Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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!
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!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Bricolage is the French word for DIY, or, sometimes, hacking.
http://www.bricolage.cc/docs/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 :)
Basically, if you look at most sites they are composed of a few different types of pages.
/. for example
/. 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.
Each page may contain several different sections.
Take
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
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.
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.