[Zope-CMF] DocBook XML, etc. support

[Sylvain Thénault]

On Monday 16 June ? 00:50, David Merrill wrote:
> Hello all,

hello,

> I'm the Lead Developer with the Linux Documentation Project. We are
> interested in publishing our documents through CMF (and Plone), but we
> cannot force our authors to do all their editing TTW, nor can we force them
> to change their formats. In fact, we find DocBook XML ideal for our
> purposes.
> 
> What we need is to have all the TTW capabilities of CMF for those who
> need/want it, but also allow the site to publish documents whose source is
> maintained elsewhere.
> 
> We have a huge collection of documents in many source formats. The formats
> we want to support are:
> 
> LinuxDoc SGML
> DocBook SGML 3.1, etc.
> DocBook XML 4.1.2, etc.
> Texinfo
> Several forms of structured text, for mirroring Wiki content
> 
> So, as a first step, I have extended CMF to allow DocBook XML as a content
> type. The code suffers from several limitations at this point, but it is
> functional enough that I wanted to run it past you for your feedback. I can
> provide a patch against CVS if you are interested.
> 
> However, my thought at this point is that hacking up support for lots of
> different formats and adding them into CMF directly is not the way to go.
> What would you think about a kind of plug-in system, where we can plug in
> support for additional formats? That would allow us to develop support for
> all the formats we wish, without weighing CMF down with stuff most CMF users
> will never need.
> 
> Is this something you might be interested in? Or is there some other
> approach you would recommend?

Such an approach has been developped in the Archetypes project 
(http://www.sf.net/projects/archetypes). It's based on a transformation 
tool in which you can register some transformations from a mime type to 
another (transformation are python plugins). In the current archetypes 
implementation, the transforms tool is used to display the TextField 
content in html or text whatever the input type (there is currently a 
support for Structured Text, ReST, Word, PDF, Python source).
Some new transformations would be welcome ;o)

-- 
Sylvain Thénault                               LOGILAB, Paris (France).

http://www.logilab.com   http://www.logilab.fr  http://www.logilab.org