IMHO, the best approach would be:
- Agree on the structure, the features and the functionality of the site.
- See if somebody can get all that coded and if it's possible at all. If not, go back to 1) and keep the limitations in mind. If it IS possible...
- Get a skeleton of the site working - no gfx, no effects, just plain, ugly default font text links.
- Tinker around with that demo site a bit. See if it does what we want it to do. Make a small WP database and see if we can have search results filtered as we plan to do. Change a file's revision number and see if the changed number appears when we reload the page, etc.
- "Skin" the whole thing and give it a nice layout.
If we can agree on the general scheme I posted, we ought to think about the necessary filters now... "sort by" and "display only" - but according to which criteria? How many parameters do we want to implement anyway?
File size, upload date, file time stamp, revision #, WP author, # of downloads, rating, new, updated, xx map type only ? All of them or just some?
And should the resulting list be customisable in a sense that the user can specify which columns to display? Let's say only time stamp, author and rating?