Dean for America selects Bricolage to power DeanForAmerica.com

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Leading Internet campaign enjoys increased performance, easier management, thanks to open-source CMS

As part of its continuing growth, Dean for America, Governor Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, has adopted Bricolage, the open-source content management system developed and maintained by San Francisco-based Kineticode, Inc., to power its home page, www.DeanForAmerica.com.

We’re grateful to be using Bricolage to manage our Web site, said Nicco Mele, the campaign’s webmaster. Because our Internet presence is so vital to the success of our campaign, we needed to find a solution that maximized our ability to respond rapidly to the day-to-day shifts in the political environment with new content and resources on our Web site. In Bricolage, we found that solution, and now, thanks to Kineticode’s implementation services, we’ve realized the profound benefits.

We’re delighted to be helping the Dean campaign fulfill the promise of its Internet strategy, said David Wheeler, president of Kineticode. Kineticode certainly understands the importance of the Internet for the Dean campaign, and we’re pleased that we could help the Dean team to empower its editors and boost the performance of the DeanForAmerica.com Web site. It’s an exceptional illustration of Bricolage’s capability and scalability, and a significant confirmation of the power of well-written and maintained open-source software.

Bricolage enhances the management of DeanForAmerica.com in a number of ways. First, it provides an interface for rapidly developing new document types. Editors creating documents based on these types use an intuitive browser-based interface to enter new content and publish it to the Web site. This approach simplifies the interface for creating new content, while maintaining the consistency of document structure across the site. The upshot is that campaign staffers can focus on what they do best—developing and publishing new content—without worrying about HTML or presentation.

Bricolage also represents a performance upgrade for the website, www.DeanForAmerica.com. As an extremely high-volume site, DeanForAmerica.com enjoys upwards of six million page views per month and up to 400,000 per day during the last few days of each fiscal quarter. To meet the demand, the site requires a fast, responsive front-end Web server to efficiently deliver documents to site visitors. The new Bricolage-powered site enables maximum performance by publishing all content to an external Web server, which can scale to meet server loads independent of Bricolage. The result is an easy to manage yet highly responsive, dynamic site.

Bricolage’s meaningful URLs also means that the campaign’s internal web pages are available to search engines, helping to spread the campaign’s message and vision. Because Bricolage publishes content to the external Web server, and all content has meaningful URLs free of random identifiers, it’s easier for visitors and search engines alike to locate content. Furthermore, since the page URLs are meaningful, search engines will increase the ranking of all DeanForAmerica.com pages, thus boosting the site’s ranking in search results. The payoff is that voters can more easily access information about the campaign, including policy statements, press releases, and event announcements.

About Kineticode, Inc.

San Francisco-based Kineticode, Inc. (www.kineticode.com) is the leading provider of services for the Bricolage content management system. Founded by Bricolage lead architect and developer David Wheeler, Kineticode provides planning, implementation, and development services to customers as diverse as Entertainment Tonight Online, The RAND Corporation, and the World Health Organization.

About Bricolage

Bricolage (www.bricolage.cc), an open-source enterprise-class content management system, greatly simplifies the complex tasks of creating, managing, and publishing the vast libraries of content essential to any organization. With advanced features such as fully-configurable workflows, customizable document types, and comprehensive Perl-based templating support, Bricolage has been designed from the ground up to scale to meet the demanding needs of large organizations around the world. This flexibility and scalability led eWeek to hail Bricolage as Most Impressive in 2002.

About Dean for America

Dean for America (www.DeanForAmerica.com) is the official campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Governor Howard Dean, M.D.

Press Contact

Abbey Linfert
Business Manager
Kineticode, Inc.
abbey@kineticode.com

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Kineticode is a service mark of Kineticode, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.