The solution in brief
| Solution: | Plone |
| Category: | Output, Web Publishing |
| Web: | http://plone.org |
The editors of ”der Freitag“ use the magazine’s Web site to maintain a dialog with readers. An online community with a hierarchic user structure comprised of commentators, bloggers, and so-called publicists directly influence the contents of the printed edition. The editors blog, comment, and decide which online contributions they want to buy for the gazette. Community members whose articles are published in the printed edition are paid the same per-line fee as professional freelance copywriters.
”der Freitag“ also posts printed articles on its Web site. To this end, writers and editors revise and format texts as usual in Adobe InCopy and K4 then loads them to Plone. With the benefit of the interface, this requires no manual effort or expert knowledge. All the editor has to do is tick the Web Export box in Adobe InCopy inside the K4 Check-in dialog. This loads the article to Plone, where it is ready for posting at www.freitag.de. If an editor later wishes to send the same article back in the opposite direction, the interface generates a new version of the original article in K4 rather than a duplicate of the Web article.
The enabling technology here is the K4 XML Exporter and a “K4-2-Plone” plug-in. The K4 XML Exporter generates a document based on the article’s XML data. All the editor has to do is prepare the K4 article for export by formatting characters and paragraphs as he or she has been trained to do. The “K4-2-Plone” plug-in then automatically generates clean XML information. The editor needs no prior knowledge of XML, and the process is foolproof. The K4Edit menu in Adobe InCopy was extended with two “K4-2-Plone” options to afford the user intuitive access to these functions.
