Bricolage Content Management System

Bricolage 1.11.1: The Bricolage development team announced the release of Bricolage 1.11.1, the second developer release in preparation for the forthcoming Bricolage 2.0. Highlights include: improved SFTP distribution, AJAX improvements, publish another request queuing, and a lot more.

Bricolage 1.10.6: At the same time, the Bricolage development team also released Bricolage 1.10.6, the latest in the stable release series of Bricolage. New features and improvements include: improved database indexes, improved security, improved search functionality, and more!

The Hook: Long-time Bricolage-powered, Vancouver-based, daily news site TheTyee.ca launched their new "superblog" just days before the announcement of the Canadian federal election. Their new blog -- called The Hook -- publishes an impressive amount of daily content with ease and style. Judging by their approach, one might guess that the Tyee intends to launch more blogs on the ultra-capable Bricolage platform.

The New Internationalist Blog network: Rounding out the growing list of Bricolage-powered blogs, the New Internationalist also launched its new multi-blog network at blog.newint.org. Existing blog content was migrated from Drupal to Bricolage, and the comments from Drupal to Perl Simple Comments. The platform launched with five blogs and plans are afoot to add more blogs to the site over the next several months.

Drupal and Bricolage together at last (again!): Some regular readers may recall that we've discussed several ways that Bricolage sites enable "front-end functionality" like user comments -- often by integrating another application that provides that functionality. So, while we’re on the topic of Bricolage-powered blogs, we thought it would be convenient to mention (yet another) option for adding user-generated comments to stories:

The Drupal "commentify" module provides a way to use Drupal as a commenting solution for third-party Web sites, whether they’re static pages, a different CMS, or another Drupal installation. It was developed to add comments to newspaper Web sites served from a proprietary CMS.

Ever wanted to create thumbnails for those pesky PDF assets? Turns out that there are several ways to do it. Bret Dawson suggests using a simple approach with Image::Magick, and provides a good starting point here. Another approach -- using Image::Magick::Thumbnail::PDF -- is also unpacked in the same thread. Have your own ideas? Send them to the-oc@bricolage.cc.

Still having a hard time getting your head around cover dates, or getting stories to publish in the future? Turns out you’re not the only one! Not only does Bricolage have built-in capabilities in this area -- but long-time Bricoleur Paul Orrock and his colleagues at Digital Craftsmen have come up with another ingenious way to handle that requirement. There’s a great investigation of the concepts over here, and the scripts that Paul references were generously provided back to the community and are available here.

Consider yourself a Bricolage "hacker", or a wannabe hacker? If so, you’ll want to get up-to-speed with how Bricolage lead developer David Wheeler uses "Development Aliases" to quickly build development environments that use different Apache and database configurations. David explains the set-up and the usefulness over here.

In the last Output Channel, we reported that the World Health Organization was re-evaluating Bricolage for their own needs, and looking at the CMS landscape for potential replacements.

Given Scott’s post this past August, asking if organizations were using the current development release of Bricolage, we’re happy to report that it appears that Bricolage made the cut, and is still meeting the needs of the World Health Organization.

Database blues got you down? Be sure to check out the new PostgreSQL Tuning Documentation over here.

Use the Schwartz! Need to sort yourself out? Feeling like you can’t get your list prioritized? No time like the present to try out a Schwartzian transform. If you’ve not heard of the Schwartzian transform, check out the great explanation provided by Scott Lanning on the users list.