Draft for the GSoC Application Abstract (Timo Stollenwerk)

(2500 character limit)

The publishing process of a magazine normally requires a lot of manual steps carried out by specialized people (e.g. content editors, designers) working collaborative on one document. In a regular publishing work-flow, content is exchanged between the deployed applications (e.g. word editor, CMS, DTP program) by simply copy and pasting the content. This data duplication can lead to inconsistency of data, additional work if content changes and a lack of flexibility during the publishing process.

An end-to-end publishing solution with work-flow support helps 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.

Existing Open Source Content Management Systems already have build in support for work-flows and can handle and process source documents of all fashions. Furthermore they support version control, locking of currently edited documents and import and export of content data.

According to this, the enhancement of an existing Content Management System to an end-to-end publishing solution seems reasonable. To do so the Content Management System needs to be able to read, write and process the XML-based Scribus documents. This can be done by accessing the XML source tree of Scribus documents via standardised and platform independent XML processing technologies like XPath, the Document Object Model (DOM), the Simple API for XML (SAX) and XSLT.

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

For the implementation the Content Management System Plone is the preferred choice of the author, but the final choice will be made after reconciliation with the Scribus community.

The original proposal with an example work-flow 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