[Scribus] Collaborative publishing using wiki and Scribus

[Louis Desjardins]

Hi,

A teacher in the Montreal area is currently setting up the basis of a 
workflow to publish a school newspaper that will involve lots of 
young journalists. He was inspired by the work of another teacher who 
uses Scribus for the same purpose. He attended the Scribus workshop 
at AQUOPS this year and I hope I can convince him to make the jump 
from participant to animator next year!

So, what's the idea? Very simple.

Use a wiki for the collaborative work of the kids. They can write and 
edit their texts using the strict minimum tools : a computer (any 
kind, any platform) and an internet browser (any). They can proofread 
and make corrections. They can be monitored by the teacher who will 
know at any time where the kids are at. Since it's on the internet, 
everyone has 24h access from anywhere. With permission control, the 
teacher can restrain access only to a group of students. After all, 
this is all about publishing a school newspaper, so you want to keep 
your scoops!

Once the text receives its "ok to print" label, whoever is in charge 
of the layout exports the text from the wiki to a .txt format and 
imports it into Scribus. He explained that this requires a bit of 
code to make this export function work from the wiki. This code can 
be found here.

http://recitmst.qc.ca/wikinimst/wakka.php?wiki=ExporterPageWikiTxT

The link below leads to the blog (in French) by Pascal Lapalme, the 
teacher. (I have given you the essential in this post.)

http://www.pascal-tic.org/weblog/index.php/2006/05/18/52-wikinimst-scribus-et-journal-scolaire

As he was explaining this to me yesterday, I thought the same 
approach could be done with pictures to be published.

For text and images, no more emails with attachments. But also, and 
this is not the least, exit the need to uniformise the text from 
various word processors and various formatting before laying out the 
newspaper. The kids can concentrate on the content of the text. No 
"fla-fla" as Pascal puts it! Just plain text. Tracking and accessing 
stories and pics is easy. Once you have the content, Scribus is there 
to make it stand out.

Curious to see what others think about this!

Louis