I'd swear that you sound like someone who's getting ready to
sell us an
automated tool to publish to hosting. I'm not saying I for one would
turn it down. But would you care to just go ahead and put it on the
table so we can look at it and figure out the next steps?
There's someone on the Zikula team writing a module to pull your XML
documents from source control and publish them into the CMS for displaying
to the world. We're already working on that, in case it hasn't been clear
previously. If this isn't useful or needs to change best to let us know
while the script is still in the early stages.
Theoretically you simply write your docbook XML, commit it when you're done
and then log into the CMS and hit publish to update the documents.
Hopefully there will also be a test option where you can publish in a
private location for checking while avoiding publishing a part finished
document to the public at large.