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

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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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: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 :)