Digital Publishing: Is anyone using a good old web CMS to manage print magazines, like magazines?

This has been done quite often, usually as part of a "single source" strategy. Any CMS with a flexible enough content model could be adapted to do an integration like this. (XML-based systems are obvious choices, but really, as long as there's a granular content model and the CMS is not "managing pages" or just "managing blobs of HTML" it could work.) However, if you start single-sourcing from a web CMS, you'll often run into it's limitations quite quickly. A web CMS is really designed to make management of websites easy, and even if it's flexible and somewhat channel-agnostic, it will always be centered around the scenarios we use for web. So the integrations I've seen so far fall short of the expectations. And yes, that includes integrations of a component XML based web CMS (that actually does a good job of separating content from site structure and design, so theoretically quite well suited) with InDesign; pretty much as the asker describes. It's still pretty cumbersome, because the only thing that's automated is the content linking to In Design, but then it still has to be re-flowed, chopped, re-arranged etcetera... print is just such a different medium from web. There's also a couple of tools that try to make this easier, e.g. integrate with your CMS, and then allow you to create mobile apps (Apple Newsstand etc.) from your web content. But it's still fairly cumbersome, and it's never as clean as you'd hope it could be -- while it takes a huge effort to get the integration done in the first place. So the idealist in me says single sourcing is great, and this is how it should work. Ideally manage content in one system that is uniquely suited to that; and then manage the actual publications in best-of-breed, separate publishing systems (for web, for apps, for print). The experienced cynic in me, however, says that pragmatically speaking, it's probably not worth the effort, unless you run a very large publishing house.

I have given this some thought at times in the past. The fundamental problem is that the data model underlying CMS is lower resolution than the data model of a print magazine (Ithey've had hundreds of years to build out the features for print design). the CMS usually knows about title, body, comments  Magazine layout involves a lot of other stuff--drop caps, bleed, text following the shape of images, blurbs, dingbats, typography, etc., etc. You would be exporting a fairly simple albeit large XML blob  and then creating a lot of new objects in the print workflow.  In some sense you're just moving the work from one location in the pipeline to another. That said, it's feasible in principle, and I'm sure some smart people could show me why I'm wrong.  I think the best approach is to build the CMS in XML then export from there to both web and print.

You could also look at a PDF solution like Reportlab which offers XML document templating and can accept dynamic data from multiple sources. It supports print functions such as crop marks and bleed areas, vector graphics  and best of all is not reliant on any Adobe tools. Whilst i'm not sure I would look to design a magazine with it, any document with relatively uniform underlying pages would definitely be possible.

You could use a cms Like Joomla to buid an online magazine using exsisting components. The hoem page could be the magazine cover with excerpts from the various 'articles; within the magazine which drill down to the full articles. You could also add an auto feed of blogs and articles via automated importing of properties via rss feeds. You could also make it a subscription type site like a magazine subscription. I realize this answer is how to use a CMS as an online magazine and not sure if it answers the original question as posted.My  backround is in web and not prited media , but perhaps this is a proper approach , at least as a proof of concept if not exactly what is being asked , but is robust enough for for production.