Draft for the GSoC Application Abstract (Timo Stollenwerk)

(2500 character limit)

The publishing process of a magazine usually requires a lot of manual work carried out by experts (e.g. content editors, designers) working together on a document. In a regular publishing worklow, the content is often exchanged between the deployed applications (e.g. word editor, CMS, DTP program) by using the clipboard and simply copying and pasting the content. This duplication of the content may lead to inconsistency of data, additional work when content changes, and a lack of flexibility during the publishing process.

An end-to-end publishing solution with workflow support will help people engaged in the publishing process to create and manage content, to track documents and their status and to keep the data consistent between applications.

There are Open Source Content Management Systems available that already allow for workflows and that can handle and process source documents of arbitrary types. Furthermore, they support version control, locking of currently edited documents as well as and import and export of content data. Accordingly, the extension of an existing Content Management System to an end-to-end publishing solution seems to be a reasonable task.

The implementation of such an extension will enhance the Open Source Content Management System Plone to read, write, and process the XML-based Scribus documents. This can be achieved by accessing the XML source tree of Scribus documents via standardised and platform independent XML processing technologies (XPath, DOM, SAX and XSLT), so that the content of a Scribus document is accessable keeping the predefined styles and layout untouched.

Scribus and the Content Management System will communicate over the WebDAV protocol which is an HTTP extension for distributed authoring. This will enable Scribus to not only interoperate with the Content Management System, but with a wide variety of other Applications (CVS, Subversion, Apache Webserver, most Operation Systems etc.). By integrating the WebDAV client into the Scribus interface, designers can open and save remote documents from a server using their familiar environment.

The original proposal with an example workflow and technical details is available here:

http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Draft_of_end-to-end_publishing_solution#Use_Case_.233_Publishing_Workflow_for_Magazine_Layout_.28Timo_Stollenwerk.29