BricaBox Blog

It’s here. After more than eight months of development, we’ve finally launched our pride and joy, BricaBox. A lot has changed since our private beta back in November, so I’d like to give you all a brief rundown of what’s new and improved. We’ve got a lot more in store for after the launch, too, so stay tuned for more on that in a later post.

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.

Kyle posted a new video about how to create a BricaBox site. You can find it in this post, in full HD quality on Vimeo (where we love to upload videos) or on our tutorial site: What.BricaBox.com.

For those of you with BricaBox creation privileges, this video will take you through, start-to-finish, the process of creating a BricaBox, creating new content types, and adjusting your layout. It takes 10 minutes, but you can watch only the first part or up until you feel comfortable taking the reins with your new site!

Hello friends, Kyle here with some news we’re pretty stoked about: we’re about to unleash we just unleashed some really awesome new functionality and a bunch of bug fixes for our pride and joy, BricaBox! For your reading pleasure, below you’ll find a brief list of the new stuff we rolled out this morning.

MultiContent
- Each BricaBox can now have multiple content types. Want to create your own version of 43 People, Places, and Things? Easy! Just add a content type for each. Each content type can have its own set of attributes, too. For instance, a Person might have a URL and no address, whereas a Place might have an address and no URL.
- Each content type can have its own custom layout. Just go to Manage > Blocks & Layout > Content Layout. You’ll be able to select which blocks appear for which types of content. Easy.
- Filterable content list on steroids

Community Features
- Profile comments + email notifications about ‘em (you can turn these off on your account settings page)
- Comment block now has pagination on the homepage

Engagement
- Engagement can now be toggled on and off for a BricaBox (e.g. if you’d like to disable voting on a Top 100 list)

User Interface & Bug Fixes
- Lots of UI enhancements + refinements
- A ton of backend tweaks and bug fixes

We’re really excited about where BricaBox is headed in the coming weeks and months, and you can expect more fixes, enhancements, and upgrades as we progress towards our January launch.

As always, please get in touch with us if you have any questions, feedback, comments, complaints, or otherwise; we’re all ears! I should note that a great deal of the features rolled out today are based directly on feedback from a group of very valuable people: YOU!

Cheers!

Hi, Kyle here. I wanted to write a brief post explaining some of the visual changes BricaBox is undergoing as we speak. You may have noticed the brand new homepage we’ve got up at www.bricabox.com; it’s just one of the many redesigned aspects of the app we’ll be rolling out in the next few weeks. We’re taking an in-depth look at each page and identifying what we do well, as well as what we could be doing better. It’s our hope that the upcoming design changes will make BricaBox the killer publishing platform you’ve been looking for. So, if you see a page that looks funny, slightly out of whack, or just plain screwed up, our apologies, but rest assured something great is coming very soon. Cheers!

“Brica What?!” is a new series of video case studies we’re going to publish to help people understand what BricaBox is “good for.” The first episode is Nate’s first attempt ever at a screencast. The quality of the direction, narrative and transcoding will increase over time. I’m just happy to get one out and hear people say, “Ahh, so that’s what BricaBox can do…”

Yeah, that, and a whole lot more. More episodes coming soon. For now, enjoy:

PS: For those of you with BricaBox access already, check this out at what.bricabox.com, the official home of the “Brica What?!” series.

There’s a phrase we keep tossing around at BricaBox HQ, and that is,

“It’s not about BricaBox…”

As platform providers, trying to enter the web publishing market, we know that what “it’s really about,” are the publishers who will use our platform. What they need isn’t BricaBox, per se, but a platform which allows them to be them and do what they want to do.

For an idea of what I mean, check out Blip.tv. Blip is a web video platform which, very smartly, decided to provide the best set of tools for serious video bloggers and episodic web video producers — not your cat-falling-out-of-the-car YouTube “producers.” With this approach in mind, they’ve built out a very respectable niche in the web video market, being the first choice for most independent producers.

Another, clearer, example of this is Wordpress. This blog is powered by Wordpress software, but I hope no one ever comes to my site and says, “Wow, I love Wordpress!” No, I’d rather hear them rave about my posts. In fact, Wordpress is so good that I’d pay them to stay behind the scenes.

So this is the approach we’re trying to take with BricaBox: don’t be about us — be about the publishers using our system.

In fact, I think this makes development a lot simpler. For example, recently Kyle came with a super creative proposal to integrate site breadcrumbs in the platform header. It was an innovative solution to the age old question in web development and design, “Where am I?”

But as gorgeous as the plan may have been, it would have been a major decision to try and pave the road there. More so, it would have made BricaBox more BricaBox — more about us.

On a normal site that’s ideal. You want people to know you for your innovations. But BricaBox isn’t a normal site. It’s a platform for publishers; and for that reason a difficult decision was made easy, and we used a more standard breadcrumbing technique. While throwing out innovation is a painful thing to do, sometimes it reminds you of your priorities.

Our priorities are our publishers.

