[Zope-CMF] DocBook XML, etc. support

[David Merrill]

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.

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?

Thanks for your time,

-- 
David Merrill
dmerrill at ibiblio.org
http://www.lupercalia.net