Best practice for Integration

... best practice would be for your newsroom workflow system to not be regarded as a "print workflow."

At any rate, here's what we're doing. We're moving all of our newspapers off legacy systems (DTI, Baseview/NewsEditPro/iQue/whateveritscalledthisweek) and onto a cloud-based system, MediaSpectrum's ContentWatch.

ContentWatch integrates with Drupal through an XML-RPC interface that can post and update. The Drupal Services module is used as the foundation for this, plus some custom code written by MediaSpectrum. CW's ContentRouter basically builds the equivalent of a Drupal node from its database and posts the structured information to Drupal. Since this is not a feed-based system, updates are instantaneous.

For any field of which CW is aware, it is authoritative. We've replicated most of our Drupal fields in CW. This allows live posting and updating of stories at any time by editorial decision. Photo attachments are a bit of a hack in CW 2.7, but they work and will get better. We have plans to manage Drupal nodequeues from CW in a future release.

In addition to the story-by-story posting, we have provisions for bulk publication or updating of items that have been placed on print pages. Pushing all the print pages after midnight updates at least the publication timestamps, even if nothing else has changed.

There are a few fields that aren't available in CW. For example, we have not yet figured out how we want to represent the equivalent of Drupal's Location module data in the ContentWatch database.

We're also managing only one editorial content type. Blogs, alerts, promos, polls, et cetera, are invisible to the newsroom system, as are comments. CW is a document workflow system, so we won't be using it to manage databases or CAR projects.