We’ll keep you as informed as possible going forward and for now we’ll keep the site live.

Thanks for everything! You guys are great. If you have any questions, feel free to write us at support@bricabox.com

Best,

Nate

One of the things we’d need to do to really make it work is create a To-Do list block, but using some of the tools we already have, I’ve gone ahead and set up a BricaBox for our team to track bugs, internally document our Blocks, and collaborate on projects.

Check out the following video to see how I did this:

While waiting for our Shack Burgers, Fred asked me to give my elevator pitch. He already knew me and about BricaBox, but he had never heard my version of our pitch.

So, I gave my 15 second pitch:

“With BricaBox, you can create a Social Content Application in minutes, with a few clicks, drags, and drops.” It’s the pitch I give everyday — the one that goes along with this graphic:

Fred’s response was then like many others: “How does this relate to Ning?” he posed. (Oddly we rarely get “How does this relate to Wordpress or PBWiki?” or anything else — it’s always Ning.)

So then I tried a new one on him:

“BricaBox is Ning for Content.”

Fred’s response: “I like that. That works,” (responding to the pitch, not necessarily the company — I’ll still work on that

The reasoning, Fred explained, is that Ning is clearly gaining some currency in the industry, and anytime you can say something is “this for that,” you can get get our of teaching mode (”let me tell you what a Social Content Platform is”) and communicate your message quickly and easily.

Communicating quickly and easily is exactly why buzz words exist, and have a purpose for this reason.

Back to lunch and BricaBox and our pitch, the next thing that happened brought everything full circle:

Albert Wenger, another Partner of USV, was also in line with us. He too heard the pitch and nodded in agreement when Fred endorsed the “Ning for Content” approach; but when his wife, Susan, joined us in line — who as co-founder of DailyLit is no web-tech slouch herself — Albert chose to introduce BricaBox as “a social content platform,” straight from my “teaching pitch.”

Reading into this, I assumed he thought Ning would be a little out there for Susan, even considering her knowledge of the space; and this showed me that unless I knew my audience really knows the inner guts of the web industry, I may still have to cling to my teaching pitch, and save my quick-pitch for highly specialized crowds.

So, to you, my reader, this post is two things:

1. An admission that we don’t have our pitch quite down yet, and we’re still finding that what works for some people doesn’t work for others
2. And a request for feedback: How would you put BricaBox in 8 seconds or 1 sentence?

Beyond “Ning for Content,” here are other one liners people have liked:

• “Wiki with depth” - Credit: Charlie O’Donnell
• “Wordpress for Structured Content” - Credit: David Berlind
• “Drupal’s Blogger” (BricaBox is to Drupal what Blogger is to MoveableType) - Credit: Me… see product matrix below
• “Deja Ning” (their first strategy) - Credit: Andrew Watson

Thanks for thinking about all this. I look forward to your feedback.

Today, we’re super proud of Nichelle, Allison, and Rachel (the other two Cupcakes Take the Cake bloggers) because they’re on Martha Stewart’s show!

That’s right, our favorite Cupcake gals will be on the top of the program airing today (1pm EST on NBC - check local listings).

Here’s a picture of them on the set:

And here’s their blog post about it.

Congrats ladies!

Hi everyone,

We just wanted to say “Happy Easter” from your friends at BricaBox. Whether or not this is a holiday you observe, we hope you can be around family and friends today.

Also, enjoy this video from our friend iJustine. It’s great! (The BricaBox egg is at minute 1:37)

Your wiki block just got a lot easier to edit, thanks to the new editor called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

Say goodbye to HTML and other foreign language markups (admit it: markdown and textile are for geeks only).

Embrace the wonderful wikiness!

Hey everyone, who’s going to South by Southwest this year?

Check out SXWhere.com — a quick but super useful thing we pulled together for the SXSW festival. It’s a place to post parties that are happening.

Also, please spare a Digg for it and head over here.

As I mentioned on my blog, SXSWhere is not only a super useful way to post and find events (and see who’s going) — SXSWhere is also a great demonstration of how easy it is to build social content websites using the native functionality of BricaBox (including that date support Kyle just rolled out).

Set-up time was under 5 minutes and design time (Kyle played with the CSS and made a few nice graphics) was probably about 1 hour.

So, 1 hour and 5 minutes to this! — it’s why we think we’re doing something kinda special.

