Bricolage Content Management System

Exciting times in Bricolageville with the quiet announcement of Bricolage 1.10.4. The official annoucement should be up on the Web site shortly.

Improvements include: Support for Perl 5.10 and PostgreSQL 8.3., nicer use of the "Bricolage Instance Name" preference (great if you're working with several Bricolage instances), more German corrections (thanks to Steffen Schwigon), a "--site" option was added to "bric_republish" (Suggested by Chauncey Thorn), and much more. Check out the complete list of changes.

Bricolage Presentation at GLITTER Conference: Bricoleur Matt Rolf will be delivering a presentation on Bricolage at the Great Lakes Information Technologists for Education and Research (GLITTER) 2008 conference, which takes place on March 26-28, 2008 at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His presentation will be on "Leveraging Bricolage for Content Management Across the Web, Intranet and Print." Can't wait to see those slides.

Xinha WYSIWYG plug-in, redux: Much to the dismay of Macintosh and Windows users everywhere, the popular Xinha What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor did not support the Safari Web browser. That was until the Xinha team released Xinha 0.95 RC2 a few weeks ago with Safari support. It was quickly announced on the Bricolage list that this release not only supports Safari, but also greatly enhances the speed of the editor, which means that Safari-using staff world over will rejoice at having the opportunity to add bold and italics with ease in Bricolage. (Xinha has been supported natively in Bricolage for some time now for other browsers.)

In related news, Greg Heo has successfully ported Alex King's JS Quicktags to Bricolage. JS Quicktags is a set of buttons that allow you to insert HTML tags into a content area. The tags are cursor aware - placed around a selection or at the cursor position. To make this editor work in standard Bricolage scenarios, Greg had to patch the JS Quicktags source so it would work for multiple textareas on the same page. That patch was submitted and is now included in the latest release of JS Quicktags. Expect to see this port avaiable in the very near future.

Information Architect Guido Buelskaemper continues to set the record (if not the pace) for launching new Bricolage sites. For February he announces two new sites (and says there are more coming!):

Stahl Konecranes is a leading provider of high-performance lifting solutions and maintenance services. The company, with 500 employees at 24 branches in Germany, has chosen Bricolage to manage all the content of its website.

ZWS are the experts when it comes to innovative systems which use renewable energy sources. They have chosen Bricolage to manage the content of their corporate website and all microsites for their branches in Germany and Austria. Thanks in particular to its ability to handle text and media files on different servers while utilizing both a central and a peripheral approach, it simplifies both the provision and sharing of content.

Ever get confused when mixing character sets in Bricolage? Well, join the club. Or, watch-on as Chris Schults and David Wheeler set the record for the longest thread on character sets in the history of the InterWeb. (And, in the process, referencing a script by our old friend -- and no stranger to Bricolage -- Matt Corks.)

Speaking of characters, Greg Heo has also finished porting the Typogrify project to Perl for use with Bricolage. Typogrify: is a set of Django template filters to make caring about typography on the web a bit easier. The filter set includes useful text-handling tools like: Widon't (handling of "widows"), SmartyPants, and applies special markup to initial quotes, ampersands, and multiple adjacent capital letters. You can see an example of Typogrify in action here. And, should you want to put it to use right away, you can grab the latest version in the www.buildingbrics.com repository.

Check all button on bulk publish section: Ever lamented that there wasn't a "check all" button on the bulk publish screen? Well, thanks to our friend Iván Chavero, there's now a patch available to add that functionality.

That's open-source software in action. Gotta love it.