Hello Newspaper group! For those of you who don't know us, please allow us to introduce ourselves. We are the Open Publishing Lab, a research lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology that is researching new methods of content creation and developing open source applications for publishing across various media.
One of our projects is the Innovation News, a module and installation profile for Drupal that aims to allow anyone, even people with little Drupal experience, to easily set up and run a web-to-print newspaper.
We released our software a little over a year ago and have received very helpful feedback from the Drupal community. We have been very grateful for this feedback and have been honored by the community's interest in our technology. In fact, we have been especially grateful for the discussion brought up here on this group.
The lab has recently decided that maintaining and improving these tools will be a focus over the coming weeks as part of our mission to enable communities and share what we have learned with those communities. We wanted to announce this to you in the Newspaper group and are very interested in everything you have to say - feedback, feature requests, complaints, or anything else you want to talk about.
Just to give you some perspective, here are some ideas we have tossed around internally.
- Providing some way for the platform to integrate with open print technologies such as Printcasting and ZinePal. Currently the platform allows "editions" of a user's publication to be exporeted as XML documents, but not all people have access to tools like InDesign that can work with this data. Establishing a link with one of these free and open technologies is a priority of ours, and should provide some nice benefits to users.
- Using Drupal's taxonomy system to maintain a link between nodes and editions. This should provide much more flexibility than our current method of making associations, which relies on a custom database table.
- Using the Views Datasource module, rather than our own custom module, to generate XML documents from Innovation News editions. Again, this should make the platform much more flexible, and should make it easier to use as well.
However, as we mentioned, we are very interested in what's on your mind. What do you think is important? What do you think is the future of this type of platform? Are there any things that you wish this platform could do, but does not?
On a side note, we are very open to working with another developer during this process. Our hope is to get this project back off the ground and, with some momentum, one day potentially hand it off to the open source community to allow it to grow in a more natural and efficient way than one lab could provide.
We look forward to hearing from you,
OPL @ RIT
Comments
Drupal in the print world
I'm becoming increasingly interested in the potential application of Drupal in the print periodical world -- and not just at the low / disruptive end of the scale (as in Printcasting).
As I work to roll out our Drupal-based Morris Site Management System across the Morris Publishing Group newspapers, I constantly have to struggle with legacy print-focused newsroom management systems that I think could be replaced fairly easily with far superior Web-based tools, and I can see how to do it with Drupal.
There's a great deal that could be done in a fairly straightforward way to support news coverage lifecycle from the planning process through writing/photography and editing workflow.
But there's always a catch, and in this case there are a couple of catches.
One is in the area you identified: Page layout. If you're going to move beyond newsletters into the realm of weekly and daily newspapers, you're going to have to have robust real-time, bidirectional integration with InDesign/InCopy at a very fine-grained level (i.e., not "export an edition in XML and pull it into InDesign). This probably requires some significant work both at the InDesign plug-in level and on the Drupal side.
I'd love to see Scribus mature into the page layout role of a newspaper-scale operation, but it's not there yet, and I'm wondering what could be done to make that happen.
The second major "gotcha" area is in advertising. Ad scheduling for print isn't rocket science (Layout-80 automated ad placement planning back in the CP/M era when 64K was a lot of memory) but it also isn't something you can download free from the Internet. Solving a newsroom's problems isn't a real solution unless you either have a robust interface with an existing ad workflow environment ... or you tackle the ad problem straight-on. When you consider the full spectrum -- display and classifieds, workflow and billing -- it's a pretty big
Anyway, given RIT's background in the printing and graphic arts areas, those might be interesing areas of inquiry for you.
Editions for print, not the Web
BTW, I've looked at the Innovation News profile, and I have to observe that the very concept of edition-based publishing conflicts with everything I'm teaching our newsrooms about the continuous and interactive nature of Web publishing. It is, however, appropriate and even essential for print.