yelvington.com

In an awesomely detailed post, the editor of Schamper, the student newspaper at the University of Gent (Belgium) describes how he -- a philosophy major -- built a Web-centric content management system that outputs to Adobe InDesign for print, all based on the open-source Drupal CMS framework. How integrated is it? Well, when an editor opens a story, it's locked so others can't modify it. When it's stored, the XML output is updated and InDesign refreshes the layout. And oh, by the way, there's also a public-facing website. Great work, all integrated by someone who's not a professional programmer, and based on free code.

Drupal is disruptive innovation in action. Many people mistakenly think it's a blogging platform. It began as a communications tool for Belgian student Dries Buytaert to communicate with his dormitory buddies. It's built on open-source foundations (PHP, MySQL or Postgres). Over the last several years it's grown into a powerful, flexible and reliable tool for some pretty high-end projects. I believe Bluffton Today was the first newspaper to use it for the core of its site; now quite a few dailies up to the Virginian-Pilot are using it to power their websites. Now it's moving into print production.