> [edit]Integration between desktop publishing system and CMS > Example: Scribus - has a Python scripting language that can pull info from > the CMS > CMS has to not interfere with what the script would pull (not too much > theming etc.) > Use the CMS as the content repository and editor, lay out the newsletter in > Scribus > Maybe use WS-API4Plone, Drupal Services module, etc. -- to use XML-RPC, REST, > SOAP or whatever to do the queries > Or use RSS > Plone supports API for grabbing portions of pages etc. > Till next time...
I don't think pulling the content from a CMS is the hard part, the hard part is formatting. I have been playing around a bit with using Trac and Gallery for sources of images and text. With Trac I can track the status of an article, from (in my setup) an "Idea" to "In progress" as well as "Ready for proof", "Needs more work", "Ready for layout" and "Published". (Trac has support for customized ticket flow.) Since Trac includes a wiki, and can even use wiki formatting in ticket descriptions, it is very convenient to have both the status tracking, formatting as well as revision history in one place. I use Gallery as an image database and in the articles in Trac I just use "thumbnail links" to the full image in Gallery (so by right clicking the thumbnail and chosing Save target I get the full image saved to disc). The "weak spots" of this solution are: - Accessing content requires manually taking if from Trac/Gallery and saving it to disc and/or pasting or importing into Scribus. - Wiki formatting can not (yet) be imported into Scribus and automatically converted to text with styles (I can however save the text from Trac as HTML, which makes things a little better). - Two separate user accounts needed since neither Trac nor Gallery has decent support for sharing account database with other applications. I just played around with this a weekend or so a couple of months ago, but with a bit of polishing it looked like a workable solution. I really think some kind of tracker is better than a CMS, because for an editor I think having a good overview is important (and that is what a tracker gives). Trac also has timelines with milestones that can be used, but I never played around with that. /Peter
