Bricolage Content Management System

Bricolage 1.10.5: Another quiet announcement by Scott Lanning -- this time for the Bricolage 1.10.5 maintenance release. Improvements include: Addition of the JS-Quicktags editor as a configuration option, improved the display of related media and story information in the element list, and many other improvements and bug fixes. Read the official annoucement for all the details, or check out the complete list of changes.

The spring sprint: Bricolage's Lead Developer -- David Wheeler -- dedicated two weeks in April to whipping Bricolage into shape for the next major release. Thanks to the work of many in the community, David was able to finish off modperl2 support and a variety of other features to get out a Bricolage 1.11.0 development release. You can read all about it on David's blog.

This work is in preparation for the next major production release of Bricolage -- which will be Bricolage 2.0! Bricolage 2.0 will include many new features and improvements, including: Apache 2 and MySQL support, element occurrence, AJAXification and user interface improvements, and a streamlined installer. What better time to get involved!

VMware update If you enjoyed localhostin' it with Bricolage 1.10.3 running in VMware then you're in for a treat: Paul Orrock just released a Bricolage 1.10.4 VMware Ubuntu image with the latest security patches for Ubuntu 7.04. And Cameron Miller promptly upgraded Paul's image to Hardy and Bricolage 1.10.5. Collect them all.

JS-Quicktags editor and Bricolage: Want a quick-and-easy way to give your content managers and editors some basic content mark-up capabilities without going to the dark side of a WYSIWYG editor? Then JS-Quicktags is the drop-in editor just for you. Greg Heo released a patch for Bricolage 1.10.3 and it's available as a configuration option in 1.10.5 and beyond.

www.bricolage.cc moves to Canada: April also saw the migration of the www.bricolage.cc Web site and Bricolage installation to Gossamer Threads in Vancouver, Canada. Gossamer's own Alex Krohn and Brian Smith are taking an active role in the Bricolage community and recently provided patches to help with the installation of Bricolage in a shared hosting environment (or, most accurately, without root access). Many thanks to all the nice folks at Gossamer Threads for their contributions and support.

Redfin. Redfin is the industry's first online brokerage for residential real estate. In early March, Alex Loddengaard posted a great article to their developer's blog Plumbing Upgrade: We’re Using Bricolage For Content Management

Alex documents the reasons Redfin needed a CMS and with the process Redfin went through to choose a CMS. He points to Bricolage’s data modeling, templating engine, as well as the well-documented API as reasons for choosing Bricolage.

The United Church Observer was also launched in April by Bret Dawson of Pectopah. Founded in 1829, The United Church Observer is the oldest continuously published magazine in North America and the second oldest in the English speaking world.

Bricolage permissions 101: Ever wanted some help getting started with Bricolage permissions? If so, we've put together some new resources for you. Phillip Smith (that's me!) has a post on his blog that includes two short screencasts that demonstrate how to set up basic permissions for a blogger. These concepts are also written up on the Bricolage Wiki and apply broadly to any group of users that you might want to restrict to a certain type of content, a certain group of elements, or a certain category in Bricolage.

Clearing out the job queue: If you've ever re-published your whole site only to realize that there was a problem with the publish job, you've probably pondered how to easily clear out 4000 or more failed jobs from the jobs queue. Thankfully, there's a whole section of Useful SQL over on the Bricolage Wiki, including this great tidbit on how to Delete all failed jobs. Works like a charm.

MEDIA_UNIQUE_FILENAME: If you're working with a lot of media assets, then MEDIA_UNIQUE_FILENAME is a configuration option that you just might want to explore. Paul Orrock -- the author of that option -- reports that It's great and works really well for us, we have 30000+ media all with consistent filenames, in the right case, no spaces or strange characters and no two are the same.