A few days back, while deploying a batch of new code to BricaBox’s production…er…boxes, we hit somewhat of a roadblock: Rails’ autoloader was killing a few of our namespaced routes (e.g. /block_builder/tags/some_action). Stranger yet, the issue seemed to only occur in production, not in any of our dev instances. After some thoughtful conversation with Lee at EngineYard, ensuring our monit config wasn’t acting up again, and investigating the more obvious possibilities, turns out it was in fact Rails’ own naming conventions for controller filenames that was causing the whole thing; one quick rename of a controller file and we were good to go. The route parser was hitting “block_builder”, finding a controller class to match (by way of the autoloader), incorrectly setting our action to “tags”, and proceeding from there. By renaming block_builder_controller.rb to something else, it was essentially hidden from the autoloader, thus allowing Routing to correctly parse “block_builder/tags” as a namespaced controller, passing back “some_action” as our action, etc.

The moral of the story? If shit starts acting up, check your filenames!

This is a repost from my personal blog:

Suggested Reading:
A few weeks ago, I came out and said that that “BricaBox is a Platform,” after Andrew Parker wrote a post warning against the “Dark side of platform development.” On Friday, I promised to follow up on my statement that BricaBox is like Bug Labs’ product, BUG. Then, on Saturday, Fred Wilson wrote a post about “When a Product Becomes a Platform,” which was followed by Marc Andreessen’s equally provocative post, “Three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet.”

From the articles listed above, there are two quotes you should have fresh in your mind, before I make my point:

From Fred Wilson:

“…the best products become platforms at some point. And things that start out as platforms have a hard time becoming products.”

And from Marc Andreessen:

A “platform” is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches… [but] whenever anyone uses the word “platform”, ask: “Can it be programmed?” Specifically, with software code provided by the user? If not, it’s not a platform…

My problem with the current analysis is highlighted by Fred and Marc’s computer-programmer-centric perception of platforms and products. They miss an entire type of platform: those utilized by “the consumer” to create products for her own “countless needs and niches.”

The fact is that “programming” doesn’t just mean “code,” and products can be built by platforms, not just on them.

The fact is, platforms create products too.

Let’s step outside the land of Internets for a few quick example:

Example: Cold Stone Creamery.
Cold Stone has created a wildly successful platform for “Ice Cream Creations.” You walk into a store for ice cream and you can walk out with literally “countless needs and niches” fulfilled (seriously: there are 48 ice cream flavors, 10 candy mix-ins, 4 nut mix-ins, 10 fruit mix-ins, 4 cakes & cookies, and 6 “other” mix-ins, including my personal favorite: Cinnamon. Oh, there are also 3 sizes. How is this not a platform for people to program their ice cream needs? At its heart, isn’t programming an art of putting commands into a system and receiving an output? I’d said Cold Stone is a pretty yummy platform!

And so, this brings me to platforms like BricaBox and BUG — both of which take their nod from blogging platforms, which we’ve seen power forms of communication and expression, such as podcasting to Post Secret.

But BricaBox and BUG go further than blogs, which provide “just” a blank canvas, because they are based around a modular approach to processing, organizing, displaying, and mashing-up data.

On BricaBox, for example, a customer can fulfill near endless combinations of web publishing niches and needs, even though code-level development isn’t yet open to developers (don’t worry “Level 1″ and “Level 2″ fans, it will be as soon a we can support the community). On a BUG, you may only have 4 modules available now, but the possibilities are still endless in terms of number of different products the platform allows you to create.

Think about location-based applications on both BricaBox and BUG (which, if you’ve heard me pitch, are my favorite applications to talk about). On BricaBox you could create a website to review all your favorite restaurants, pulling in outside review data, parking data, and mapping data; but you can also create a website to organize a home buying search with your family, pulling in demographic data, local political information, hyperlocal news, and nearby restaurant reviews. These are two very different applications — products, if you will — born from the same platform.

On the BUG, you (or USV’s Brad Burnham) can create a camera which records GPS coordinates with video and saves data according to his preference; or, you can an actual “Black Box,” using the accelerometer, GPS and the camera. Again, one play application and one work application: same set of parts, same factory, different implementation.

Aside from function, I should mention presentation, especially because BricaBox is a web-based platform. So, while on BricaBox one person may use location-based data as a part of their BricaBox, she could still highlight other data (like her tags) as the primary way of interacting with the website. The examples go on and on…

To conclude, I think the platforms Marc glamorizes are platforms for platforms’ sake, and we think it’s time for platforms to be for products’ sake. On Fred’s point, products which try to be platforms turn out to be platforms for features’ sake (these are plug-ins on one product). While this model was revolutionary 4 years ago, and has powered much of what’s “cool” now, we think new approach is what’s revolutionary today.

Lastly, I want to add a point which Andrew Parker told me. “Platforms are great,” he said, “if they can make killer products.” This is a very fair and useful point, mostly because those of us focused on the beauty of a platform which can do all these amazing things can easily lose focus of the “killer” use-cases.

