Just wanted to post a quick note to let everyone know that I’ll be doing a presentation on Bricolage for the Silicon Valley Perl Mongers this Tuesday, 5 November 2002, at 7 pm. I’ll be explaining what Bricolage is all about, why it’s so cool, and doing a demo of document design and template development. Come check it out. Interested? Grab the directions and come on out!

Originally published on use Perl;

To my utter amazement and delight, eWeek, the weekly IT newspaper from ZD, has posted a review of Bricolage! I had never heard from them, or even noticed that they were interested, but am delighted with the review. It could not be more glowing. Here’s an excerpt:

However, an open-source content management system called Bricolage bucks this trend, providing an open option that isn’t just capable but is one of the best content management systems eWeek Labs has seen, even eclipsing some of the best-known commercial products.

I’m hoping that this has ramifications for getting the message out about Bricolage. I think it’s time for me to start thinking seriously about creating commercial support contracts to sell similar to what Best Practical is doing for RT.

Originally published on use Perl;

It was a good feeling to finally get Bricolage version 1.4.0 out the door. I’ve been saying for months that it would be released “in a few weeks.” Now I’m no longer a liar.

All the important details are in the use Perl announcement. But I’m really pleased with it. Bricolage has come a long way since its initial release, and it’s all for the better. At least one user has already sung its praises, and my hope is that, as more people start to use it, there will be more contributions and it will continue to acquire great new features and perform better and better.

On tap for the next release are more new features, plus the addition of comprehensive unit testing based on Test::Class. The framework for this is already in CVS, and I’m working on new features even as we speak!

Originally published on use Perl;

For anyone who might be in the neighborhood, I’ll be giving an informal presentation introducing Bricolage tonight (9 Septbember 2002) to the Mason Users Bay Area group in San Francisco. Here are the details:

When: Monday September 9, 7-9pm Where: Ensenda, Inc. 512 2nd St @ Bryant 4th Floor San Francisco 94107

Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management system written in Perl with a Mason-powered UI. It offers a browser-based interface for ease-of use, a full-fledged templating system built on Mason and HTML::Template, and many other features. It operates in an Apache/mod_perl environment, and uses the PostgreSQL RDBMS for its repository.

This talk will introduce Bricolage and many of its concepts for defining content structure and building documents. And of course, since this is a Mason group, we’ll take a look at the close relationship between the Mason templating system and the elements of content in Bricolage.

Thanks to Philip Mikal for organizing this meeting!

Originally published on use Perl;

I worked a lot over the weekend on the Bricolage section of the upcoming O’Reilly book on Mason, and now it’s done. I mean, it’s a draft. Naturally, I’ll want to go in and edit it again in a few weeks, once I have some distance from it.

Dave and Ken were kind enough to let me rewrite their section on content management, since for all intents and purposes Mason-CM appears to be dead, and Bricolage is quite actively maintained. I appreciate their allowing me to contribute – I think this will be good for Mason and for Bricolage.

At any rate, after a busy couple of weeks, I’m ready to get back to plugging bugs in Bricolage and planning its future. I’m a bit behind. If I didn’t have to spend so much time trying to hustle up work, it would help. Anyone want to hire an experienced Perl hacker and Bricolage developer?

Originally published on use Perl;

Well, I got Bricolage 1.3.0 out yesterday. It’s a development release for the upcoming 1.4.0 release. There are two major new features in 1.3.0. The big one is a SOAP server. Sam Tregar has been hard at work on this puppy. It promises to simplify the process of autopublishing stories, and to make importing and exporting assets and elements a no-brainer. I say kudos to Sam for his hard work.

The second major new feature is a real live configure process. Mark Jaroski of the World Health Organization developed this for us using Autoconf. Unfortunately, it wasn’t ready in time for the 1.3.0 release, but it’s already looking better and should be in 1.3.1 in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I need to get 1.2.1 out. This is mostly a bug-fix release of Bricolage, although there is one new feature. A new module greatly simplifies the process of Apache configuration, making it easy to, among other things, run Bricolage on a virtual host. The one drawback to this feature is that it relies heavily on mod_perl <Perl> sections, and these are somewhat broken, although there is a patch. Other than that, there are loads of bug fixes in 1.2.1, so look for it soon!

Originally published on use Perl;