BHUGA WOOGA!

An important requirement of the platform for SPAWAR (for whom my employer, Openband, works) is a set of full-featured file functionality. Our solution to that is Miglius' File Framework, which is an exceedingly powerful solution for handling files on a Drupal 6 site. It reqires Arto's RDF Framework, which means it's easy for other modules to interact with it, and has a ton of other features, but the one I'm writing about today is the file conversion bits. Out of the box, FF supports logic for tons of conversion paths, so anything your users upload is downloadable as a preview, as a full file, playable in the browser, viewable as html, whatever. Importantly, it uses OpenOffice to do all of those nifty office format conversions: viewing Word documents in the browser, inline, is exceedingly useful.

It'd be silly to write that much conversion code yourself, and naturally we didn't want to reinvent the wheel. But that means there's a ton of software to install to make all of this work, from PHP 5.2 to JOD Converter, and that's what this post is about.