The major questions in my mind when I’m doing “quick and dirty” reviews are pretty simple:

• What is this?
• What kind of things does this do?
• How do I make it do those things?
• Is this project “for real?” (live, active, up-to-date, etc.)

The showcase page you mention helped quite a bit, actually. It certainly showed off the capability of the project and helped answer the “What is this?” and “Is this for real?” questions. I cannot stress how important that is–projects that don’t look “real” might as well be dead.

The #1 thing I would recommend is putting a “Documentation” link on the front page that goes directly to the Bricolage wiki on Github. In the long run more of the user-oriented material (assuming it exists or is written) should be linked from that page.

The Bricolage site has lots of good material but doesn’t really give a casual visitor any idea how it might work on a day-to-day basis. My vague impression, considering what I’ve seen of the documentation, is that most of the organizations using Bricolage probably created sites and processes specific to their needs. If someone just installs Bricolage is it useful for any specific purpose, or does someone need to create “purpose” using the tool?

Thanks for the pointer to OpenMelody. When I get a chance, I’ll drop by. The fact they’re keeping support for other databases is encouraging.

It will be interesting to see how the two “open” Movable Type projects interact. (Or not, as the case may be.) Their site certainly seems…circumspect in discussing the relationship, which I think is a positive thing.

While I don’t really see either of them as a replacement for WordPress at this time, both look like they could be interesting, informative, or inspiring.

• I’m leery of the “flat file” system they use in lieu of a database.
• It would seem the file system needs to be writable by the web server. (Generally a bad thing.)
• If I’m reading their site correctly, the posting process is to simply edit objects in the file system. This would certainly work for me, but I really couldn’t deploy this at a customer site. Any process that starts with the phrase “get to a command line on the server” is right out.

You are probably correct in assuming I “missed” other Perl-based blogging packages. One of the oblique points I was making about “Perl blogging software” would be that, if it exists, it’s invisible. For example, the Wikipedia page about content management systems lists almost 60 PHP packages versus 8 Perl packages. The first-glance impression is “Gee, there’s a lot of PHP out there, and not much Perl.”

I know it’s weak conclusion, but it takes a couple of seconds for the necessary brain-bits to fire up, parse what I’m seeing, and realize this isn’t market share, it’s just an arbitrary list of packages. A self-selected list of packages, to boot. Selected by those brave enough or foolish enough to stick their hands into a great, steaming pile of Wikipedia.

If you know of other packages you think I should have been able to find quickly and easily you might consider dropping those folks a line and see if they can get their project listed in more public places like Wikipedia. Sourceforge has a lot of listings, but it’s not easy to find things sometimes. A quick “Google?perl+blog+software” turned up a raft of things, but a “quick and dirty” review doesn’t call for much digging. A glance at many of the sites wasn’t really encouraging–lots of über geeky, ulta-minimal sites; things out of date; broken links; etc.

Where else should I be looking? (Which begs the question, “Where else should these projects be posting?”)

Good post & a solid summary. Many thanks for the comments about the Bricolage documentation — as a volunteer on the project, I appreciate getting this kind of outside perspective on how we’re doing vis-a-vis speaking to “users” and making it (relatively) easy to get up-and-running.

That said, you’ve pretty much nailed Bricolage’s sweet spot: large sites with lots of pages and infinite customizeability. A straightforward blogging tool it is not (though some sites do use it to incorporate blogs into a larger site).

One project that you may want to look at that is worthy of note is Open Melody (http://openmelody.org/). It’s a fork of the open source Movable Type codebase that is more actively maintained by folks that used to work for Six Apart. AFAIK, they intend to keep PostgreSQL support.

And, for all of its quirks, Movable Type itself is pretty darn good as a blogging platform. Fewer themes and modules, but a solid codebase to build on nonetheless.

Cheers,

Phillip.

You did miss many Perl blogging platforms. Blosxom comes to mind (because it’s very similar to my first custom platform for sediton.com back in 2001) . There are several others I don’t know the names of off the top of my head.