Bricolage and Drupal on the Tyee

I've just posted a new project called Bricolage Integration. I wrote it for an on-line news site called The Tyee, based in Vancouver, BC and it's been running for almost a year now.

The requirements of the project were to use Drupal to allow commenting on a site that was being generated by Bricolage. Bricolage is a perl-based content management system that doesn't include a hosting system - i.e., it just generates output pages that you can do what you want with. It's typically used to generate static html. This has the advantages over Drupal of:

1. a site that scales better for traffic (i.e., no mysql/php bottlenecks)
2. a mature and well-developed workflow.

Of course it has the disadvantage that it's not "dynamic", so folks have been looking for some way to allow commenting on static bricolage sites for a while. For my client, the reason Drupal was chosen was that the previous system (Vbulletin) was causing problems and wasn't very configurable. Not mention, that Drupal has some good buzz going for it.

My solution, which you can see in more detail in the project, is to treat the bricolage output as individual drupal page templates, and then use the comments module. This sounds easier than it was, and there are some outstanding issues that I'm hoping to work on in my Drupal 5 upgrade, but the basic approach has been successful.