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Perl Programming The Media IT Technology

Small but Mighty:The Bricolage Story 95

Posted by timothy from the now-there's-an-ecosystem dept.
SilentBob4 writes "Bricolage is an example of the power of an open source project to survive its proprietary origins. As you will read below, Bricolage was originally started in-house by Salon magazine, and then open sourced by About.com. I imagined how very frustrated David Wheeler, a Salon employee, would have been had he been forced to watch the code he helped develop just die on the shelf. Never underestimate the strength of the human passion to create, and to see one's creations bloom in the light of day." The full story is at Mad Penguin."
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Small but Mighty:The Bricolage Story More

Small but Mighty:The Bricolage Story

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  • Cute... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Svippy ( 876087 )
    Another one of those great small stories.

    If it wasn't because I was inhuman, I would cry of happiness. :)

  • Success is customer driven (Score:5, Insightful)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:20PM (#12237222) Homepage Journal
    This is the biggest stumbling block to most OSS software. Developers dont get it that if they want to make a living off it they have to be customer-focused. Wheeler clearly understands this.

    • Re:Success is customer driven (Score:5, Funny)

      by ShaniaTwain ( 197446 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:29PM (#12237333) Homepage
      I dunno, my approach so far has been to shout at customers, poke them with sticks and let them know that they aren't smart enough to know what they want.
      It hasn't paid off yet, but any day now I'm sure it will. people respect honesty.

      even dumb people.

      • Re:Success is customer driven (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It worked for me!

        WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY, FATSO?

        Signed,
        B. Gates

      • Re:Success is customer driven (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cptgrudge ( 177113 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:50PM (#12237582) Journal
        I dunno, my approach so far has been to shout at customers, poke them with sticks and let them know that they aren't smart enough to know what they want.
        It hasn't paid off yet, but any day now I'm sure it will. people respect honesty.

        No, see, your problem is basically that you just have to do it with a smile and a laugh. Gain the customer's trust. Make them think that you are on their side. The thing is, people know that they aren't smart enough to know what they want. They just want someone to be able to tell them in a way that isn't condescending and makes them feel OK about it, that's all.

        But seriously, the sad part is that this is very true for quite a few people.

      • Re:Success is customer driven (Score:4, Funny)

        by BerntB ( 584621 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:08PM (#12237830)
        even dumb people.
        Please use the polite and relevant term -- users.

        :-)

        Seriously, though. When I had a terrible time doing support for a program I wrote (fitting punishment), I thought that the world was made of users and supporters. Two conclusions... 1. Everyone are users of other's support and almost everyone are doing support, too. 2. All users are idiots, because we don't have time to think about things and ask instead.

        (What Saint Dogbert preaches, I guess.)

      • You mean, you're a GNOME developer?

    • Re:Success is customer driven (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rovingeyes ( 575063 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:33PM (#12237388)
      Developers dont get it that if they want to make a living off it they have to be customer-focused

      Very true. But there are products that are completely customer driven. In fact, we have developed a Content Management System which is completely drvien by customer demands. This product is in development for over 5 years now. It started out as a simple web based content editor for our clients' hosting. Slowly, one after the other requests started pouring in. The good thing was that the requests were incremental in nature. Now we are at a stage where we are analyzing whether this product has grown beyond its needs (it has become a hybrid between cpanel and xoops) and does it warrant to be made a product and sold?

      There lies the big problem. Our company still wants to have control over it coz 80% of our company's revenue is directly or iderectly generated by this product. So some company execs are questioning whether Open source is the right way. Couple others are saying that open source might be the only way out as there would less risk involved as bulk of the revenue off of a product is generated by support unless you have a product like SAP.

      Definitely interesting times ahead...
      • It's all about support. Do you want one-time revenue or recurring revenue? Which one requires less sales critters?

      • These execs seem to sound like other people I once talked with about Open Source.

