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."

Comments

Cute...

[Svippy]

Another one of those great small stories.

If it wasn't because I was inhuman, I would cry of happiness. :)

Re:Cute...

[CloudDrakken]

sounds like somebody's got a case of the mon---thursdays Open source is a fad that we can't grow out of

Success is customer driven

[winkydink]

This is the biggest stumbling block to most OSS software. Developers dont get it that if they want to make a living off it they have to be customer-focused. Wheeler clearly understands this.

Re:Success is customer driven

[ShaniaTwain]

I dunno, my approach so far has been to shout at customers, poke them with sticks and let them know that they aren't smart enough to know what they want.
It hasn't paid off yet, but any day now I'm sure it will. people respect honesty.

even dumb people.

Re:Success is customer driven

[rovingeyes]

Developers dont get it that if they want to make a living off it they have to be customer-focused

Very true. But there are products that are completely customer driven. In fact, we have developed a Content Management System which is completely drvien by customer demands. This product is in development for over 5 years now. It started out as a simple web based content editor for our clients' hosting. Slowly, one after the other requests started pouring in. The good thing was that the requests were incremental in nature. Now we are at a stage where we are analyzing whether this product has grown beyond its needs (it has become a hybrid between cpanel and xoops) and does it warrant to be made a product and sold?

There lies the big problem. Our company still wants to have control over it coz 80% of our company's revenue is directly or iderectly generated by this product. So some company execs are questioning whether Open source is the right way. Couple others are saying that open source might be the only way out as there would less risk involved as bulk of the revenue off of a product is generated by support unless you have a product like SAP.

Definitely interesting times ahead...

Re:Success is customer driven

[cptgrudge]

I dunno, my approach so far has been to shout at customers, poke them with sticks and let them know that they aren't smart enough to know what they want.
It hasn't paid off yet, but any day now I'm sure it will. people respect honesty.

No, see, your problem is basically that you just have to do it with a smile and a laugh. Gain the customer's trust. Make them think that you are on their side. The thing is, people know that they aren't smart enough to know what they want. They just want someone to be able to tell them in a way that isn't condescending and makes them feel OK about it, that's all.

But seriously, the sad part is that this is very true for quite a few people.

Re:Success is customer driven

[HepCatA]

Hmmm, diplomacy...

Anyone can tell you to go to Hell.

A diplomat will make you look forward to the trip.

Re:Success is customer driven

[BerntB]

even dumb people.

Please use the polite and relevant term -- users.

:-)

Seriously, though. When I had a terrible time doing support for a program I wrote (fitting punishment), I thought that the world was made of users and supporters. Two conclusions... 1. Everyone are users of other's support and almost everyone are doing support, too. 2. All users are idiots, because we don't have time to think about things and ask instead.

(What Saint Dogbert preaches, I guess.)

Re:Success is customer driven

[winkydink]

You mean, you're a GNOME developer?

More Mad Penguin

[fm6]

I'm glad to see that Mad Penguin finally has Slashdot-effect-resistant servers. But they still need to do better HTML -- and a lot less Javascript!

Whats Bricolage?

[stratjakt]

Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management and publishing system. Built on Apache, the world's most robust and dependable Web server, and backed by the reliability of the ACID-compliant PostgreSQL RDBMS, Bricolage scales to meet the content management needs of the most demanding of organizations. Bricolage's intuitive browser-based interface works with any modern web browser, and lets you perform in minutes the customization and configuration tasks that other systems require hours to carry out. Furthermore, Bricolage features a fully customizable workflow environment, so that it can work the way that you work. Together with templating support built on the highly flexible and popular Perl programming language and extensive user groups and permissions, Bricolage provides an affordable yet powerful solution for your content management needs. A comprehensive, actively-developed open source CMS, Bricolage has been hailed as quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class open-source application available by eWEEK.

An open source assortment of random buzzwords. This sounds like just the product our marketing dept has been looking for!

Coolness, Park!

Re:Whats Bricolage?

[stratjakt]

My only point was that that blurb doesn't tell me what it is.

It's full featured, ACID compliant, templated, backwards compatible, vertically integrated, etc..

What is it? Some sort of gameboy game?

Re:Whats Bricolage?

[br0ck]

Maybe the screenshots will give you a better idea.. I never seem to know what the heck these marketing briefs are talking about either, but as soon as I see some proper screenshots I can wrap my head around it. Like in this case where you see the screenshots and quicky see that it's just an app that help them write news stories to publish on the Web.

