Bricolage is a content management system

Content management system

A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

 (CMS) written in the Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

 programming language.

Bricolage has been described as an Enterprise Class CMS

Enterprise content management

Enterprise Content Management is a formalized means of organizing and storing an organization's documents, and other content, that relate to the organization's processes...

, competitive in features and capability to high end, high cost proprietary products. Examples of organizations whose web sites use Bricolage include the World Health Organization

World Health Organization

The World Health Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that acts as a coordinating authority on international public health. Established on 7 April 1948, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health...

, Rand Corporation, Macworld

Macworld

Macworld is a web site and monthly computer magazine dedicated to Apple Macintosh products. It is published by Mac Publishing, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California...

, and the The Tyee

The Tyee

The Tyee is an independent Canadian online web magazine, which focuses on coverage of news and media issues in British Columbia.The Tyee was launched in November 2003 by David Beers, a journalist who had previously been associated with the Vancouver Sun...

.

Originally authored by David Wheeler to manage content for Salon.com

Salon.com

Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...

, Bricolage is now maintained by a small group of core developers. Released under the revised BSD license, Bricolage is free and open source software

Free and open source software

Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...

.

Design

Bricolage runs on the Apache web server on the Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, BSD, Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

 and Solaris platforms. It can use either the PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...

, MySQL

MySQL

MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

 and Oracle

Oracle

In Classical Antiquity, an oracle was a person or agency considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic predictions or precognition of the future, inspired by the gods. As such it is a form of divination....

 database management system and mod perl

Mod perl

mod_perl is an optional module for the Apache HTTP server. It embeds a Perl interpreter into the Apache server, so that dynamic content produced by Perl scripts can be served in response to incoming requests, without the significant overhead of re-launching the Perl interpreter for each request...

.

Bricolage is inherently a multi user CMS, designed to manage workflow for large websites with many contributors. Bricolage uses a template development model and completely separates presentation from management of content. The CMS can (and often does) reside on a different server than the web site or other data store being managed.

Native PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

support was added in Bricolage 1.10, that embeds a PHP 5 interpreter inside a Perl 5 interpreter. As a result, PHP code runs in a native PHP 5 environment, but can also transparently make use of any and all Perl libraries, including the complete Bricolage API.