Bricolage-Devel 1.11.0 Released

2008.04.30

The Bricolage development team is pleased to announce the release of Bricolage 1.11.0, a developer release in preparation for the forthcoming Bricolage 2.0. With over two years of development coming to fruition, this version of the veritable content management and publishing system features a panoply of important new features and improvements. Some highlights:

MySQL Support

Thanks to Arsu Andrei's 2006 Google Summer of Code project, Bricolage 1.11 is the first version of Bricolage to support a database server other than PostgreSQL: MySQL 5. All of the features currently offered by the PostgreSQL implementation are also supported by the MySQL 5 port. Our thanks to Google and Arsu for the stellar work.

Element Occurrence

When specifying the structure of Bricolage documents, administrators have always been able to specify a minimum of one instance of any given field in an element. But that's always been pretty limited. Thanks to Christian Muise's 2006 Google Summer of Code project, this has been greatly expanded. As of Bricolage 1.11.0, you can now specify that a minimum number of fields or subelements can appear in a document. The nice thing about this is that, when you create a new document, it will be fully populated with the minimum number of all required fields and subelements. And users cannot delete them. Furthermore, each field and element specification can have a maximum number, as well. This will prevent users from adding more than the maximum number of subelements or fields to a document. For example, a Book Review story element type might have a minimum of one and a maximum of one Book Profile subelement, meaning that a book review can have only one book profile. It might also have an occurrence specification for a Pull Quote field, requiring, say a minimum of 1 pull quote and a maximum of three in a story. The result is much finer control over the structure of documents in Bricolage.

Dynamic Interface Improvements

As part of his 2006 Google Summer of Code project, Marshall Roch added a tremendous number of improvements to the Bricolage user interface, with the goal of making it easier and more intuitive to use, not to mention more responsive. Said improvements include:

  • On-the-fly editing of attributes of objects without reloads. These include contacts for users and contributors, keywords for categories and documents, categories for documents, rules in alert types, and a number of other places.

  • Fields and subelements in the story and media profiles are displayed recursively, so a story's entire contents can be edited from one screen, as opposed to one screen per subelement as it was previously.

  • The right side of desk items has been redesigned. Icons are used because they save space. and they finally allow assets to be moved between desks from the Workspace, and assets to be checked in to any desk from the Desk view. The and Publish and and Shelve options have also been added. Additionally, you have the option to immediately publish assets on publish desks, or schedule them for later.

  • Desks now use JavaScript to execute actions immediately. Where you previously had to choose an action from a select list and scroll all the way to the bottom to execute it, you can now check in, move, check out, or delete an asset in one click, without a full page refresh.

  • The event log and trail have been merged and improved. The trail was a subset of the event log that only showed desk moves. You can now filter the log by any event type, and there's a dedicated link to choose the right event types to recreate the trail.

There are a number of other improvements to the UI, including a faster, more responsive side navigation.

Apache 2 Support

As of 1.11.0, Bricolage supports both Apache 1 and Apache 2. It's likely that in the next release, Apache 2 will be the preferred Apache, as Bricolage actually works better with Apache 2. But if you've been holding off on using Bricolage because you needed to use it with your vendor's Apache 2 packages, now's the time to make the jump.

How Are We Doing?

There are a bunch more changes in Bricolage 1.11; For a complete list, see the changes list. For the complete history of ongoing changes in Bricolage, see Bric::Changes.

Download Bricolage 1.11.0 now from the Bricolage Web site Downloads page, from the SourceForge download page, and from the Kineticode download page.

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, HTML::Template, PHP5, and Template Toolkit support for flexibility, and many other features. It operates in an Apache/mod_perl environment and uses the PostgreSQL or MySQL RDBMS for its repository. A comprehensive, actively-developed open source CMS, Bricolage has been hailed by eWEEK as quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class open-source application available.

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