Import Office / OpenOffice docs

It would be great if users could import an Office’s document without all that nasty code that Office creates.

cheers
emi

There is a solution to that, a french CMS named LODEL is able to do just that via ServOO

ServOO allows publishing large, structured and complex documents on the web easily. It converts documents prepared in a word-processor into XHTML for publication on the web. ServOO is based on OpenOffice.org so support many usual formats, for instance rtf, doc, sxw.

Documents converted in XHTML are enriched by ServOO with information about document structure (paragraph style, charater styles). Any Web application can now support this feature using ServOO. The integration is very easy thanks to an object-oriented library in PHP (ServOO client library). The library undertakes the communication with ServOO and processes the XHTML-enriched documents for the web application.

It could be a very nice feature to have implemented in MODx...

One of the biggest open source CMS, ezpublish (http://ez.no) does that as well. They use it together with webdav, you just upload an OpenOffice document and have an article right out of it. Basic formatting is parsed and used, as OpenOffice documents are pure XML. Read an article in the phpmagazine about it.

They have a whole bunch of nice features, but the system it quite difficult to learn and the admin area is more from a programmer’s point of view, everything with objects and attributs and tech talk like this.

And templates and template language (couldn’t they have taken Smarty?) are difficult as well, templates and css scattered over many pieces (I like the modx approach with one template so much, it was the main reason for me to evaluate it).

Running out of topic? Anyway, OO-parsing is a great feature!

Frisco