Plone 5 as foundation for XML Director Web-to-Print solutions

XML Director is an generic solution for building XML-based content management solutions based on the CMS Plone. This video shows how we build easy-to-use web-to-print applications using CSS Paged Media (XML/HTML for input, CSS for layout and styling). This demo features the PDFreactor PDF converter and the Nimbudocs WYSIWYG editor by RealObjects.

The migration of XML Director to Plone 5 is making big progress. As part of the ongoing effort I extended XML Director as web-to-print solution platform.

The following screencast shows how it is possible to use Plone 5 and XML Director as decent web-to-print application. The screencast shows to usecases:

1. generation of PDF from a given HTML templates and CSS styles with form data filled through Plone. The input forms for each template are automatically generated from the HTML (with some additional metadata stored within the HTML, no need to create forms manually or individually). The generated PDF file is being stored automatically on the preconfigured storage (XML database, cloud storages, local filesystem).
2. editing of the template using the Nimbudocs editor. The Nimbudocs Editor provides WYSIWYG editing of the template. The layout looks exactly the same as in the final PDF.

Screencast