NewsML

As I have worked with different content management and middleware solutions, one problem I have encountered numerous times, and that I think needs a better solution in drupal, is import and export of data and provision of web services. I think it would be good for drupal to create an import/export framework that would allow drupal developers to make re-usable, sharable import and export modules by implementing PHP objects to a few commmon interfaces and then adding their new import/export type into a central, common import/export module.

This is especially relevant for modern corporate newspapers that need to integrate content from different legacy systems, produce that content, then send it off to a number of different web publishing systems, and then also face the prospect of their systems changing if they are bought or sold. The framework as outlined in the design below could also be a means of implementing REST services (SOAP or XML-RPC would probably require another layer on top of this, though you probably could do it in this framework).

Hi there.
In a local organizational newspaper I have been helping with over the years, I did an extensive investigation into NewsML as a way of standardizing archiving and editing content format for hard copy production, as a way of guaranteeing that the archive would never be isolated and impossible to translate (via xslt or other means) into a newly adopted format.
NewsML (see http://www.newsml.org ) is being used by Reuters, AFP, and in tens of the world's top newspaper organization publishers (see http://www.newsml.org/pages/whouse_main.php ).

http://www.iptc.org/NAR/

Greetings, fellow standards junkies:

I stumbled across the site above while looking to see what was being done with aggregation these days. For anyone who's ever given any thought to how much IE6 is to CSS like RSS 2.0 is to aggregation, it might make sense if I admitted I originally bookmarked the site above for future review and subconsciously repressed the memory as a hoax intended to torment me.

If it was some big deal, why wasn't anybody talking about it? Little did I know...

To be completely serious, though, I've been thinking a lot these past couple of months about what could be done to make Drupal more attractive to publishers looking to convert their operations to the web or folks looking to create web-based publications, and there's been growing interest in the subject. Given the spike in growth seen in the community following the DeanSpace/CivicSpace project and how popular Drupal has become with non-profits and the like, I've been thinking a complimentary project to the ecommerce suite aimed at publishers might both increase Drupal's popularity as a commercial platform and drive new business to contractors.