenames (usually) aren't the best way to express that.

While Drupal does not have an immediate "set-it-and-forget-it" module to do this, the beauty of Drupal is that it is quite customizeable, and can be made to do just about anything we want.  In this document, I will attempt to walk through how to mimic much of DOCman's behavior in Drupal, using common modules.