This site is developed using the Bricolage Content Management System. Being a Mac geek, I decided to install it on my OSX Laptop. What follows is a set of notes involving some of the more difficult points in the install.

I found that most of the install went rather well, once I started using David Wheeler's page as a guide to installing Bricolage on my Mac. I started by using Marshal Roch's instructions, and found them to be a useful reference. My major problems involved using Fink Commander. I found that I could not get certain modules like DBI and DBD to install properly. These problems cleared up when I decided to "go old school" and install everything in a terminal session.

if you decide to install Bricolage, it is imperative that you enable the root user, and do all your work as root. Just having an Administrator level account is not enough to get Bricolage installed properly.

Bricolage requires a large number of Perl modules, which do not come installed in the stock install of Perl on OSX. Rather than try to force fit a bunch of modules, it made more sense to me to download Perl 5.8.x, and install it into /usr/local/perl. Once I tested the install and knew it was working properly, I moved the stock install of perl to a backup location, and created a symlink to the new version.

PostgreSQL is also required to run Bricolage. You can download either an OSX installed version of PostGRES, or install it via cpan. In either case, you need to have a postgres user account defined.

There's a couple of resources online that will tell you how to create a postgres account. I found that it was easiest to just make a postgres user with OSX's built in Accounts control panel. Make the user with no password, then use the NetInfo Manager to modify the postgres user so it does not show up on the login list. You do that by setting the user id to a number less than 500. Then delete the user directories OSX set up. Postgres won't use these anyway.

Once I had all the required modules installed, Bricolage installed easily -- so I thought, until I tried starting bricolage:

There was a problem with libapreq. Luckily, there is a patch available online. Download libapreq-1.3 via cpan and install the patch. here's the critical data from the patch readme file:

Once the patch was installed, I had to figure out how to configure apache properly. This took hours. Here's the resulting config and install data from my terminal session:

Finally! After two weeks of work, from installing perl to configuring Apache, it was done. That is, the install was done. All I had to do now was configure Bricolage...