Drupal for newspaper

Hi, I'm Craig Ringer from the POST Newspapers, a local newspaper in Perth, Western Australia.

I'm posting here to find out more about Drupal for internal CMS/workflow use, and to find out what others use for some of their other newspaper-related business software like class/pag.

As is frequently the case I'm the only techie in the newspaper, and close to the only computer literate person here. I'm an experienced Java and C++ programmer with experience working with PostgreSQL, but I'm on fresh ground with PHP for Drupal and am new to templated HTML+CSS CMS themeing etc. I'm currently working on writing a newspaper accounts/bookings system for my employer, and am investigating software options for other parts of the business.

I've been evaluating Drupal as part of a wider effort to replace some scary legacy systems at the POST Newspapers,. Rather than tackle the web side alone, I'm interested in integrating internal workflow/cms from editorial through to page layout, so that we can replace our increasingly problematic "word docs in a file share" process with something a bit more robust and remote-worker friendly.

I've noticed that Drupal has workflow controls akin to those in Plone, etc, making it more practical for internal use. My question then is whether others here are using Drupal for their internal CMS as well as their web publishing front end, and if so how they're integrating it with their page layout. Is anyone aware of any InDesign or Quark plugins that provide "story pull" from drupal to the page? With image handling? What about pushing corrections/edits from Quark/InDesign back to the CMS, tracking published/not-yet-published status, recording the page(s) the story was published on in the CMS, etc?

As part of my wider research I'm also trying to find alternatives to our incredibly decrepit newspaper bookings/advertising system, and our classified pagination system. I'm not aware of any OSS alternatives in that area, and am beginning to seriously consider building a simple (markup-driven, non-GUI) class/pag system on top of TeX given that all the alternatives I've looked at so far are at least one of:

• terrible quality (buggy, awful ui, etc)
• crippled by dependencies on overpriced 3rd party databases and frameworks like FileMaker, Oracle, Sybase, etc
• designed and priced for much larger papers with five-plus busy staff working solely on classifieds
• incredibly expensive

The same applies to newspaper ad booking systems. I'd be really interested in knowing how people here find out about software options (OSS or - sigh - yet another closed-down customer lock-in commercial job) in this area. There seems to be a real lack of newspaper-focused mailing lists or forums, so many small papers land up wasting a lot of time and effort duplicating time, work and effort due to lack of effective communication about business systems.

As you can imagine, I'm really glad to see this group! I hope I haven't strayed too far off topic for the drupal side of things.