[scribus] Scribus cloud service?

Mon Nov 18 02:55:47 UTC 2013

You're right. For such a cloud service a simpler version could probably be
enough. And I really have no idea what QT already provides in that regard.
That was just a guess because HTTP is just about everywhere and web
services and APIs are still the hot topic of the month in web apps. And
REST is the preferred way to interact with web APIs, so if you want
versatility it's probably a good idea to use it.

But since just about every organisation that deals with content needs some
form of CMS it would open quite a few possibilities for scribus to
integrate into already existing workflows. Think about product catalogs
where a printed version is done once and a year and a webshop exists too.
Or news papers/magazines that will have some form of CMS in place and pull
content from there for print and web use.

Having a versatile way to integrate into such rather complex environments
through software and not through a lot of fiddly work by humans would
probably be a huge plus for scribus in general and might make it more
appealing for enterprise use.

But I also think that getting the treatment of the data right is actually
hard and would need quite a bit of experimentation. Also note that you're
certainly not done with storing just the scribus (XML) document, because a
typical document also needs fonts and images and whatever kind of asset
scribus can already use that is not embeddable into the XML.

On 18 November 2013 03:25, Peter Bittner <peter.bittner at gmx.net> wrote:

> Great!
>
> I'm not even sure why a hosted solution would have to provide features
> of a CMS, or the other way round, Scribus would have to be able to
> communicate with a CMS using REST and HTTP features of Qt in the first
> place.

> It would be sufficient that such a cloud service stored a normal
> Scribus document, allowing to edit parts of the document with a
> simplified web user interface. The layout can stay the same and be of
> no to little concern online.
>
> Of course, you would have to come up with some sort of semantic
> structure (section, header, sub-header, paragraphs of an article,
> articles) in order to provide for a sensible form of collaborative
> online editing. But the whole process could (and maybe should) be
> hidden completely from Scribus. The desktop application Scribus
> downloads and opens a file, as usual. The cloud service reads from and
> writes to that file.
>
> Peter
>
>
> 2013/11/18 Jan Schrewe <jschrewe at gmail.com>:
> > I'm not exactly sure but I think what you mean is some form of CMS i.e.
> > something that stores resources (text, images and layout settings) in a
> > manner that can be imported into scribus via HTTP (or some other form of
> > network protocol).
> >
> > Discussions about some form of CMS has popped up here and I personally
> > think support for CMS could be built quite easily into scribus if frames
> > supported some form of REST protocol (i.e. use the standard HTTP verbs
> and
> > content headers to pull in data). Implementing something like this is
> > moderately easy (and probably QT has some form of HTTP support). Trouble
> is
> > that scribus doesn't really use semantic data but stores data together
> with
> > the layout information. While this is something just about every DTP
> > program does, one would need to carefully think about how and where
> layout
> > changes for a frame are stored. The same goes for the resizing of images
> to
> > some extend.
> >
> > Personally I think being able to link scribus with a CMS via a
> standardised
> > "protocol" would be absolutely awesome. And would also make a lot of of
> > sense from a workflow perspective because most content that ends up in
> > print most definitely ends up on the web somewhere. It would also make
> the
> > life of authors and designers quite a bit easier. If text is in scribus
> and
> > needs to be changed there is no non annoying way to change it without
> > either re-importing and formatting it or getting an author to use scribus
> > (which most don't seem to like).
> >
> >
> > On 18 November 2013 01:56, Peter Bittner <peter.bittner at gmx.net> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello everyone,
> >>
> >> I'm wondering whether there has been any real attempt or plans to
> >> embrace the Cloud with Scribus power. I'm thinking about something
> >> similar to http://musescore.org and http://musescore.com
> >>
> >> MuseScore has started similar to Scribus strictly as a specialized DTP
> >> program, much more specialized though obviously as they are doing
> >> music sheets only. You could and still can download their software to
> >> run it locally on any major platform, and it feels a lot like Scribus.
> >> Then, integrated into the software, they allowed you to connect to a
> >> personal MuseScore account and have your music sheets uploaded. From
> >> your account you could share the music sheets. A year or more ago they
> >> then made the obvious move (according to a newsletter I received;
> >> their website [1] says 2009---whatever; here's [2] a more in-depth
> >> explanation) and announced they will provide a separate Cloud platform
> >> on a commercial basis.
> >>
> >> Anyway, I've seen something (not quite that) similar [3] has been
> >> discussed on this list before. So, are there any other, maybe recent,
> >> developments about a Cloud service? Maybe there's not as much need to
> >> share documents as there is with sheet music. But for small
> >> communities, non-profit associations, schools, and the like that
> >> struggle with making a recurring publication of a sort of newspaper
> >> there is no real solution of a simple collaborative platform to
> >> compile and review the content they compile. They usually can't afford
> >> employing a dedicated publishing team, or they come up with content in
> >> terrible document formats, tragically formatted, to then have it
> >> handed on to a design agency that gets the job done for a few bucks or
> >> so. Usually too much money, but seriously: who wants to do that stupid
> >> job of bringing a terrible mix of that delivered content into a nice
> >> form? In the end they blame it on you when the whole issue or some
> >> single articles "should have looked differently".
> >>
> >> What I don't see as a sufficiently sensible or useful scenario is to
> >> put the whole program online, a desktop application in the boundaries
> >> of a web browser, e.g. [4]. That's, uhm, excrements of a male cow.
> >> (Sorry!)
> >>
> >> Is there any possible way to store a Scribus document on a server and
> >> expose the single parts of the document in a sensible way as
> >> "articles" of a blog, e.g. categorized or tagged to make clear it
> >> belongs together? My scenario would be to allow online collaboration
> >> in a way blog posts are written, optionally supported by an editorial
> >> workflow.
> >>
> >> Any thoughts or opinions? Feedback greatly appreciated,
> >> Peter
> >>
> >>
> >> [1] http://musescore.com/team
> >> [2] http://musescore.org/en/node/8099
> >> [3]
> >>
> http://lists.scribus.info/pipermail/scribus-dev/2011-October/001310.html,
> >> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.scribus.devel/1295
> >> [4] https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-10-10-lool-demo.webm
>
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