Starting a spec list for a design for a ZINE module

One thing that comes to mind quickly is multiple 'zines, similar to multiple blogs. Ideally, they'd have choosable layouts/themes (NOT visitor-configurable), and able to have a distinct URL rather than 'node/87' or whatever. I suppose alias'ing could handle that part.

Motime's blog creation module(s?) is a good example and quite nice, letting users choose a layout/theme from a visual catalog.

Another idea, not specific to zines but overall, is the word "node" itself. What an ugly word! I suppose many will find such nit-picking silly, but ugh. The only field I'm aware of that uses the term is (computer) networking or medical (lymph nodes). First replacement I can think of is 'item'. Maybe there are better ones...

In an older version of Drupal I used I just renamed 'node.php' to 'article.php' (and think maybe hacked some internals to deal with this), but something less "tech-y" would be nice. I need to take a look but this might be easy to do with mod_rewrite or a similar style hack in a page handler.

A robust workflow mod might be useful -- I've seemed to manage in the past with roles and (publish) permissions. This doesn't allow granular perms though like "the Arts editor can publish work into the Art section only". I think many zine-specific features might clash with the more general nature of Drupal.

Of course this then veers into a big CMS vs. community software vs. publishing sw, etc. etc. discussion, and the "do one thing and do it well" UNIX philosophy, etc.

Issue Management- useful for magazines which are also print zines. This would mean that articles could be clumped into articles and sort of sorted by that. This could probably be handled by a new taxonomy term.That each item could have.

Content Layout- this seems to be the biggest stumbling block towards making Drupal really useful as a zine at least for us. The whole dichotomy between front page, the haphazard administration and voting thing seems to orientate everything to a slashdot/blog style layout where as a magazine would typically have a more static or at least organized via topic front page. It just seems that having a main column and then a bunch of administrative blocks on either side is a little limiting as far as layout goes. If you could have multiple columns in the main block that were arranged with different categories or a taxonomy term as the heading that might go a ways to make it easier. Like a sports or politics section.

Another thing in general that might help with drupal would be something similar to the node_image module but allows one to associate files that could be used as HTML tags rather than auto-insert also such as a PDF version of articles and what not. This would be cool, prolly not to hard.

I could think of more, such as repeating events within the events module, but thats about it for now.

Drupal doesn't seem to have a staging ground (i.e. a place for editors to see how next week's issue looks like). I assume one would get around that with permissions and roles?