I'm in the process of building a system whereby editors can go to a specific page on the site, and from it, view all the possible output formats for every document in the db; they can also generate "hard" copies of each of these formats and store them on the server as a permanent record (in case the db or Cocoon become unavailable).

I made the following progress today:

• A sitemap pipeline is in place to use the Directory Generator to create a list of the documents already in the backup directory (which is backups/{styleGuide}).
• Another pipeline, called by backups.xml?styleGuide={styleGuide}, generates a TEI file which lists all the documents in the database by xml:id; it also has an XInclude instruction in it which is then processed, and that pulls in the directory listing from the above pipeline, creating an XML file which has a list of the contribution documents, along with a list of the details of all the "hard backup" copies that already exist.
• Another pipeline, backups.xhtml?styleGuide={styleGuide}, processes that through an XSL transformation, which is currently only in skeleton form but will eventually create a rich page with links to view and generate any or all of the hard backups available.

So I guess I'm about a third of the way through this; the next stage will be generating individual items on demand, and the final stage will be generation of multiple items (all the PDFs, say, or all the XHTML files), along with a decent GUI reflecting progress and completion.