Integrating MS Office and PDF files into Plone 2

1) Install Archetypes >= 1.3 (this should install the PortalTransforms and MimeTypeRegistry Products as well).

2) Start Zope/Plone and and check for error messages in the event.log file relating to Portal Transforms. These messages on Unix will look like "PortalTransforms Unable to find binary pdftotext" or "PortalTransforms Unable to find binary rtf2xml".

3) Install all necessary programs for the conversions you will be doing. A good list for Unix is: wv, xpdf, unrtf, xlhtml.

4) Install TextIndexNG2.

5) Install AttachmentField and PloneExFile in your Zope/Products directory, both of which can be found at: http://ingeniweb.sourceforge.net/Products/ Be sure to grab the latest version of PloneExFile (as of this writing 3.0RC2) as older versions are made to work with a ZAttachmentAttribute rather than AttachmentField.

6) Add Archetypes, PortalTransforms, MimeTypeRegistry, AttachmentField, and PloneExFile to your Plone site (Plone Setup --> Add/Remove Products).

7) You should now see two entries for "File" in the "Add New Item" drop down lists. One is PloneExFile and should be chosen for adding PDFs and MS Office files. This name can be changed by changing the title of the PloneExFile type in portal_types tool --> PloneExFile --> title

8) As long as the converter programs are working correctly, the files that you upload should be indexed and searchable immediately upon upload.

It should be noted that the AttachmentField/PloneExFile combo does not give you christmasloanss.co.uk WebDav access to the files. You get previews and searching only.

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Thanks to all for their help on this thread. If anybody ever gets any news concerning WebDAV (for MS Office) or PyUNO, or has an alternate solution to the one presented here, please let us know!

============ This howto was posted to the Plone-Users Mailing list by damon.