InDesign to WordPress workflow

Question

I'm working on a project for a monthly InDesign-based magazine that enables them to put their content online via WordPress.

The current workflow is either:

1. Copy/pasting from InDesign to a Word document (by the magazine staff with access to InDesign) and then copy/pasting from Word to the various fields in WP (by an intern without access to InDesign but access to Word)

2. Create a CSV that contains all of the post data and use CSV Importer to import to WordPress.

Thus, I have two questions:

1. Is there a better InDesign => WordPress workflow than the ones I discuss above?
2. If not, what a good way of pasting a large amount of multi-line HTML data into a spreadsheet?

Massive gratitude to anyone who can help with this.

Edit: The solution I'm looking for involves as little InDesign-side work as possible. I'll spend a month writing an XMLRPC plugin for InDesign from scratch or something similarly stupid if it means not having to retag page elements for a decade worth of issues -- so long as that really is the best possible route.

Answer 1

My boss decided it'd be way easier to outsource the content importing to an outsource group in India. In reality, I think that's probably the best solution for this kind of thing.

I'm asking the mods to make this a community wiki question; seems like a common enough problem that it deserves a list of solutions instead of just one answer.

Answer 2

Afaik: There's a (hidden?) button for TinyMCE that cleans up stuff imported from MS Word. You click the button insert (copy/paste) the stuff from Word and TinyMCE should do the rest.

Second: You can export as XML from InDesign. Why not use that? Pulling in XML data should be much easier. I'm pretty sure that you could also add a new table in DB for the XML content and pull that instead of the_content();. Adding some meta box (or just use custom fields) to upload the xml file to DB would be as easy as disabling the editor could avoid a lot of trouble.

Answer 3

If it was me, I would worry more about the ability to get content out of InDesign, and not getting content into WordPress. Assuming you script data from an InDesign file into a middleware connector (PHP or anything else really), I think XML-RPC would definitely be the way to go to get that content into WordPress.

Aside from that API being fully flushed out for all your WordPress publishing needs, using XML-RPC would have the added bonus of perhaps supporting other publishing platforms without needing to rewrite any code.