Fixing the website

[Aaron Crane]

Simon Wilcox writes:
> Bricolage (www.bricolage.cc) is perl based and very flexible. Trouble is
> that with the flexibility comes a fairly steep learning curve and it can
> be a bitch to set up.

Indeed.  My experience with Bricolage suggests the following:

  - For smaller sites, Bricolage is substantially more effort to deploy
    and look after than a trivial solution like ttree.  This is
    particularly true if the people maintaining the content can ssh to
    the server and edit there, or can drive a version-control working
    copy and commit appropriately.

  - For larger sites, Bricolage is substantially more effort to deploy
    and look after than a custom-written CMS.  I think it takes less
    than a month for one person to write a full CMS from scratch.  Much
    less, if the feature list is short, and you have a useful toolbox of
    reusable web-app code to throw at the problem.  Bricolage
    deployments of any significant size or complexity take considerably
    longer than a month.

    Also, if new features come along every week or two, it'll probably
    be much easier to add them to your own code than to find some way of
    shoehorning them into Bricolage's way of doing things.  And don't
    forget that the people maintaining the content will need to be
    trained in the arcane ways of operating Bricolage.  Even people who
    like Bricolage agree that creating and editing pages with it is less
    than straightforward.

> For those that are happy with svn, ssh and make/ttree it's probably
> overkill but I throw it out as an option.

Perhaps surprisingly, it turns out that Bricolage is also overkill for
those with big websites on which their entire business depends.

-- 
Aaron Crane