word2web and xslt_book for Drupal

One of the projects that I've been working on at Development Seed is migrating the workflow of a very, very large news media organization. That means that we've needed to work on adapting various little facets of their production to the web and dealing with the hardest problem in content management: Microsoft Word.

Luckily, where there's a will, there's a way, so we baked up a solution. word2web and xslt_book are a 'one two knockout punch' of sorts. Word2web is a filter and interface that lets editors just grab an exported Word file, upload it, and end up with a new bit of content on the site. Xslt_book slices up that uploaded Word HTML (now XML), and presents it as a beautiful new book-like node.

(I highly recommend going to the HD version on Vimeo.com)
xslt_book & word2web from tmcw on Vimeo.

Other Cool Bits

• Both modules use XSL transformations for cleaning Microsoft Word, and both are free. This is really cool - formerly options were limited (and sometimes costly) for this sort of task. Even if you don't plan on using Drupal, you can grab the XSL and use it in your application.