Bricolage 1.6.0 Escapes

2003.04.29

Perhaps sensing the warm breezes of spring and the slow thawing of IT budgets, Bricolage 1.6 has made a break for freedom in wilds of the Internet. No competing content management system is safe from the wiles of this robust Perl-powered publishing system. You have been warned.

In other words, the Bricolage team is pleased to announce the release of Bricolage 1.6.0. This is the first new stable release of Bricolage since the release of version 1.4.6 in January, and the first major release since 1.4.0 in September, 2002. The result of contributions from Bricolage community members from around the world, version 1.6.0 is the most full-featured, best performing, most stable version of Bricolage yet.

Here's a sampling of the major new features in version 1.6.0:

  • Added Field Profile, so that element Fields can be edited. This is a marked improvement over the old interface, which required that fields be deleted and recreated if users wanted to change them.

  • Added "Super Bulk Edit", which is a bulk edit interface allowing users to edit all of the fields in an element at once using POD-like tags, rather than just a single repeatable field.

  • Ported Bricolage to HTML::Mason 1.16 and later.

  • Added the STORY_URI_WITH_FILENAME bricolage.conf directive, which, when enabled, allows story URIs to include the file name. This is especially useful in output channels whereUse Slug as File name is enabled, since it allows stories to essentially have identical URIs except for the file name.

  • Lots of group-related optimizations. These should greatly improve the speed with which permissions are checked.

  • Added WebDAV mover.

  • Complete rewrite of much of the database access code in the majority of the Bricolage classes to greatly improve performance. The number of database calls in a given Bricolage screen has also be drastically reduced by several orders of magnitude, thanks to the loading of each object's ACL when it is retrieved from the database, rather than one-at-a-time for every object on a screen.

  • Added per-request object caching, boosting burn performance up to 33%.

  • Localization and Internationalization support introduced, with Portuguese and Italian libraries to complement the default English.

  • Keywords can now be associated with media documents as well as story documents.

  • Added preview link to every element profile of a story profile and to every view of a document in workflow.

  • Switched exceptions from home-grown to using Exception::Class.

  • The "Content" section of story, media, and subelement profiles now attempts to display a bit of text from the first text field in each listed subelement so that it's easier to see at a glance which subelement is which.

  • Added unit and regression testing suite with over 3200 tests.

  • Moved URI formatting preferences to output channel profiles, so that they are now output-channel specific.

  • Added ability for stories to be associated with output channels on a case-by-case basis.

  • Added support for utility templates, which don't have to be associated with elements or act as category templates. This is useful for code that's not content-specific, but which may be useful in a variety of templating contexts.

  • Stories can now be cloned -- that is, exact copies can be created.

  • Improved CSS and JavaScript support for the UI.

  • Added many new methods to the Burner API to assist with linking to other pages in a document and in determining the type of burn (preview or publish) from within a template.

See Changes for a complete list of new features and improvements in this release. To get started with Bricolage see the appendix introcucting Bricolage in the recent O'Reilly Mason book. The complete Bricolage documentation, including some introductory, HOWTO, and tutorial documents, is available on the Bricolage Website.

About Bricolage

Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management and publishing system. It offers a browser-based interface for ease-of use, a full-fledged templating system with complete HTML::Mason and HTML::Template support for flexibility, and many other features. It operates in an Apache/mod_perl environment, and uses the PostgreSQL RDBMS for its repository. A comprehensive, actively-developed open source CMS, Bricolage has been hailed as Most Impressive in 2002 by eWeek.

blog comments powered by Disqus