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Small but Mighty:The Bricolage Story
SilentBob4 writes "Bricolage is an example of the power of an open source project to survive its proprietary origins. As you will read below, Bricolage was originally started in-house by Salon magazine, and then open sourced by About.com. I imagined how very frustrated David Wheeler, a Salon employee, would have been had he been forced to watch the code he helped develop just die on the shelf. Never underestimate the strength of the human passion to create, and to see one's creations bloom in the light of day." The full story is at Mad Penguin."
It's not "just an app that help (sic) them write news stories to publish on the Web." I can see how you might can get that idea from the screenshots, but as the guy David hired to help develop the next version, I can assure you that this is not correct. When we say (pardon the buzzwords) "enterprise-class content management system", we mean it. It's "Enterprise Class" because it scales to meet the needs of large-scale content management (which can be a multimedia archive instead of text, if you prefer.) Radio Free Asia, Portugal Telecom and the Rand Corporation, and many others who need scalable products have turned to Bricolage because it handles the load.
Further, just because it has a Web front end does not mean that it's just for the Web. We can associate the content with "output channels" that can put out any type of content that a computer can produce. You can manage a print magazine or a bank of monitors in Bricolage, if you so desire. Don't judge the product by screenshots.
Basically, it allows you to manage information on a large scale and present it in a uniform, consistent manner. It's usually as a Web page, but it can be used to manage to RSS feeds, email, newsgroups, etc (and simultaneously, too. One document can be transformed and sent to all of those.) For example, the bulk of our customers use it to ensure their Web sites have a consistent look and feel and data goes through a proper "workflow" process. It's more suitable for large companies that absolutely must manage their data.
For example, a journalist might enter a story in Bricolage and check it in. However, depending on the needs of the company, it's probably not published at that point. Some companies require copy editors to proof the stories and others require a legal department to approve the stories. At that point, a story might get moved to a "publish desk" where a new crop of stories get published, it might get kicked back for revision or it might be published on the spot. By guaranteeing that an appropriate process is followed, content can be managed in a way that suits the needs of an organization.
I should add that I can hardly begin to cover it's features. We have competitors who charge (and get!) six figures for the product we give away for free.
Side note: my father, whose been a programmer for years, doesn't get this. He keeps asking "if it's so good, why do you give it away?" I don't think he'll ever "get" open source :)