Our website is built on the ProsePoint profile ... but a few weeks ago, we had to replace the ProsePoint WYSIWYG editor with CKEditor because of compatibility issues with Panels.
This has created huge problems, because the ProsePoint editor had a "Paragraph" option in the "Format" section. When we would copy-and-paste text from NewsEditPro into the website, all of the paragraph breaks in NewsEditPro (single hard returns) would turn into line breaks: <br />. In the ProsePoint editor, all we had to do was highlight the text, choose "Paragraph" from the "Format" drop-down menu, and voila! The text separated back out into proper paragraphs.
That option does not exist in CKEditor. The only two solutions we could come up with were (1) copy-and-paste from NewsEditPro into Word, then copy-and-paste from Word into CKEditor or (2) use the "Paste and Match Style" option in Safari. However, either option is inconsistent; neither one works 100 percent of the time.
So we are considering the possibility of going to a web-to-print ("reverse publishing") solution.
I've read everything I can find regarding Drupal, XML, InDesign, and NewsEditPro -- but I have yet to find anything resembling an actual how-to guide.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
Like to hear more about that
I'm very interested in learning more about your current working method. Including the parts that don't work well yet. Could you detail the process some more for us?
Thanks.
Print-to-web process
You mean our print-to-web process? (We don't currently have a web-to-print process; that's what I'm researching.)
Here's our print-to-web process:
Story is written in NewsEditPro.
Editor reads/edits story.
Staff member (it may be the writer of the story, an editor, or a copy editor) uses copy-and-paste to transfer the text from NewsEditPro into the "Create Story" page on the website.
The person posting the story sets the Workflow status of the story to the appropriate state: Public if the story should show up on the website immediately; Draft if the story is still under review; Ready to place if the story should not go Public until midnight.
The person posting the story also handles the other pieces required or available for the story: byline, photo (with credit and cutline), video (links to external videos), slideshow (of multiple photos), taxonomy (a Primary Term that sets the story's URL; "Channels" that feed the story into taxonomy Nodequeues; and a Tags field that sets keywords that feed a Related stories block that appears on every story page), etc.
If the story is not immediately going Public, then someone either individually flags the story with Flag to publish or, later at night, stories are flagged in bulk using VBO.
Stories appear automatically on the correct pages (News, Local news, Sports, College sports, High school sports, Life, Opinion, Staff columns, etc.) using a combination of taxonomy Nodequeues and Views, except for a few pages where we want full control of how stories are laid out; those are handled through ProsePoint Editions that use Composite zones for layout.
Does that answer your question?
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer
Web - to - Print
I was thinking that you were going Web to Print. Where you upload and edit online then migrate the data down to InDesign via (?) xml or something. I've hear of many papers going this route.
I thought you were outlining a method similar to that.
Sorry for the confusion.
TinyMCE
We're running Baseview/IQue version 5 at our paper in Conway, Ark. Using Transporter, we rigged an automatic XML export of copy and images that can be loaded into Drupal, but the staff prefers to cut/paste because they have more control. Pretty much everything goes online immediately when it's ready.
As a WYSIWYG editor, we're using TinyMCE (with the Drupal WYSIWYG module). No problems with cut/paste from InCopy, afaik.
Where we have cut/paste troubles (at other papers) they tend to be traceable to Satan's favorite program, Microsoft Word.
I'll be in Minnesota next week working with another Baseview paper that's on an old version, and we're going to to it cut/paste. I'll let you know if I discover any formatting weirdness.
Longer run, we're moving to MediaSpectrum ContentWatch with an XML-RPC interface tying the systems together.
TinyMCE
I will definitely test out TinyMCE on one of my personal test sites and see how it handles copy-and-paste from NewsEditPro. Thanks!
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer
No good
Nope. TinyMCE does the same thing that CKEditor does. (Sigh.) Still hoping to find a solution.
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer
WYMEditor
Looks like I may have a winner. I installed nearly all the editors compatible with the WYSIWYG module and started testing them. So far, WYMEditor works. I need to do some more testing ... and then try to convince our IT department to let us switch (once I've fully tested as many scenarios as I can think of).
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer
Whizzywig
Scratch WYMeditor. It appears to have a bug: If you don't enter anything in the WYMeditor field, there is an invisible break code --
<br />-- in the field.Even if I turn off the rich text editor and delete the
<br />, it's still there after I save the node. Which means that parts of the display that normally hide themselves when they're empty ... think that they're not empty (because of the<br />), so they display. So I have all this extra stuff showing up in the node that shouldn't be there.So I continued testing the visual editors that are compatible with the WYSIWYG module ... and finally found a winner: Whizzywig.
I can copy-and-paste from NewsEditPro, choose "Paragraph" from the "Choose style" pop-up menu ... and voila! I have my paragraphs back again.
Now to solve the rest of the problems on my to-do list.
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer
Filtering
Keep in mind that Drupal stores whatever you give it, and filters on output.
