[Zope-CMF] DocBook XML, etc. support

[Tres Seaver]

On Mon, 2003-06-16 at 00:50, David Merrill wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> 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.

Casey Duncan's ExternalEditor product is ideal for such uses:  the
product requires installing a small helper app on the client side, which
then launches user-configurable editors for content selected for
external editing in the browser.

In conjunction with Craeg Strong's ZopeXMLMethods product, one can build
quite interesting XML-based applications in Zope:  the source is kept as
XML, edited via external tools, and rendered via XSLT templates.

 - "ExternalEditor product":
   http://www.zope.org/Members/Caseman/ExternalEditor

 - "ZopeXMLMethods product":
   http://zopexmlmethods.sourceforge.net/

> 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.

That is a somewhat different requirement:  in this case, you are likely
to want to write an "importer" for the content, and transform it to HTML
on its way into the site.

> 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?
> 
> Thanks for your time,

Tres.
-- 
===============================================================
Tres Seaver                                tseaver@zope.com
Zope Corporation      "Zope Dealers"       http://www.zope.com