Bricolage Content Management System

Bricolage 1.10.7: In early March, the Bricolage development team released Bricolage 1.10.7, the latest in the stable release series of Bricolage. The new Bricolage is vastly more stable in triggered publishing, media management, story versioning, and template management. Read the official announcement for details.

Say "hello, world" to Bricolite: Bricolite is a lightweight UI for Bricolage that was developed to make it easier for very non-technical people to contribute content to your site. The requirement was driven to meet the needs of sites that have a Bricolage-powered blog, but Bricolite can also be used to help streamline the posting of any type of "user-generated content," such as listings, or events, etc. Bricolite also exposes an XML-RPC interface to Bricolage that makes it possible to post simple content from tools like Ecto and Scribefire.

You can watch a 5-minute screencast of Bricolite in action here and the Bricolite source code should be available soon. (if you're anxious to get your hands on it, please get in touch with Greg Heo.) Credit goes to Greg Heo for doing the heavy lifting, Adam Ma'anit for the early thinking.

Bricolage UI Changes: Matt Rolf and the team at Denison University have embarked on a large overhaul of the Bricolage user interface. There's lots of discussion on the mailing lists about what direction it should take, and your input is welcome. The focus of the user interface improvement work will be a refreshed color scheme, better layout for "My Workspace," and various other improvements to make the day-to-day use of Bricolage more enjoyable.

World Health Organization sponsors several Bricolage enhancements: In late January, Gossamer Threads was engaged to implement and contribute a series of enhancements to Bricolage for the World Health Organization. The improvements include: editable previews, copy and paste, import from Word, and left-to-right switching for languages like Arabic. You can read the announcement here. These improvements are targeted to find their way into Bricolage 2.2 later this year.

The Canadian Abilities Foundation (CAF) and Abilities Magazine: The team at Pectopah have launched yet another eye-pleasing Bricolage-powered site at www.abilities.ca. The Canadian Abilities Foundation's online presence - www.abilities.ca - links people with disabilities to a world of resources, and Abilities Magazine is Canada's Lifestyle Magazine for People with Disabilities.

Trafford Children and Young People's Service Earlier this year, Chris Birch and the team at Axon Birch launched a re-designed site for Trafford Children and Young People's Service on Bricolage. Using Bricolage, they designed an informative and fun Web site which would appeal to young people. You can read more about the project here.

And, flying under the radar, long-time Bricoleur John Durkin launched the multi-author blog known as World of Wonder. From their site World of Wonder has a large online presence with Web content created for Yahoo as well as the WOW REPORT, a pop-culture blog read around the world and WOW TV, a broadband on-line destination designed to attract young film-makers.

Things you wish you'd done in your templates: New to Bricolage, or starting a new Bricolage project? Be sure to read this not-to-be-missed mailing list thread on how to approach your template development, where long-time Bricoleurs weigh-in on how they would have done things differently. All aspects are covered: where to start, default template content, and how to approach utility templates and Element Types.

John Durkin shares this bit of advice: You can also publish a story that controls an include file with SOAP from the server's crontab, then you can create a frequently updated module that lives on the page that doesn't load your production Web server down with a database query every pageload. Instead, your template can query the db at publish time. This is good for things like 'most emailed stories!'

New method for working with images: Like many Bricoleurs, David Wheeler got tired of writing the same code over and over again to create thumbnails for a site. So he recently wrote a new method in Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Media::Image that is similar to the old thumbnail.mc utility template. This new method will allow Bricolage developers to modify the image in any way you want right in your templates. Expect to see this new method in the next major releases of Bricolage.

Generating Excel documents: Finally, David Beaudet provides some pointers on how to generate a Microsoft Excel file from a story template. This could be very useful if your site presents tabular data, or similarly structured information, that you'd like to make available for download.

PHP::Interpreter Installation Difficulties: Want to use Bricolage's PHP templating capabilities? The first step is getting this installed correctly, and -- sometimes -- that can prove challenging. Here are some tips from the Bricolage user community to get you off to a good start.

Ingesting new stories from alternative CMSes: Ever wanted to import stories from other sites, or other CMSes, directly into Bricolage? For example, maybe you want to import an RSS feed from a source that you re-publish on your site; or you want to make it easy for editors to review content from various sources and quickly publish stories that make the cut. If so, you're in luck! Bricoleurs Bret Dawson and Greg Heo have struggled with this too and have come up with some helpful ways to manage the task, which are all described here.