Content Management with Bricolage
by David Wheeler
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Pages: 1, 2, 3
Document Aliasing
Once you have several departments in your organization managing their own sites, they might decide that they need to publish each other's content. Fortunately, if these sites are using the same document models, they can. Users with READ access to another site can create aliases to documents on that site. They can edit the title, URL, and keywords of the alias for the benefit of their own site, but the content remains in read-only form, so that editorial control remains in the hands of the originating site. Document aliasing thus provides a simple approach for sites to publish each other's content without violating one another's editorial integrity.
SOAP Interface
Bricolage features a robust and full-featured SOAP interface. The included bric_soap command-line client makes it easy to import and export documents, templates, and administrative objects, as well as bulk publish or update content. The ability to import content is especially important for organizations that wish to migrate their existing documents into Bricolage for management and publishing going forward. Watch for an article later in this series that highlights the flexibility and power of the Bricolage SOAP server.
Scalability
Bricolage is designed to scale to the needs of the largest organizations. Its scalability manifests in three directions. Horizontal scalability is ensured by the ability to distribute the load between separate database, application, preview, and distribution servers. And remember, because Bricolage operates independent of the delivery of content to the final audience, your site's front-end servers can scale independently of Bricolage.
The browser-based interface provides Geographical scalability by allowing users to securely use Bricolage from anywhere in the world. Whether content editors are down the hall, across the country, or on the other side of the globe, if they have a browser and access to the Bricolage server's network, then they can be contributing content to your sites.
And finally, the Bricolage feature-set ensures organizational scalability, allowing for the centralized management of multiple sites, multiple types of documents, content categorization, and flexible templating across an organization and its sites. These features can be exercised as necessary as the needs of your organization evolve. In other words, Bricolage rapidly adapts to the changing requirements of your content-management environment.
Security
Bricolage provides comprehensive security via encryption, user permissions, and its independence from your delivery servers. All communications with Bricolage can be encrypted over SSH/TLS to ensure secure use of the server from anywhere in the world. The same applies to the SOAP server, of course. At the access level, Bricolage provides a comprehensive permissions system to ensure that users get access only to the content and administrative objects relevant to getting their work done. And because Bricolage does not serve content to your final audience — it generally runs as a back-office application and often behind a secure firewall — your content library remains safe in Bricolage even if the security of your front-end servers becomes compromised.
Bricolage offers a comprehensive permissions system to ensure users get access to only the objects they need to get their jobs done.
ROI
Bricolage's open-source licensing helps to ensure that it is fully buzzword compliant, in that you can achieve a much higher return on investment (ROI) than with competitive commercial systems. Furthermore, Bricolage runs exclusively open-source software, including Apache/mod_perl and the PostgreSQL RDBMS, so there are no hidden licensing costs, either. And finally, even organizations that decide to use <plug>professional consulting services</plug> for their Bricolage implementations find that the expense tends to be around half what it costs for the rollout of a commercial content-management solution.
Who Uses Bricolage?
Despite its genesis in the online news niche, Bricolage has managed it to go into production in a variety of settings. This success is a function of its broad feature-set, as well as the regard it has gained from the press. So who uses it?
- Print Publishing
- Web Publishing
- Academia
- Research
- Broadcasting
- Financial Services
- Non-Profit
- Corporate
And there are many other organizations quietly using Bricolage without publicly making that fact known.
Right for You?
If Bricolage sounds like a good fit for your organization's content-management needs, or if you're interested in how Bricolage really works, stay tuned to Perl.com for my next article, "Bricolage Installation and Configuration," and we'll have you up and running in no time!
Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank Darren Duncan, James Duncan Davidson, and Rael Dornfest for providing valuable feedback on drafts of this article.