I can’t speak to BUG’s strategy here, but for us, we intend on focusing on real, individual customers to develop killer uses with us, for them. Just the other day I was in a meeting and folks decided that what we “really needed” in New York was comprehensive directory of tech organization and other interested parties. “Should we use a wiki?” somebody asked, prompting concerns from one corner. “Should we build a new site?”, piped-up another, though most thought that also seemed like a poor idea.

So there we were, and it dawned on me, we were in a clear situation where the best publishing solution for the directory really was BricaBox - no joke. Could we have predicted that a local group would have found a “killer use” is a directory with a map mash-up, calendar mash-up, and alexa mash-up? Not really. It’s our platform, but their product.

And so one by one we talk to people, introduce the platform, find places where our platform can power better websites, and get people to say, “Hey, I have a killer use for this platform: it’s my product.”

In his post about “The Dark Side of Platform Development,” USV Analyst Andrew Parker makes some important observations about the territory we’re in with BricaBox and talks about the perills of building a platform which relies on free web services (APIs).

I’ve been a little mum about BricaBox specifics on this blog, but I couldn’t help but react to Andrew’s post, and in so doing I’m revealing a little about how we’re thinking about these issues and how they affect our product.

Because I’ve posted that comment (and because Charlie has been getting on me about not being more open about the product) I’d like to talk a little more about what BricaBox “is” and is up to:

To start, BricaBox is a publishing platform. It allows you to create a web site much in the sense a blogging platform allows you to create “site” (don’t you hate when people refer to it as just a site, though? It’s a blog! — or in our case, it’s a BricaBox!). Also like a blog, you can “have” one of these sites, or just visit one.

Our platform allows you to make your BricaBox about anything you want, but it’s especially designed for content which has a theme and is composed consistently (like a list of places, people, companies, words, ideas, to-dos, etc). If your content is of one of those broad categories, our platform connects your data to some of the web’s most useful APIs, allowing you to see that content mashed-up in a bunch of interesting ways without knowing any programming. What more, BricaBox has a smart permission system which will allow you to invite a broader community to contribute (like a wiki) and engage (like YouTube) with the content you’re publishing.

As you can see, one of the reasons I’ve been avoiding talking too much about BricaBox until it’s in the public eye is because it’s rather heady. To paraphrase the words of a (different) VC analyst I’ve shown BricaBox to, “This could be like Blogger, before people knew the significance of blogging.” We’ll certainly let history runs its course without making such claims ourselves, but now you see what direction things would have to go in for us to be successful.

Anyway, I hope you find this information and my comments to Andrew useful in understanding what we’re up to. Also, I hope to get more people looking at the platform soon so we can continue to get valuable feedback.

Comments to Andrew:

This is a very interesting note. You’re right — these issues do not go un-addressed by teams developing applications and platforms which rely on the services (in some cases free) of others (especially when those “others” have such an ability to reinvent *your* wheel overnight).

On the data pipeline control issue, we have a belief that all services on the web are best publicly available, and — here’s the important part — the more folks who have access and ability to use these services as they see fit, the more likely they are to stay free and available to folks who have access and ability to use them. This is a common balancing act on the Internet, but ultimately both API service providers and ourselves want to see web services in the hands of people. We think creating a platform for that to happen adds to this natural, democratic process.

On the second point, indeed the Goliaths can come out with their own versions of applications, functions, and platforms, but they can’t always communicate the value of their product as effectively as an independent company focused on that one thing. Google’s replacement of boutique RSS readers with the Reader app may be easier to predict because there’s only so much one can do to differentiate a product which receives consistently formatted information over a set protocol — and Google can do it. But for a product like a blogging platform, the Big Cos. can still have their product out and doing well (i.e. Blogger) while other companies exist happily, earning revenue, innovating and building value for their users, investors, and the broader Internet community (i.e. Six Apart’s several, eventually acquired products, tumbler, Twitter, to reference a few).

So my reaction to your post, in a nut shell, is this: Yes we lose sleep over these issues, but no it doesn’t phase us. Anyway, it’s my over simplification to say that if these services and platforms are really valuable enough that we’re worried about how Google compete, then we’re in the right business.

I have some exciting news.

As of today, I can announce that Kyle Bragger has been made a permanent member of the BricaBox family. He enters the company as our Chief Technology Officer and will continue to bring his expertise in programming, design and system administration to our coffee, pizza, and beer strewn table.

Some of you might remember when Kyle came along back in March. Well, now he’s here for good, and we’re darn happy about it. For you blog readers, there’s an added bonus here: Kyle will begin writing for the BricaBox Blog, and if he’s half as good at writing as he is with everything else he does, it will bring a lot of interesting material to this space.

Lastly, it also brings me great pleasure to announce the date of our first private alpha invites going out: August 1st. Save the date, set your alarm, or just use this form to get on the list, and we’ll send along invites as soon as capacity allows.

Thanks to all. We’re super excited about everything.