        If you've not done so already, kindly enlighten them that they can hybridize the approach: Dual Licensing..

        $$$$ for the Deluxe/fully-featured/full-access version (you HAVE been modularizing the incremental development feature sets, for the inevitable dual-license scenario, have you?...)

        $$$$$ for the 24/7 support access, version of the above $$$$

        $$-$0.00 for the less-than-fully-featured, no-24/7-support version which DOES i

  • More Mad Penguin (Score:4, Funny)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:24PM (#12237272) Homepage Journal
    I'm glad to see that Mad Penguin finally has Slashdot-effect-resistant servers. But they still need to do better HTML -- and a lot less Javascript!

  • Whats Bricolage? (Score:5, Funny)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:26PM (#12237302) Journal
    Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management and publishing system. Built on Apache, the world's most robust and dependable Web server, and backed by the reliability of the ACID-compliant PostgreSQL RDBMS, Bricolage scales to meet the content management needs of the most demanding of organizations. Bricolage's intuitive browser-based interface works with any modern web browser, and lets you perform in minutes the customization and configuration tasks that other systems require hours to carry out. Furthermore, Bricolage features a fully customizable workflow environment, so that it can work the way that you work. Together with templating support built on the highly flexible and popular Perl programming language and extensive user groups and permissions, Bricolage provides an affordable yet powerful solution for your content management needs. A comprehensive, actively-developed open source CMS, Bricolage has been hailed as quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class open-source application available by eWEEK.

    An open source assortment of random buzzwords. This sounds like just the product our marketing dept has been looking for!

    Coolness, Park!
    • What's scary is that I understand what it said.
    • But can it leverage corporate synergy to enhance capability-oriented revenue enhancement solutions in today's fast-paced marketplace? I see that it is highly flexible, affordable yet powerful, and comprehensively provides solutions to my content management needs; but it must leverage use-case scenarios in an adaptable yet industry-leading model that features performance suitable for enterprise-class systems to be acceptible in today's fast-paced marketplace.

    • Re:Whats Bricolage? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Random buzzwords are a sure sign that the product sucks. And I can't even begin to describe how much Bricolage sucks! My company has been using it for too long now, and one look at the database structure and bloated templating strategy would send any developer worth his salt to the emergency room. It's truly one of the worst CMS products I've ever seen. Avoid it like the plague.

      • Re:Whats Bricolage? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by JamesonTV ( 876162 )
        Damn straight! Just look at the screenshots. That's not a UI, that's a straight dump of the database. The job of the interface designer is to create a CMS which helps the user manage and publish content without having to be fluent in all the underpinnings of the system. Bricolage basically drafts every user into the role of novice database administrator.

        Praise from eWeek does more to call eWeek's judgment into question than it does to make Bricolage look good.
    • Ummm ... first sentence: Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management and publishing system.

    • Re:Whats Bricolage? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Syre ( 234917 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:17PM (#12239152)
      What Bricolage basically does is to let organizations create a document publishing workflow with various privilege domains.

      What this means is that you can sub-divide the work, and let graphic artists create the page templates, then let writers put information into the pages and submit them for publishing, then let editors review the pages and put them live.

      Each user can be set up so they have control over given functions for given sites or sub-sites, and there can be multiple levels of workflow/approval for each function.

      This is perfect for a magazine, where you want authors to be able to submit stories and editors to be able to review them without requiring either to know HTML or anyone else to later have to put the content into a template. That process is all automatic.

      It also is useful for any organization which needs to do similar activities ie: let a department manage their own sub-site, which will be formatted exactly to corporate standards without having to know HTML and with or without oversight and approval.

  • Bricolage is mentioned... (Score:3, Informative)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) * <tom AT thomasleecopeland DOT com> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:28PM (#12237324) Homepage
    ...in Josh Berkus' article The Five Types of Open Source Projects [64.233.161.104] (site is down at the moment, so the link goes to the Google cache).

    Josh characterized Bricolage as a "solo" project, but maybe it's moving onwards...

  • Bad naming... (Score:3, Funny)

    by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:31PM (#12237363)
    I imagined how very frustrated David Wheeler, a Salon employee, would have been had he been forced to watch the code he helped develop just die on the shelf

    It almost died on the shelf because everyone thought he was talking about a Barcalounger.