Re:Whats Bricolage?

[Saganaga]

It's a "content management and publishing system". Seems pretty clear cut to me.

This is the type of system used by people who have to manage a ton of documents, with workflow, version control, editorial review, etc., and then control which content goes live to a website.

Any large news or portal type website will have some kind of content management and publishing system in place, either home grown or off the shelf.

Content management systems are not new. My employer (Thomson West) has 20-30 year old home-grown mainframe-based systems that are used for maintaing the content for our legal research products. In the old days it was mostly book publishing, now it's increasingly web-based publishing.

Re:Whats Bricolage?

[SethJohnson]

My only point was that that blurb doesn't tell me what it is.

It's full featured, ACID compliant, templated, backwards compatible, vertically integrated, etc..

These terms make sense to people in the world of CMS's. Here is a quick rundown:

• ACID compliant- refers to the database in the backend. It's postgreSQL, so the Salon developer didn't really do anything for the ACID compliance. This basically means it can maintain data integrity to a pretty good standard if there's a power failure or some other hardware problem.
• Templated- This means users of the system can create a couple of different templates that define the look and feel for different sections on a website. The PERL will dynamically pull content out of the DB and plug it into the proper spots with HTML formatting applied without a human having to code HTML pages for every content item.
• Backwards compatible- this is kind of a vague term. Probably is intended to mean that you can have a website built and then install this package and it will still be able to serve the HTML pages you had previously created. Because it's a complete webserver, though, this attribute may be affected if you had previously been using a different CMS system (like Vignette) that requires special plugins to be loaded by the webserver.
• vertical integration- gotta scratch my head on that one. It's a business organization term. So right there, it should trigger some marketoid alarms.

Re:Whats Bricolage?

[Urusai]

But can it leverage corporate synergy to enhance capability-oriented revenue enhancement solutions in today's fast-paced marketplace? I see that it is highly flexible, affordable yet powerful, and comprehensively provides solutions to my content management needs; but it must leverage use-case scenarios in an adaptable yet industry-leading model that features performance suitable for enterprise-class systems to be acceptible in today's fast-paced marketplace.

Re:Whats Bricolage?

[publius_ovidius]

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.

Re:Whats Bricolage?

[JamesonTV]

Damn straight! Just look at the screenshots. That's not a UI, that's a straight dump of the database. The job of the interface designer is to create a CMS which helps the user manage and publish content without having to be fluent in all the underpinnings of the system. Bricolage basically drafts every user into the role of novice database administrator.

Praise from eWeek does more to call eWeek's judgment into question than it does to make Bricolage look good.

Re:Whats Bricolage?

[urbaneassault]

Radio Free Asia, Portugal Telecom and the Rand Corporation

Wow, that's about the craziest threesome I've ever heard of!

Re:Whats Bricolage?

[Syre]

What Bricolage basically does is to let organizations create a document publishing workflow with various privilege domains.

What this means is that you can sub-divide the work, and let graphic artists create the page templates, then let writers put information into the pages and submit them for publishing, then let editors review the pages and put them live.

Each user can be set up so they have control over given functions for given sites or sub-sites, and there can be multiple levels of workflow/approval for each function.

This is perfect for a magazine, where you want authors to be able to submit stories and editors to be able to review them without requiring either to know HTML or anyone else to later have to put the content into a template. That process is all automatic.

It also is useful for any organization which needs to do similar activities ie: let a department manage their own sub-site, which will be formatted exactly to corporate standards without having to know HTML and with or without oversight and approval.

Bricolage is mentioned...

[tcopeland]

...in Josh Berkus' article The Five Types of Open Source Projects (site is down at the moment, so the link goes to the Google cache).

Josh characterized Bricolage as a "solo" project, but maybe it's moving onwards...

Bad naming...

[null etc.]

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

It almost died on the shelf because everyone thought he was talking about a Barcalounger.

For those who wonder...

[El Cabri]

Bricolage is the French word for DIY, or, sometimes, hacking.

Re:For those who wonder...

[mroch]

From the Bricolage "About" page in the application itself:

The name Bricolage was not drawn directly from the common usage of the term in French, but rather from the first chapter of The Savage Mind, by the famed French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In that famous discussion of scientific thought vs. mythical thought--of science vs. the science of the concrete--Lévi-Strauss declares, Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual bricolage.

