Student newspaper switch

Hiya, I'm the "technical advisor" for a small student newspaper that's going to switch to Drupal, and I'll share my experiences up 'till now. When I started out the workflow was almost non-existent: articles spread over word-files, e-mails, corrected printouts and more word-files all in one unstructured heap. So under my guidance we switched to a modified version of TextPattern (I created some hacks for managing editions, workflow for the editors, and last but not least automatic XML export tailored for use in InDesign). TextPattern is very light-weight and has a clean interface, but lately I've grown dissatisfied at the slow development of the system and the fact that it's often easier (albeit dirtier) to hack the core code to get your work done than to actually write a plugin. So this summer we're going to switch and I'm doing some analysis to see what challenges need to be faced.

The good stuff

Well, Drupal has some excellent contributed modules. Specifically for newspapers there are a lot of handy ones: Workflow (for the editors), the Import/Export API (xml export), Node Relativity (for substories), widgEditor (because people dislike tags and widg seems to provide the cleanest output), Checkout (to help against concurrent edits - there is already a version for Drupal 5 available although it's not yet on the official module page).

Stuff that still has to be taken care of

The standard way Drupal handles article posting is, well, rather bloated. I guess that's inevitable considering the myriad ways in which Drupal is being put to use, but it does mean that I'll have to make a specific back-end theme and perhaps make some more advanced changes to make content posting and editing as intuitive as possible for the writers. There's been some talk on this group about making a "Drupal To Print" distribution, and I think creating a distribution that feels like a tool that's specifically created for the content management of newspapers yet is still flexible enough, is one of the main hurdles that needs to be overcome.

Another problem at the moment is the integration with DTP. Currently the Import/Export API wraps all the content in a CDATA field, which is exactly the behavior that doesn't work if you want to import the content into InDesign and make use of its "map tags to styles" functionality. Also, currently there is no module that automates the creation of such XML files, which means that it's cumbersome to start layouting when the editors are still checking/rewriting articles. (I hear some people use a Cacidi plugin for InD that can import and layout data straight from the database, but considering its cost and InD's powerful XML handling, it doesn't seem like it's worth the trouble.)

Related to that problem is the fact that standard XML output often isn't ideal for use in InDesign: ID doesn't have the ability to change styles according to attributes, only according to tags. So it can't distinguish <p class="introduction"> from <p class="question">. I wrote some generic code that changes <p class="x"></p> to <x></x> and I'll probably try to get that to work on Drupal in tandem with the im/ex API, as well as (re)writing a module that'll produce that XML automatically and write it to a folder based on a predefined profile. (Or else, because my coding skills are subpar, pay someone to write it and hope that our limited resources can handle the expense.)

Stuff that I'm still in the dark about

Our oldest editions are only available in OCR'ed PDF (scans from a paper archive that was rapidly decaying) and I'd like to integrate those in the site. I know there is a module to include attachments in search operations, but I still have to figure out how to use that module only for the editions aren't in the CMS in the regular way (i.e. everything until 5 years ago).

I know the e-publish module has the possibility to link a PDF to an edition, but I must confess that I think it's a very cumbersome module. So either I'll use Views for distinguishing between each publication and between sections (although I don't know if that is optimal) or else that'll require another custom module.

So, basically, to sum things up: Drupal is a very solid CMS, and the fact that newspapers like The Onion use it means it's definitely possible. However, it's definitely not an out-of-the-box solution if you want to use it as the hub for all content management and export to both web and DTP.

Comments and suggestions are definitely welcome - as I'm probably one of the least technically proficient participants in this group, I might be looking at some things the wrong way so please don't hesitate to correct me.