Bricks Site Builder v0.02 released

Peter McDermott — Sun, 15 Jul 2001 08:52:50 -0000

Bricks Site Builder v0.02, a DHTML Layout tool for Apache + mod_perl has been released.

The code has been significantly cleaned up, the user interface has been polished, and a proper perl installation script has been added.

0.01 released!

Peter McDermott — Mon, 30 Apr 2001 20:25:20 -0000

0.01 is now available in the download area.

What is Bricks Site Builder?

Peter McDermott — Mon, 30 Apr 2001 20:24:36 -0000

Bricks Site Builder, a DHTML layout tool running on Apache + mod_perl + Mason (www.masonhq.com), enables rapid web-site design. It provides a standardized component architecture so that a user can easily add functionality (photo albums, web logs, etc.) to their web site. But it is not a content management system, per se.

Components using this interface are called bricks, hence the name. A central part of Bricks Site Builder is an integrated layout tool that allows the site administrator to add, move, delete, and copy bricks in a assemblies (pages). This layout tool consists of a tool-bar at the top of a web-page. It's not drag and drop; it's select and submit.

An assembly by itself can be rendered as a web page, or it can be a sub-assembly of another assembly. Only the top-level assembly renders page properties (title, body tag, etc), but those properties can be inherited from children if the site designer so desires.

The fundamental bricks are assembly, column, table, and text. A page contains a column. A column may contain any number of bricks in sequential order. A table contains rows and columns of cells, which, in turn, contain more columns. The text brick is as simple as it gets -- it just outputs text.

For example, I've written a photo album brick that takes as input a title, description, and a source directory (these values are input via a web form). Then, depending on user input it will render a thumbnail page, a page of four 300x300 photos, a single 700x700 photo, or a full-size photo. On each page it allows easy navigation of the photos. If files are added or removed from
the directory, it automatically updates its database.

This brick can easily be inserted into an assembly by selecting "add photoalbum to position n" where n is a page position (something like 5 for the fifth item in a column, or 2.4.2 for cell at row 4, col 2, in the table that's the second item in the page).

In addition to providing a component architecture, Bricks parses and routes incoming html arguments (both from HTTP POSTs and in the URI) to appropriate bricks. This way, a single page can contain two identical bricks and the user's input to one brick will not be routed to the other. You can have two photo albums side-by-side on the same page without worrying about input to the left album affecting the right one.

Multiple assemblies can map to a given URI. For examle, the first assembly might be a header and footer, the second a right-hand menu, and the third a page containing a web-log.

The site designer can attach an assembly to all requests for a folder (and possibly its' sub-folders), and a virtual filename or a perl regular expression.

The primary benefit of Bricks Site Builder is not the rapid layout of web-pages or a flexible mapping of URIs to assemblies. Instead, it is the ability to easily leverage the bricks other people have written to create a kick-ass, data-driven web-site.

-Peter McDermott

Recent posts to news

Bricks Site Builder v0.02 released

0.01 released!

What is Bricks Site Builder?