  • For those who wonder... (Score:4, Informative)

    by El Cabri ( 13930 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:36PM (#12237433) Journal
    <em>Bricolage</em> is the French word for DIY, or, sometimes, hacking.

    • Re:For those who wonder... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mroch ( 715318 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @03:50PM (#12237575)
      From the Bricolage "About" page in the application itself:

      The name Bricolage was not drawn directly from the common usage of the term in French, but rather from the first chapter of The Savage Mind, by the famed French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In that famous discussion of scientific thought vs. mythical thought--of science vs. the science of the concrete--Lévi-Strauss declares, Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual bricolage.

      Bricolage is the product of a bricoleur, a kind of handyman who assembles the fruits of his labors from the tools he has at hand. Similarly, mythical thought uses the extant concepts available to the cultural bricoleur to shape the world of cultural understanding. In other words, one's understanding and interpretation of the world and its events derives from assembling new interpretations based on existing cultural (Lévi-Strauss would say structural) symbols. Signs allow and even require the interposing and incorporation of a certain amount of human culture into reality, Lévi-Strauss writes. Thus signs (or symbols, as modern anthropologists are more likely to call them) are the building blocks of cultural comprehension.

      Similarly, content is assembled in the Bricolage content management system by drawing on extant elements to create a new end product. Element administrators function as Lévi-Straussian scientists, in that they create new symbols (elements) that document editorsas new media bricoleursdraw upon to assemble and manage new structures of meaning (content).

      For those who may find this explanation too much a stretch, we fall back on the meaning of the term bricolage as it is commonly used in English, rather than French. For our French users, who might see the name and immediately think big hack, note that typical English definition, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, is simply, something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available. This definition nicely describes how Bricolage documents are built from the elements defined for them.

    • Bricolage is the French word for DIY, or, sometimes, hacking.

      The way I interpret your statement is that you are suggesting that Bricolage is a piece of hack and thus not worthy. If that is true then I have to disagree. In my short career of 3 years as developer I have come across so many overzealous developers who think that if you have not developed a software from scratch then either you are not worthy of being called a developer or the product is not a serious product.

      I fail to understand what is thi

    • As a french-speaker, I'll add that "bricolage" is often used to mean "doing crafts" (like making decorations and stuff) even though the dictionary definition is closer to "doing odd-jobs".
  • I have no desire to use a bit of software I can't see beforehand. I mean, I at least wanna see how it looks. :/

  • CMS? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) * on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:06PM (#12237798) Homepage Journal
    OK, I RTFP (read the first page), and figured out that Bricolage is a CMS.

    Now, as a non-web developer, I have to ask: what does a CMS like Bricolage do? Can someone give some examples, other than a finished site? I want to know more about the backend stuff of a CMS. Call it idle curiosity.

    • a CMS manages content. It's basically a framework that takes care of the boring repetive details of writing a content-driven website; these include getting data from other pages, getting/saving properties/attributes of web 'objects', and slapping templates on everything. In general, they are used so that non-techies can upload content, so the techies can spend more time on useful hacking.

      From what I can tell, Bricolage is fairly similar to Zope.

      • Re:CMS? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by publius_ovidius ( 870895 )

        One key difference between Bricolage and Zope is that we (Bricolage) are entirely back-end. Once we serve the content, there's no overhead of some framework slowing things down. The people can choose to use any technology they want to drive the front end (many folks use PHP). Heck, if they are having performance problem on the front end, they can switch to a different technology and still use Bricolage to manage things on the back end. Many content management systems do not allow this. This is a huge b

        • Re:CMS? (Score:2)

          by rho ( 6063 )
          Benefit to some, feature hole to others. Now you have two systems to admin, not one. Don't misunderstand, I'm not kicking your project for fun, I'm just expressing what I would perceive as a hassle. Once you've installed Bricolage, you still have to decide what and how you will serve your content, which is a non-trivial problem in itself. Of course, since Bricolage seems to be focussed towards enterprises, those kinds of companies won't blink an eye at high-dollar dual admined systems. But what do I know,

          • But what do I know, i'm just some Slashdot schlub.

