rolfm at denison
Aug 19, 2009, 1:01 PM
Post #3 of 4
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Re: Denison University in Ohio added it's name to the list of organizations running Bricolage
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I found this e-mail in my drafts folder. It's a summary of our
migration back in 2007. Some of the technical issues are out of date,
but I thought some of you might find this interesting, even if it is
almost 2 years late to the day.
-Matt
On Aug 27, 2007, at 12:57 PM, Phillip Smith wrote:
> Just wanted to say a quick "congrats," and "lovely!" Any interesting
> tidbits in there to share? E.g., how things were approached, or
> where Bricolage has been put to an interesting use?
Thanks! It certainly has been interesting. We started in June of
last year, just after I arrived in my position. Denison has a great
background in XML structured documents. The ability of Bricolage to
create HTML with that sort of structured approach was something that
appealed to me, and something that I was able to use to sell the
Bricolage project to my coworkers. Valid code is something of a
tradition here, and while we didn't test extensively - we were just
working hard to migrate it all - I think that's still a goal for the
future.
We ran out a test instance for our Computing Site last year at this
time. The demonstration was good enough that our IT Director gave us
the green light to make a pitch to senior staff to implement
Bricolage across campus. There had been a desire for a redesigned web
site for some time among many on campus - look-wise and information
architecture-wise - and we had secretaries editing raw HTML to update
the site, and that position was just untenable. So the enviroment was
right to pitch Bricolage as an incremental step that wouldn't shake
things up too much, but would put our content development on much
better footing. We got the green light for the full rollout from our
boss and senior staff sometime last fall, and also had a number of
meetings with our page maintainers explaining the new system. Last
fall most technical work on Bricolage stopped because I had to
implement a new uPortal instance. But we had meetings through the
winter, working on what the new look of the Denison site would be.
Work with Bricolage started up again in March - two months later than
I wanted. We sorted out permissions and output channels at that time,
and made some attempts at bug patching and feature improving, not all
of which were successful. For example, we made a run at implementing
line numbers in the the template and raw code elements, but ran out of
time and never completed the patch. It's about 2/3 finished.
In the spring we also laid out a plan of attack for the migration of
our data, which was far from uniform. Starting in mid-May until the
end of July we were migrating content. After that it was QA and
various other tasks. Much to the suprise/delight/consternation of our
maintainers, we flipped the switch a whole 3 days before fall semester
started. Since then we've been tying up loose ends. So far nothing's
crashed and burned completely. At this point I'm optimistic that it
will be successful.
Interesting things? We've implemented the Rich Text Template using
the Xinha editor and that has been successful so far. We came up with
a way to delete links from related stories when a story is expired or
deleted (with Scott's help and aid). And we were able to submit a few
bug reports and a couple patches along the way.
It goes without saying that we never would have done it without the
great support from this list. It has been a fantastic resource. A
big "Thank You" goes out to everyone in the community. None of us had
perl experience to speak of when we started this - I had zero. In
addition to picking up what we could, we were able to leverage the
abilities of a number of talented students who were working for us
both summers and during the school year. A couple of them even posted
to this list.
Right now Bricolage is just used for our web site, departments and
offices. In the future we plan to adapt it for our single source
publishing projects, such as our course catalog. When we started, it
held the promise to replace four or five applications for us -
hopefully it will meet that potential.
We had a number of frustrations - a lot with the interface, and with
the DB corruption that happens. We'd really like to see a fuller set
of admining tools that can replicate SOAP commands through the
interface. I'd love to see the AJAX code, and there are a lot of
ways the interface can be improved - for example, everyone spends a
ton of time scrolling down, and your mouse often has to swing from one
side of the screen to the other to click the buttons you need. We
were a bit disappointed that workflows aren't really tied to a subsite
- if you have permissions, you can check a story out from one subsite
into another subsite's workflow - things like that are a bit wonky.
But overall the experience has been positive.
One final thing - what convinced me was the eWeek review from back in
the day and David's 5 articles for Perl.com. Those articles convinced
me that the project had strong leadership, a good direction, and an
underlying philosophy that could be understood and would guide its
development. We took a calculated risk when we picked this project
that David would still be around. We lost that bet, and it was a blow
to our effort. But we're optimistic that things will continue to go
well.
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