LinuxJournal Covers Bricolage
2004.03.01
LinuxJournal's has published a series of articles by Reuven Lerner that introduce the Bricolage content management system. The series, part of Lerner's monthly At the Forge
column, offer a nice introduction to Bricolage, covering such topics as architecture, installation, alerting, document editing, publishing, and templating.
Bricolage
: This article offers a nice introduction to Bricolage, including a desciption of how it compares to other open-source content management offerings. It also goes into a detailed discussion of Bricolage'd foundations, especially Apache/mod_perl
and PostgreSQL. Lerner then describes the installation process and investigates the SQL files that describe Bricolage's database structure in order to gain an understanding of the underlying architecture. A fine technical introduction to Bricolage.Bricolage Alerts
: In the second article in the series, Lerner explores the Bricolage alert system. The article starts with a description of the alert system and how it works. Lerner then leads a tour through creating new alerts to notify users of changes in status to documents as they make their way through workflow. The article concludes by showing how much alerts reveal about the underlying design of Bricolage itself.- Publishing with Bricolage: In the third article in the series, Lerner covers document authoring and distribution in Bricolage. First, he sets up a virtual host to serve his new Bricolage-powered site, and then describes how to create a new
destination
in Bricolage to distribute files to it. Next, Lerner briefly tours the document editing interface, creating new documents and publishiing them to the new site. The article concludes with a discussion of how to recall documents, make changes to them, and republish them. Bricolage Templates
: In his fourth and final column in the serices, Lerner offers an introduction to Bricolage templating. He provides some background on templating and HTML and reviews some of the syntax of Mason templating. Next, he describes how to check out a template and make changes to it, in the process describing what the templates do line-by-line. The article nicely highlights the flexibility of Bricolage's templating architecure, and concludes with a list of links to Bricolage-related resources.