[scribus] A Google GSoC Mentor Summit note on Scribus and CMS interoperability

[Peter Nermander]

> [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