This week I'm in Minnesota, working with the Brainerd Dispatch on its upcoming Drupal relaunch. Here's a segment from a story one of the staff cut and pasted from the old Baseview system into the rich text editor:
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px New Century Schoolbook;">Despite just three returning players, one strength of this year’s Central Lakes College Raiders team is experience.</p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px New Century Schoolbook;">The seven new faces on this year’s CLC women’s team enter the season with extensive basketball backgrounds, playing experiences and court savvy.</p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px New Century Schoolbook;">Head coach Dennis Eastman, who enters his 18th season, hopes that will make for a quick transition to the college game and help with the move from the Northern Division into the South.</p>and so forth.
Here's the same segment from the rendered page:
<p>Despite just three returning players, one strength of this year’s Central Lakes College Raiders team is experience.</p><p>The seven new faces on this year’s CLC women’s team enter the season with extensive basketball backgrounds, playing experiences and court savvy.</p>
<p>Head coach Dennis Eastman, who enters his 18th season, hopes that will make for a quick transition to the college game and help with the move from the Northern Division into the South.</p>
We've struggled the most with Microsoft Word, where we tend to get extra blank lines between paragraphs (stray
<br />tags) and bizarre case mismatches<P>blah blah</p>. I believe that under xhtml strict, the browser is legally entitled to throw chairs in such instances.You may get different results using different editors on the Baseview/iQue side and pasting from different browsers, but most of the time you can manage all of this by making sure the right filters are in place in your filter chain.
Thanks
Thanks. If I knew enough about Drupal to figure out how to use the filter chain to my advantage, I would. But I'm still relatively a novice on Drupal -- I'd never even heard of it until late last year, when I started researching to find a new (low-cost/no-cost) CMS for our site, as our old website desperately(!) needed a major overhaul.
I'd built and designed websites in (X)HTML and CSS before; I'd played around a lot with WordPress. But Drupal was a whole new learning curve -- and I had to climb that curve pretty much on my own, as I was the one and only person on our "web team" at the newspaper. I had part-time access to an IT guy on the other side of the country who knew Drupal ... but he didn't have time to hold my hand and walk me through the process; I basically had to learn everything on my own.
So there's a lot I still don't know. I've come a very long way in less than a year ... but I'll be the first to admit that I still have a lot to learn.
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer
Hey Katrina
Hey Katrina, which menu module are you using on Courier-Tribune.com ?
almamun
............................
Dinajpur | Rangpur
Horizontal menu
For the horizontal menu bar at the top of the page? That's using the Dynamic Persistent Menu module.
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer
I made a few comments month
I made a few comments month ago about using Drupal as a replacement for NewsEdit (http://groups.drupal.org/node/75458) and using Applescript as conduit between a Drupal website and an scriptable application such as InDesign, QuarkXPress or NewsEdit. It's not necessarily the most elegant way of doing it, but it's simpler than trying write a plug-in for those apps.
I was able to monkey around with Quark for a bit and it wasn't very hard to get a story out of Drupal and thrown into a text box on a page with some styles applied to it. The process gets more complicated if you want any changes you make to the story in Quark/InDesign merged back into the web version.
Applescript does have some XML-RPC capabilities now but I'm not familiar with using it.
Another way to do this is to
Another way to do this is to add Alfresco (www.alfresco.com) to the mix. Basically, you will create that content node in Drupal. Using the CMIS module, you can pass this node to Alfresco. Once the node is passed to Alfresco, you will be able to transform that node into XML based content. I believe that there is even a transformer for transforming HTML node into InDesign type of files.
Arnold
www.appnovation.com
I've been wondering about
I've been wondering about web-to-print for a while and trying to scrape together a model that could work for us. I have no experience with Alfresco or any other intermediary mentioned here, as I've only used InDesign and InCopy for print work, but I've been wondering if it's possible to use Bonus: Views Export to output xml straight from Drupal that InDesign could use (i.e., no intermediary software). I haven't had time to try this but couldn't Views templates be made to accommodate styles that InDesign would understand?
We're small enough (and a magazine, not a newspaper... we only publish 6-10 print issues a year) that this is not a priority, so I haven't done much poking around, but the concept seems pretty reasonable. Anyone done anything like this?
For now, btw, editors just publish in Drupal and then we copy and paste to InDesign.
Sean Fitzpatrick
Proof Studio
@sffitzpatrick
NewsEngin
According to our latest company-wide "digital delegates" meeting yesterday, every newspaper owned by the media company will eventually be switching from NewsEditPro to NewsEngin.
I wish I could get my hands on a trial copy of NewsEngin to try it out and see how it works -- and how it might work with our website. I've read good things about it online.
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer
I think ...
... you'll be happy. I know the NewsEngin folks, and we've been using it at our Topeka paper for over a year now. It's all Web-based, LAMP stack, (presumably) cloud-hosted. TinyMCE, I think. Input and output runs through a PHP-scriptable "router," with support for the usual XML formats and for scraping. We have it kicking out Atom and we feed that into Drupal.