Bricolage is the product of a bricoleur, a kind of handyman who assembles the fruits of his labors from the tools he has at hand. Similarly, mythical thought uses the extant concepts available to the cultural bricoleur to shape the world of cultural understanding. In other words, one's understanding and interpretation of the world and its events derives from assembling new interpretations based on existing cultural (Lévi-Strauss would say structural) symbols. Signs allow and even require the interposing and incorporation of a certain amount of human culture into reality, Lévi-Strauss writes. Thus signs (or symbols, as modern anthropologists are more likely to call them) are the building blocks of cultural comprehension.

Similarly, content is assembled in the Bricolage content management system by drawing on extant elements to create a new end product. Element administrators function as Lévi-Straussian scientists, in that they create new symbols (elements) that document editorsas new media bricoleursdraw upon to assemble and manage new structures of meaning (content).

For those who may find this explanation too much a stretch, we fall back on the meaning of the term bricolage as it is commonly used in English, rather than French. For our French users, who might see the name and immediately think big hack, note that typical English definition, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, is simply, something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available. This definition nicely describes how Bricolage documents are built from the elements defined for them.

Re:For those who wonder...

[kebes]

As a french-speaker, I'll add that "bricolage" is often used to mean "doing crafts" (like making decorations and stuff) even though the dictionary definition is closer to "doing odd-jobs".

Screenshots

[RandoX]

here.

Re:Bricolage screenshots?

[mroch]

http://www.bricolage.cc/docs/screenshots/

CMS?

[Quixote]

OK, I RTFP (read the first page), and figured out that Bricolage is a CMS.

Now, as a non-web developer, I have to ask: what does a CMS like Bricolage do? Can someone give some examples, other than a finished site? I want to know more about the backend stuff of a CMS. Call it idle curiosity.

Re:CMS?

[publius_ovidius]

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 :)

Re:CMS?

[Darby]

Basically, if you look at most sites they are composed of a few different types of pages.
Each page may contain several different sections.

Take /. for example
You have the title area, the sections along the side, the slashboxes (assuming that you have them turned on), then the stories.

There are others as well, but that's enough to get the idea.

So, you know how the site looks, what types of data go where, and even what that given type of data should look like on the page.

So in a CMS like Interwoven Teamsite, or Bricolage you can set up a variety of templates.

One type will take the raw content that goes on the page. Usually you'll have an HTML form that the copywriter will put their text in and hit submit. You'll usually have several fields: Title, Tagline, Main body in one or more paragraphs.

So this content is then usually stored in a database.

Continuing with the /. example, when a story ends up on the front page, it is formatted to fit into the story section, if it runs over the max length, then it's cut off.
Also, the "Read More" and other links are tacked on.
Now, when you click on the read more link, it takes you to a different display of the same information.
It has the complete text etc.

Generally, once you have your data stored, you can have any number of templates which define how that data will be presented. Your CMS can then generate all of these different HTML pages, or fragments of pages depending on how you set it up.

Now, most CMS's I'm familiar with include workflow capability as well.

So say you work at a newspaper.
You are submitting a story for the sports section.
So you click on your "New Sports Story" link in the CMS.
It will present you with the appropriate form that you put your story into. Title, headline, paragraph, paragraph, etc as well as attaching any images that the template supports.

Once you hit submit (or preview), the actual HTML pages can be generated, but also, it will go through an approval process before it can go live.

So you submit your story, and it goes to the sports editor who has some issues.
He enters his comments and sends it back to you.
You resubmit, he approves it, and it goes to another editor who gets to give the final approval.

At this point, it might be updated directly to the live site.

Alternatively, you might be able to set it to roll out at a pecific date and time etc.

You can also have straight static HTML pages generated or generate the fragments and have your Web Application build pages dynamically based on who is looking at the page etc.

There is really quite a lot of customizability possible.
I've used Interwoven and Bricolage mostly, and they are both really powerful once you start getting the m figured out.

Re:CMS?

[publius_ovidius]

One key difference between Bricolage and Zope is that we (Bricolage) are entirely back-end. Once we serve the content, there's no overhead of some framework slowing things down. The people can choose to use any technology they want to drive the front end (many folks use PHP). Heck, if they are having performance problem on the front end, they can switch to a different technology and still use Bricolage to manage things on the back end. Many content management systems do not allow this. This is a huge benefit of Bricolage.

Re:CMS is part of VM

[ggvaidya]

I'm tired of you young 'uns using the term 'VM' VM is 995 in Roman numerals.