Swedish newspaper Drupal deplayment

Hi Group! Since I started working on a newspaper website upgrade two years ago - I've found a lot of good advice around here. So I thought I'd make a write-up on what I've done, as well as pose a question.

My workplace, Fria Tidningar, had a setup with a publishing system called Scoop, and an automatic web export to PHPnuke which was really starting to show its age when I came here 2.5 years ago. The company then published 4 newspapers, today 8, with different premises (4 of the papers are local) - but some shared content.

After evaluating different CMSes (primarily Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla) I decided on Drupal, and started pounding away on an automatic export system. The Scoop system was very limited in that it only provided exports in its own custom xml-format (with lots of formating data stripped away) at that time. These days it also provides a mangled version of NITF (though I have not had any closer look at it). Anyway, the Scoop xml-format is a tad unpredictable - so I had to make a perl script to parse it, go look for attached images, and write out a more NITF-ish xml-document more suitable for consumption by Drupal. In hindsight that may have been a bit stupid, with some duplication of effort as well as an extra step in the export chain - but I really had to parse the xml anyway to find attached images before upload, and we were at that time looking into the possibility of selling a newsfeed service, where we would be using NITF.

For the first Drupal (v5) installation, I coded a custom import module as well as a custom theme (based on Garland IIRC, but with pretty much everything changed). Modules we used were Image & Image Attach, Domain (for syndication between our related papers), Views, CCK and Taxonomy. CCK was used for extra text fields, and Taxonomy for sections and stuff. For the byline, I created a new user for every new name during import and asigned ownership to the user named exactly like the byline. This turned out to be a pretty bad decision in retrospect (the user table filled up with names of external writers, badly spelled names, names + descriptions, etc). The site worked though, and was put to use around march 2008.

Around february this year I started porting the entire site to Drupal 6 and made a new take on the news import. Apart from better coding practices, the bigest changes were to image/byline/owner handling. I made byline a taxonomy-field instead of autoregistering tons of users, which has greatly improved usefullness (the byline is of course clickable). I still autoregister users, but now it is the editor that entered the text into the publishing system - so when that happens it is because we hired a new editor. This also has the effect that an editor automatically owns all of his/her texts in Drupal. As for images, I still use the old Image module - but attach the images using CCK nodereferences. I hacked Image assist to make it add an entry to a noderef field, and display the icon beside text fields. I also coded a custom menu to help with things such as subscription forms.

As a starting point for our theme I used the Basic theme - which proved very nice to work with. I suppose I have bastardized the theme thoroughly by making it load images when provided noderefs, and opening the correct section menu. Still, it works fairly well.

In the last update, I added the WYSIWYG and CAPTCHA modules - in order to make both commenting and article authoring easier. And looking forward, the Drupal installation is starting to look like a good place to centralize the editorial workflow.

This last piece started to be a bit pressing when the distributor of our publishing system canceled our support contract without having made good on their delivery of the entire system. What we have is a file system-based administration system, as well as a number of quark-plugins to manage different aspects of the workflow. We are thinking of moving the workflow management into Drupal, and export the articles for Quark/InDesign/whatever.

Has anyone here tried using Drupal as a newspaper publishing hub? Do you know of any usable Quark/InDesign export plugins? (Or xml-export coupled with Quark/InDesign import plugins?)

Cheers!
/Filip

PS If you don't mind the Swedish, you can check out some of our sites at:
http://www.fria.nu
http://www.stockholmsfria.nu
http://www.goteborgsfria.nu