With ppi Media’s CX Fusion, you can easily publish your content on a wide variety of platforms by linking your web CMS to Adobe InDesign. You can use CX Fusion to connect InDesign not only with Drupal, but also any other content source. Find out more in this article. (Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash).
In the dynamic and demanding world of media companies and corporate publishers, content management systems (CMS) are of central importance. They need to be flexible, scalable, and secure to meet the needs of newsrooms, publishers, and other media organizations. Drupal has established itself as one of the leading content management systems in this field and offers numerous advantages that make it particularly attractive to media houses. These include:
- high flexibility and adaptability
- scalability and performance
- robust security features
- multisite capabilities
- support for multilingualism
- extensive API integration
- strong community and support
- integration with Adobe InDesign
ppi Media has developed CX Fusion, a solution that makes it possible to connect Drupal with InDesign easily and efficiently. CX Fusion is not just a Drupal-to-InDesign solution; it also offers numerous other modules for optimizing publishing house workflows. In addition, CX Fusion also enables the intelligent bidirectional linking of other systems such as WordPress with Adobe InDesign. For example, it allows Digital First publishers who rely on Drupal to transfer content efficiently, smartly, and quickly from the web CMS to InDesign templates created according to their own specifications. These are then turned into high-quality, print-ready PDFs. Time-consuming, inefficient, and error-prone copy & paste processes are now a thing of the past. Formatting is also carried out intelligently in line with your specifications.
Efficient workflows for designers and editors
The CX Fusion planner is another optional component of our solution for connecting Drupal and InDesign. This is a browser-based planning tool in which publications can be created and managed very easily. Each page can be linked to an InDesign page layout that a designer defines as a template. Of course, different templates can also be created for different pages or documents. Using our solution, editors continue to work with their familiar online editor in the web CMS and simply create a print version with the CX Fusion plugin, which they assign to a template layout. This allows them to adapt their texts to the specifications of the print layout. Online-specific content is automatically ignored.
Designers then have the option of easily finding articles from the web CMS via content search in the planner and placing them on a page using drag & drop, where the article is pulled into the predefined layout.
Formatting can even be taken from the CMS and intelligently translated into InDesign formats. If the image does not fit, the text is too short or the headline too long, the functions of CX Fusion as a plug-in for the web CMS come into play: the article can be opened in the print layout view of the planner so that texts can be adjusted line by line. And there is no need to open an InDesign client for small layout changes: these can simply be made directly in the planner using the “Page Layout” feature, a kind of slimmed-down InDesign. Of course, it is always possible to create your own layout of any article in InDesign. Incidentally, the CX Fusion planner can also be used to manage advertisements.
To sum up: Connecting Drupal and InDesign? CX Fusion makes this very easy to do. And that’s not all: CX Fusion adds a professional print channel to any (headless) web CMS. Publications can easily be created with the CX Fusion planner and editors can create customized content for print in the web CMS. Layout and editing departments work together remotely and efficiently with CX Fusion.