connecting Drupal with InCopy / XML?

Hello,

I am working for several small newspapers in Kansas and we are using InDesign and are wondering the same thing. I am new to Drupal but have a dev server where we are developing our sites with Drupal 6 and would appreciate any help you may be able to provide as far as how you got your site looking the way it does right now such as themes, modules and what not.

Thanks,

Joe Barron

If you only want to use Drupal to display exports from InDesign, InCopy will still serve as the 'real' newsroom CMS, won't it?

I am VERY interested in learning more about this approach for our own newspaper here.
Can one get by with just InDesign or does InCopy also need to be in the mix?

Christine

Yes, Geoff is correct. I suggest that anyone seeking to use XML sources consider this workflow:

Source application --> XML --> XSLT (XSL stylesheet with transformation info, aka "a transform") --> MySql db -- Drupal.

If the transformation part is unknown to you, go here: http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/xsl_transformation.asp
It's a free, online tutorial. I taught myself what I needed to know to get rolling in just a couple of hours, but I was already familiar with XPath. If you're not, spend an hour on that first. Don't be scared. This isn't bad at all.

There are other ways to effect the transformation, but the XSLT is certainly simple and easy (and can be automated).

By now, the importance of web should probably have us thinking web-to-print instead of the more widely practiced print-to-web workflow. The holdup seems to be a combination of the culture's resistance to change coupled with the fact that the demands of styling for print are generally more complex and more difficult to implement than the demands of styling for web.

At Journalisten.no we have created a xml-based workflow for Drupal.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/15543#comment-52790

Espen

Hi all,

Just a heads up that we've been working for the past 9 months on a bidirectional connection between InDesign and Drupal (7). The idea is you can search for a node within Drupal, then drag down a field into a frame on the InDesign page. Thereafter, we preserve the relationships on page such that edited text on the page can then be updated as a new Drupal node revision.

The integration is with services module right now, although we'll likely expand on that and create a submodule since this is obviously a very 'esoteric' integration. As for our go-forward plans, we'll probably concentrate all of our efforts on InDesign CS6 given the improved features.

As for Drupal to InDesign Server, years ago we built a web services layer around IDS -- in .NET I'm afraid, but we've got that fully integrated with Drupal (also v7). It would take us a huge amount of effort to convert the work over to PHP, so we're a bit stuck on that front. I think if we won some kind of project that might help fund the port.

Anyway, DM me if you want to learn more about what we're doing. As any of you who have tried this in the past know, this is a huge amount of work, so if anybody's interested in lending a hand, let me know.