The Output Channel for Spring 2011

2011.03.28

Welcome back to the Output Channel: a relatively regular review of what’s shakin’ in the Bricolage ecosystem. If you have submissions or corrections that you’d like to see included in the next issue, please e-mail them to the-oc@bricolagecms.org.

Upfront

Surprise "pop" quiz time: Tell us how you are using Bricolage. Please answer this quick, seven-question survey about your Bricolage installation(s).

Bricolage 2 Demo Site is live: The shiny new Bricolage 2 online demo has been launched. You'll find a big red button on the front page of bricolagecms.org that will launch a demonstration installation of Bricolage 2, or you can just point your browser directly to demo.bricolagecms.org. (Many thanks to our friends at Gossamer Threads for making that possible, and for hosting the demo site.)

Bricolage at Toronto Perl Mongers: The Toronto Bricoleurs will be out in full force this Thursday night, March 31, at the Toronto Perl Mongers' monthly meeting. At the meeting, Phillip Smith will deliver a hands-on, soup-to-nuts, Bricolage demonstration for the sure-to-be awestruck audience. If you're in Toronto, or know folks in Toronto that are curious about Bricolage, please be sure to invite them out. Details are listed on the Toronto Perl Mongers site.

Bricolage news and projects of note

Bricolage 2.0.1 Released: In case you missed it back in February, Bricolage 2.0.1 was released. Our thanks to Bret Dawson for rolling this release up and getting it out the door (thus proving that making a release can't be that hard), and to the community for submitting patches — it takes a village to raise a child.

Google Summer of Code: The Perl Foundation is participating as a mentor organization in GSoC in 2011. This is great news, as it helps to support a whole number of Perl projects. Once again, Bricolage is listed as a project under The Perl Foundation. Student applications may be submitted starting today, March 28th, and are due by April 8th. Students who want to get involved should start by joining the TPF Summer of Code Students mailing list and the Bricolage users mailing list. You can see a list of current Bricolage project ideas here.

Bricolage 2 VMware Image: Our friend at Adams University, Cameron Miller, reports "I just put up a Bricolage 2 Virtual Machine in VMware format. It's a 64 bit VM that has been tested under VMware Player 3.1.3 on Ubuntu Lucid 64 bit." You can download the virtual machine image via FTP here and the associated README file is here.

New sites and Bricolage sightings

There are three new Bricolage sites to report this month:

  • DeltaMi: Bricoleur, Krzysztof Rudnik, recently reporting the launch of a website for Delta - a popular monthly magazine (existing since 1974 and affiliated with Warsaw University) devoted to mathematics, physics, and astronomy and computer science primarily aimed at high-school students. Delta articles are extremely complex (math, footnotes, illustrations, marginal notes, etc.) and these articles are all managed quite easily with Bricolage, LaTeX and TeX4ht. The DeltaMi Bricolage installation boasts 13 story types, 110 element types, 12 output channels, and much more. All articles for Delta paper publication are written in TeX.

  • NABET 700 CEP: Not to be beat, the hard-working folks at Pectopah have launched two new sites recently. The first is for NABET 700 CEP, a Toronto union for film and TV technicians. In addition to news and static pages, Bricolage is used to manage the library of hundreds of current and past productions union members have worked on. In another show of Bricolage's flexibility, the NABET installation integrates with a PHP-powered HTML-to-PDF converter and communicates with an external members resume database.

  • Ontario Association of Police Service Boards (OAPSB): The second Pectopah production is a new site for the Ontario Association of Police Service Boards (OAPSB). Greg Heo reports "It's a pretty standard site: news, events, a password-protected 'members only' section."

Templates and tutorials

Screen cast tutorials for Bricolage 2: Those folks at Adams University are clearly hard at work; Cameron Miller reports "Our main content person Jen Stoughton has published set of Bricolage 2 screen cast tutorials as we have finally upgraded to 2." You can find the new Bricolage 2 tutorials online here.

There are also two new installation tutorials available online: one for installing Bricolage 2 on OS X "Snow Leopard," and another for installing Bricolage 2 on Ubuntu Lucid.

Miscellaneous stuff

Bricolage Hack Days: This edition of the Bricolage Output Channel newsletter was produced at the third Toronto "Bricolage Hack Day." We invite any interested Bricoleurs to join the next hack day, which is currently planned for May 9th, 2011. If you're not able to join in person, please join us in the #bricolage IRC channel on irc.perl.org. Better yet, start your own local Hack Day.

That’s it for this month’s issue. Remember, if you have submissions or corrections that you’d like to see included in the next issue, please e-mail them to the-oc@bricolagecms.org.

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