Bricolage Content Management System

Helping the World Health Organization keep Bricolage: The World Health Orgnaization (WHO) has been using and contributing to Bricolage for many, many years. Scott Lanning recently wrote on the user's mailing list For the past year or so or more, we've been evaluating our website and CMS, and part of this has involved making a decision about whether to continue using Bricolage or to switch to something else. The question sparked a good debate on the current landscape of open-source content management systems. We hope to hear a report back from Scott and his colleagues on their findings in time for the July newsletter.

1.11.0 QEMU Bricolage image: If you enjoyed localhostin' it with Bricolage 1.10.5 running in VMware, you now have another option to choose from. Cameron Miller at Adams State College has put together a QEMU image that is available for download.

Bricolage activity RSS feed: Greg Heo's been hard at work again producing new Bricolage enchancements. This time around, he's nearing completion on bric_events_rss -- a new contributed script that can be run via a cronjob and produces an RSS feed of all activity for a Bricolage instance. This provides a convenient way for over-protective Bricolage administrators to see everything that every user is doing on the site, including group and permissions changes, password changes, user additions, etc. Look for this public release of this script over the next few weeks.

Bricolage is soo cool! Scott Lanning writes in with this fun story from the trenches:

Since I'm usually fixing problems, you get a negative bias, so here's some positive feedback from one of our users after our upgrade:

I just wanted to say that I love its re-design! Very easy on the eyes.

Several people have mentioned how the font size is bigger now and easier to read, in particular Chinese characters. I'm not sure why that couldn't've been changed through the browser, but we'll take the credit.

TUXAMOON (www.tuxamoon.de/) is an independent German online magazine which provides a wealth of stories and reviews on cultural topics such as music, literature, society and politics. The writers, who are based throughout Germany, appreciate not only the ease-of-use and flexibility which Bricolage offers, but also its powerful workflow and versioning capabilities.

Get a contributor's bio: Ever wanted to show a contributor's bio in your story? If so, there's a great thread on just that topic over here. Another approach, if you would like more complex bios on your site -- with images, related stories, etc. -- is to use a "Bio" story for each contributor. You can see this at work over at The Tyee.

Automatically adding keywords to a story: Chris Schults over at PCC Natural Markets asks the mailing list how to automatically add keywords to a story based on a field element in a story (a select list in this case), and then promptly answers his own question. If you need to figure out something similar, don't hesitate to contact the users mailing list.

You see, you can even use Bricolage to raise money!: In case you missed it -- Check out this great image from a recent e-mail campaign, where long-time Bricolage powered organization Grist.org uses some familiar looking code (and handsome Bricolage geek Jerome Woody) to solicit support for their award-winning environmental news coverage.