Managing content part II: Bricolage

April 2004

In this three part series we take a look at the best options for maintaining websites. Part II introduces Bricolage, an outstanding industrial strength CMS.

Industrial strength content management systems are indispensable for advanced web publishing. Out of the many options available one solution stands out: Bricolage.

Bricolage - story edition interface

Content Management Systems enable a website to be managed by many people in collaboration, using a web browser as a tool for the updates. There are dozens of such packages; unfortunately most suffer from crucial flaws, the most frequent being a set design that is almost impossible to change. Others include poor user interfaces, slow output of pages and no flexibility of workflow (if there is a workflow at all).

None of these apply to Bricolage, although it does have one flaw: it is rather painful to install. This shouldn't be a concern if you work with competent technicians but it does add to the setting-up cost.

This is more than made up for by the price of Bricolage itself: it is free. Yet this open source package competes with the high end commercial CMS's which cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bricolage's main features are:

• Clean, user-friendly interface.
• Complete flexibility of design and content.Bricolage is built to let you decide what goes where and how it is formatted.
• Output in any format. A part from standard web pages, this can be Email, XML, WAP etc.
• Fast serving of pages
• Workflow based publishing. Bricolage comes with a standard workflow that can be changed at will to fit the structure of your organisation.
• Email alerts, for example to warn the publisher when an article is waiting for his approval
• Scheduled publishing
• Version control and locking
• Detailed permissions - each user has the ability to read or change only what is necessary.
• SOAP interface, meaning that almost any task can be programmed to be executed automatically.
• Available in several languages, and very easy to add new one's if necessary
• User-friendly URLs

Bricolage was originally built for salon.com, one of the web's largest and most visited websites. Other important websites to have adopted it include maccentral, macworld, WHO and the register.

Is Bricolage for you? If your project is a complex publishing initiative with a lot of traffic, regular updates and many contributors then definitely.

If this somewhat exceeds your requirements then the cost of getting up and running might not be offset by the benefits. That being the case we would generally advise against any CMS, and recommend Macromedia Contribute (see part I of this series) for inexpensive and flexible content management.