Thanks!

Date & Time support

Yes, that’s right, your Entry Templates can now have a new Date/Time field, enabling you to attach a date and (optional) time to your entries. Check out our SXSWhere BricaBox for a really cool example of this.

Private RSS Feeds

For those of you with private BricaBoxes, its RSS feed will now have a token in the url to prevent unauthorized people from subscribing to it. If you’re currently subscribing to your private BricaBox via RSS, you’ll have to update your feed reader to use the new url. You can find this url at the bottom of your index page (http://(YOUR SUBDOMAIN).bricabox.com/)

Bug fixes, etc.

We’ve also taken care of a bunch of bugs and made a ton of subtle tweaks to the UI and backend code (including a bunch of caching and optimization-type things), all in an effort to make BricaBox faster, more stable, and hopefully more useful, too.

As always, any questions, please email kyle@ or nate@ bricabox.com 24/7. We hope you enjoy these new features and fixes, and stay tuned for more in the coming weeks. Thanks!

We’re now powered by PHP

Rails is a great framework and Ruby a beautiful, powerful language, but they just weren’t cutting it for what we wanted BricaBox to do, so we rewrote the entire application from scratch in PHP (in just around two months, to boot). We’re confident that we’ll be able to offer your a more stable, faster BricaBox this way.

Cloning and one-click templates

One of our favorite new features is the ability to create a brand new BricaBox site with just one click and in less than 15 seconds using our new cloning feature. At the top of every BricaBox is a button that says “Create a site like this”, and clicking it does exactly that; your new site will be an exact copy of the site you’re cloning, complete with the same layout, blocks, color scheme, and more. The only thing that we don’t copy are entries; it’s up to you to add your own!

It’s also dead-simple to create a new BricaBox using one of our one-click templates; just head to http://bricabox.com, choose the type of site you’d like to create, name it and choose a subdomain, and you’re up and running. That’s it.

New and improved blocks

Blocks, the cornerstone of your BricaBox site, have gotten better. There’s a new Picture block, which automagically displays picture uploads from your entries, and the wiki and tags blocks have gotten major overhauls and are better than ever. We’ve also just rolled out a new Ad block, which allows you to run a BricaBox site and make some cash while doing it.

The User Panel

Clicking your name in the top right corner of the screen will pop open the User Panel. This is a great place to quickly see what BricaBoxes you own and belong to; you’ll also find links to edit your account, see your profile, and log out. We’ll be using this space to give you access even more useful stuff in the very near future.

Superpowered entry list

Not only can you now add new entries from any page in your BricaBox, we’ve totally revamped the entry list, allowing you to easily access everything on your site from one screen; you can sort, filter by categories and tags, and search, as well as interact with content, all from the same place.

Refreshed design

BricaBox is sporting a tighter, more crisp design that we hope will make your experience on the site hugely better, and we hope you love it as much as we do. Not only does the application have a brand new design, but we’ve also launched a few really cool customization features, too: BricaBox Themes, a better custom color picker, and the ability to use your own totally custom CSS.

Better membership and permissions system

The membership and permissions system has been totally overhauled based on our experiences from the private beta, as well as valuable user feedback we received. It’s now easier to manage existing members, send out invites, as well as maintain total control over who can see and contribute to your BricaBox site.

Brand new control panel

Head over to http://(yoursubdomain).bricabox.com/admin to see the brand new BricaBox control panel; we totally overhauled every aspect of the existing control panel to make it easier than ever before to control every aspect of your site. There’s also a new dashboard with links to commonly used parts of the control panel, so you can spend less time setting things up and more time actually using your site.

Limited API

We’ve also launched a limited API you can use to access your entries in XML and RSS format (atom coming soon), with the same powerful sorting and filtering features as the entry list. To access the API, use the following url:

http://(yoursubdomain).bricabox.com/entries/as/xml
http://(yoursubdomain).bricabox.com/entries/as/rss
http://(yoursubdomain).bricabox.com/entries/as/atom (soon!)

We’ll be publishing developer documentation shortly. Any API questions can be emailed to kyle at bricabox dot com. I’ll be happy to help!

We’ve also rolled out a ton of bug fixes, a bunch of improved features from the old site, and more. We’re really pumped about BricaBox and are very excited to see what you create with it.