XML Content Management System

Publishing

There is not much use in authoring if there is no ability to publish content. Publishing is the process of preparing the Publication for distribution to readers. This publish process may range in complexity from the simple act of exposing the author's XHTML on the web, to a more complicated publishing pipeline. For example, a print publish pipeline could have the following steps:

assemble

Assemble the content using a map or aggregation across multiple XML files.

format

This is one or more steps that formats the XML into a print aware XML format such as formatted objects as defined in XSL/FO.

generate printable

The simplest binary print format is PDF. It is expected you can print from this format. In the case of PDF the Adobe Acrobat Reader can do the printing.

The nature of the pipeline and the publish process will vary greatly depending on the final published form. Possible final forms and their publish processes are:

publishing to the web.

Publishing to the web can be as simple as going to the website, adding a new page, authoring the page in XHTML, and saving for immediate display. Or, publishing to the web could involve exporting from a component based XML CMS to SCORM and loading the SCORM package into a separate Learning Management System. If the delivery is to the web or some other non paper form, then searching for content by website users is a needed feature of the CMS. In a web environment the CMS often provides many of the web features In fact, in web portals it is difficult to say where the CMS ends and the portal begins.

publishing printed matter.

To print you will likely use a pipeline. This publish process may follow the example pipeline shown above with steps: assemble, format, generate.

publishing to a package.

Standards like SCORM define a package format for educational courses. This package is a zip file composed of text and binary content, all described by a package manifest. Many times it is necessary to export a subset of the content in the CMS into an external zip package such as a SCORM package. Another export format would be a software help package.

publishing to the file system.

Publishing to the file system may be necessary, for instance, if you ship a file directory structure of documentation with your software product. If your directory structure contains XHTML, however, it may be necessary to re-map links of the file directory if they do not match the link structure of the CMS.

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