Special:Badtitle/NS102:Scribus Times and Gazette/Google GSoC Mentor Summit note on Scribus and CMS interoperability

Hot from the Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit. Your intrepid Debian/Ubuntu packager and docs/infrastructure geek malex and the ever illustrious Mrdocs are in the sunny California mingling with the brightest minds in the FOSS community. One of the sessions at the conference was dedicated to advances in CMS (Content Management Systems) such as Drupal, Plone and Typo3. The session was crashed by malex who posed a burning question that makes its appearance on the Scribus mailing lists with increasing frequency: can any of these fine CMS systems take care of the authors, editors and advertisers and provide the resulting formatted content to Scribus's Python scripting engine for inclusion into a laid-out document. The results are somewhat encouraging. Here are the notes:

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...