            No, you have a valid point. There have been clients who have not been terribly happy about this. Many of them are expecting all sorts of front-end bells and whistles. As a result, we also provide consultation for those who want those bells and whistles but don't want to shell out the dough of some expensive front-end package.

            For example, we recently did Spin.com [spin.com]. These folks came in, knew what they wanted and knew that there was no need to drop a q

            • I reviewed Bricolage for a webzine that I used to run, that was a little more than 2 years ago. We decided not to go with Bricolage.

              Anyway, I'm not really out to bash Bricolage as such, but do you call this [spin.com] integrating [spin.com]?

              You have basically linked "Forums" to a phpBB? The style, the menu, everything looks different.
              Oh, yeah, it looks like you also posted the data from a feature into, not one, but several forums!?
              Why have the same content in two [spin.com] different [spin.com] threads?

              Again, not to bash Bricolage but you may want

              • That's what the client asked for. They specifically requested that we find a way to integrate Bricolage (a backend product) with phpBB, a front-end product. The bulletin board has a significantly different look and feel because they set that up and manage it, we don't. Our software does some nifty tricks like automatically spawning a new forum thread for every story, but other than that, we have no control over what they do with this software.

                In this regard, I think this is a great example. Our low-co

    • Here are some sites created with Bricolage [bricolage.cc].

    • Re:CMS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by publius_ovidius ( 870895 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @04:38PM (#12238152) Homepage Journal

      Basically, it allows you to manage information on a large scale and present it in a uniform, consistent manner. It's usually as a Web page, but it can be used to manage to RSS feeds, email, newsgroups, etc (and simultaneously, too. One document can be transformed and sent to all of those.) For example, the bulk of our customers use it to ensure their Web sites have a consistent look and feel and data goes through a proper "workflow" process. It's more suitable for large companies that absolutely must manage their data.

      For example, a journalist might enter a story in Bricolage and check it in. However, depending on the needs of the company, it's probably not published at that point. Some companies require copy editors to proof the stories and others require a legal department to approve the stories. At that point, a story might get moved to a "publish desk" where a new crop of stories get published, it might get kicked back for revision or it might be published on the spot. By guaranteeing that an appropriate process is followed, content can be managed in a way that suits the needs of an organization.

      I should add that I can hardly begin to cover it's features. We have competitors who charge (and get!) six figures for the product we give away for free.

      Side note: my father, whose been a programmer for years, doesn't get this. He keeps asking "if it's so good, why do you give it away?" I don't think he'll ever "get" open source :)

    • Re:CMS? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Darby ( 84953 )
      Basically, if you look at most sites they are composed of a few different types of pages.
      Each page may contain several different sections.

      Take /. for example
      You have the title area, the sections along the side, the slashboxes (assuming that you have them turned on), then the stories.

      There are others as well, but that's enough to get the idea.

      So, you know how the site looks, what types of data go where, and even what that given type of data should look like on the page.

      So in a CMS like Interwoven Teamsit
  • The Register was supposed to have moved to Bricolage. They promised a HOW-TO [Yesteryear's Blog] on it. This how-to never eventuated, like the Vapourware that they often rail against.

    If someone knows where this guide is, please inform me. All I can find is this [theregister.co.uk]

  • Blockquoth the FA:
    So people will always say, Bricolage is difficult to install, which I will grant is true. But there is a great deal of power to be gained from it. You can manage pretty much any website with Bricolage.
    It almost sounds like he's arguing that the more features, the harder the install.

    People are saying it's hard to install, maybe you should listen to them? It's so lame that so many OSS projects have this huge, unnecessary barrier to entry.
  • I have to admit that I have not tried Bricolage. But I will say that I keep coming back to it, looking again and thinking about whether I could make use of it. So far, I've only been using HTML::Mason (which Bricolage can use).

    What I would say is - thanks David! I might not use it just now, but I can see what a great framework it is - and have the choice of using it in the future.

  • Ok, so all-caps PERL is a pretty common mistake [perl.org] but what's up with cPAN?

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