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Where content meets technology

Jan 18, 2007

Drupal Meets Bricolage

Bricolage and Drupal are two CMS that I follow very closely. I like them both for very different reasons. Bricolage is a back-end only CMS designed to automate a publishing process and then write a static website (or populate the repository of a dynamic website). Bricolage does not run on the servers that your visitors hit. This is great for when you already have your presentation tier or you have some very specific requirements that compel you build, share, or buy special content delivery capabilities.

Drupal, conversely, is all front end and the content production capabilities are, by design, quite lean. Drupal is designed to blur the line between content consumer and contributor. Adding, editing, and responding to content functionality is built into a single user interface. Drupal also has nice content aggregation capabilities to bring in content that has been produced on other sites and make it available for a more interactive dialog among visitors. Lots of traditional media companies are using Drupal to enable community generated content.

So what would happen if you put these two systems together? The Tyee did just that. The Tyee has been using Bricolage to produce a digital daily newspaper (great content by the way. definitely worth reading) for some time now. More recently, they enhanced their comment system by adding Drupal to their architecture. But commenting is just a start. In the future, they will be adding more community-interactive functionality based on Drupal.

This is a great example of a media company building an audience through traditional publishing processes and then layering in collaborative features to actively engage their readers.