InDesign to WordPress workflow

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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:

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  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.

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3 comments

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.