* YACMS: Bricolage
Today I have a YACMS (Yet Another Content Management System) for you. Why have we covered so many CMS’ over the last few months? Simple, because just like clothes not only does one size not fit all but sometimes you want one with a belt other times a sash. The sheer range of workflow requirements makes CMS’ one of the most complex platform decisions you might have to make.
While there are many fine commercial CMS solutions the fact is that the free, open source systems can be cheaper to implement and modify. The problem a free OSS poses is that while you might be able to justify the cost of purchasing commercial software, once you factor in what essentially amounts to a development effort and the maintenance commitment, a free OSS may well be a lot harder to argue for.
From what I’m hearing from readers and colleagues is that, as with a lot of other enterprise software, the costs of CMS’ are very much heavier on the customization side. When you’re dealing with the developer of commercial software, you’re constrained by the developer’s way of doing business, which often means that bug fixes and enhancements are slow and costly.
Anyway, today I have another interesting free open source CMS for your delectation: Bricolage.
F.Y.I, according to the Free Dictionary: “bri·co·lage, n. Something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available: “Even the decor is a bricolage, a mix of this and that” Los Angeles Times. [French, from bricole, trifle, from Old French, catapult, from Old Italian briccola, of Germanic origin.]”
Bricolage is a multi-user, Web-based CMS written in Perl that runs on Red Hat, Debian, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Mandrake. It requires Perl 5.6.0 or greater (5.8.0 or later strongly recommended) with a whole litany of Perl modules (see the download’s install document); Apache 1.3.12 or greater with mod_perl, mod_log_config, mod_mime, and mod_alias, and if you’re going to be using SSL you’ll also need mod_ssl or apache-ssl; and PostgreSQL 7.3 or greater.
Content and presentation are separated under Bricolage and content templating is the model for development. Regarding scalability the authors note that: “As a back-office workflow and publishing system independent of your front-end Web and Application servers, Bricolage frees you to use whatever technologies you need to serve content to your audience. This has the double benefit of eliminating the API and database overhead of serving content while allowing your front-end to scale as server loads demand.”
Bricolage alsofocuses on workflow, a critical feature for supporting multi-person development in large organizations.
The Bricolage site has a very useful page of screenshots that illustrate the major features very clearly.
Among the users of Bricolage are the American Business Institute, Entertainment Tonight Online; MacCentral; MacWorld; Oxford University Press Journals; The RAND Corporation; and the World Health Organization.
An interesting future development is that the Bricolage development team is working on a KNOPPIX-style Live CD for Bricolage known as “KNOPPIX with Bricolage.” Debian based, Bricolage will be preinstalled and immediately usable.
If you’re looking for an enterprise CMS, Bricolage should definitely be on your hit list.
