I'm beginning to home in on my preferred toolkit which I hope will minimise the need for scripting or getting into Scribus development.
My thoughts in Ubuntu 12.04 are now
Install Scrivener. It has a very reasonable price tag after a generous beta usage. I'm still using the free beta on Linux and Windows.
Install Zotero for citations
Install Scribus
Now ..
Use Scrivener as the front end story editor, using "Scrivenings" which are fragments of the total story which can be moved around very easily.
Compile these "Scrivenings" into final *.doc format. You can use Scrivener to publish and print directly into different formats at Compile stage but the next step I'm opting for in my own workflow is to use the compiled *.doc format as the source to now populate a Scribus blank document pre-configured with textframes.
Create document layout in Scribus.
There is quite a bit of overlap of functionality in using both Scrivener and Scribus but I'm prepared to work with that to get the extra flexibility .. particularly by using Scrivener as the front end story editor and Scribus as the layout and publish editor
So my core toolkit of choice is [Scrivener + Zotero + Scribus].
References:
http://www.livinpixels.com/edu/2012/09/how-to-hook-up-scrivener-zotero/and see the videos here ..
http://forum.asymmetrical.co/threads/a-beginners-guide-to-using-scrivener.173/in particular see this on Scrivener compiling .. the stage before importing into Scribus
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/videos/CompilingUsingFormatPresetsSmall.mov...
Collaborative editing of documents is yet another subject and I'm looking at syncing content in WebDAV.
i.e. allowing multiple contributors to create a document for publication.
....