Bricolage Content Management System

Bricolage 2.0 roadmap: October was an exciting month for Bricoleurs, as the Bricolage 2.0 roadmap got hashed out on the developers list, and then announced to the user list. Looks like Matt Rolf will be leading a bug-squashing sprint, and Google Summer of Coders Marshall Roch and Christian Muise will be ensuring that their contributions — AJAX-ification and element occurrence — are ready to go. Other anticipated improvements are MySQL 5 and Apache 2 support.

Status of Apache 2.0: Speaking of Apache 2, there’s been a flurry of activity on Apache 2 support thanks to the renewed efforts of long-time Bricolage contributor Scott Lanning. Rumors are circulating that Apache 2 support may appear under Christmas trees to the delight of Bricoleurs all over the world.

Bricolage at the The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop: Matt Rolf and his colleagues from Denison University presented their Bricolage work at the recent Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. Matt’s slides are now online, and a podcast of the presentation is to follow. He also noted that Ashlee Caul and her colleague Neal were there from the RAND Corporation (one of many organizations running Bricolage) and that there was a Bricolage birds-of-a-feather discussion that explored templates, improving the permissions model and how contributors are handled.

Denison University in Ohio added its name to the list of organizations running Bricolage in late August. Matt Rolf writes “Over the summer, with various planning taking place over the past year, we migrated our official campus content into the new system. This was about 20,000 pages and media combined.”

In September, Sportsnet.ca quietly launched with the help of Bret Dawson and Greg Heo. Sportsnet.ca — Canada’s regional cable sports network — provides up-to-the-minute sports news, statistics, scores and information on events, games and players. Bret Dawson describes their proudest accomplishments as “The automatic handling of photos and the use of code selects to allow Sportsnet.ca editors to create complex regional home page line-ups.” Visit the Sportsnet.ca home page and click one of the regional icons to see the lineups in action.

Long-time Bricolage user Cameron Miller of Adams State College in Colorado recently posted his Ubuntu 7.04 Bricolage 1.10.3 install Notes and had this to say about the experience… “Rather than ‘not for the faint of heart’ I would classify it as ‘not for those in a hurry’. Alas there is a general shortage of knowledgeable UNIX/Perl sys admins in the world, and a Bricolage 1.10.3 install maybe pretty inaccessible for a typical web developer or webmaster.”

Thankfully, Cameron also put together a a Bricolage on Ubuntu VMware image that makes testing out this enterprise-class content management system a snap. In fact, you can now get up-and-running with an evaluation installation of Bricolage in minutes. If you don’t believe it, just check out the 5-minute screencast.

We’re sad to see Chris Schults leave the Bricolage community as he moves from Grist to Seattle’s PCC Natural Markets. His parting words were “So, thank you to everyone who helped me over the years — this mailing list has been the most helpful one I’ve come across.” We wish him luck, and hope that he convinces PCC to spread the Bricolage love.