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.

Here’s a call to action from Kyle, and a sneak preview of the new design + UI:

Click on the image to see it in its true size (and keep sending in those inquiries!).

You know those default themes Blogger, Wordpress, and Tumblr offer their users? Well, when we officially launch BricaBox next month, we’re going to have those too, and we’d like those themes to be designed by YOU.

(Here’s what it looks like on Tumblr and Blogger, FYI)

This is a great opportunity to get your name out there (you get to link to your website from the footer of the theme) and heck, it’s great for our us and our users too.

So, if you’re a designer and you’d like your design to be the art behind the thousands of websites which will come out of our platform in the next year, please email us at hello@bricabox.com and we’ll send template information in the next week or so.

Thanks!

Nate, Kyle, and Nir

PS: If you’d like to see our 37Signals Gig Board post about this, check it out here.

Kyle pushed out another great update this past week, which included a feature I’m calling “Color Picker.”

Color Picker allows you to change the colors of your BricaBox site in a bunch of places. It’s a great way to make your site more, well, YOURS.

Anyway, check out this new screencast about it below, and head to What.BricaBox.com to leave a comment or helpful tip.

PS: Kyle hated the colors I picked for What.BricaBox.com so I had to change them back to the default colors.

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!

We’re at the office late tonight, in honor (or fear) of the 1-week-to-launch date upon us. Peep this screenshot to see one of the sites powered by the platform that we’ll launch on the 8th. It’s the community-powered “New York Technology Directory.”

By the way, you see that Technorati data? Yeah, that’s what BricaBox does. It makes your content smarter.

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.

In the comments section of a post by Path101 Foudner/CEO Charlie O’Donnell, I recently advised him not to go out early in the start-up process and pay a designer or firm to develop a company logo for him.

I said,

Don’t settle on a logo early and don’t let someone outside the company do it. Yes, you need a better one — and fairly soon but don’t lock yourself in and don’t lock your eventual full-time designer out of the process.

Charlie liked this advice, so I thought I’d follow up by posting a series of logos we’ve been using for the past 7 months. The point here is that while your company is developing its product, it’s also developing its identity. Identity comes from product, and product comes from mission and execution over time.

This first one was designed my yours truly on the occasion of launching this very blog, which occurred a few weeks after of unveiling the “larger purpose” behind our company. The font is Abadi MT Condensed Extra Bold.

I needed business cards before the Web 2 Expo so this was Kyle’s beautiful rush-job at a better logo (this is on the business cards I still have today). You’ll notice the term “Social Knitting” — part of that “larger purpose” mentioned above — remains in the logo but the speech bubble moved into a “box.” The font changed to Gotham.

As we started building the BricaBox Platform (first lines of code etched the first week of June), we decided we needed a new, simpler logo. Kyle moved the speech bubble around the name (which was actually also done with the business cards) and removed the speech bubble. Instead of highlighting the social phenomenon we expected out of the app, we wanted to emphasize the great utility we were about to provide. The term “Social Knitting” was dropped from the logo. The font was Calvert.

As we dug in deep for the final push before our public alpha/private beta (choose one), planned for mid-October, Kyle reinvented the logo in mid-September along with a new layout. We had learned a lot about our app over the last few months, both in terms of functionality and corporate message. This logo came out when around the time we added a new developer to the team and as we were putting finishing touches on the Executive Summary. As Kyle explained to me, the pixelated box to the left of the company name is a distorted “B.” The font is back to Gotham.

The night before sending out our first “Executive Summary” to an interested investor, I realized that with one simple change, we could instill our logo with some amazing spirit by making one of the 16 pixelated squares a blue dot. There were so may metaphors and feelings which made this change feel good. The blue square was a window — a diamond in the rough.

So here we are, about a month from launching the site, and we’re still not completely done with the logo. Kyle still needs to make this a vector image and will likely tighten up some stuff in the process. Meanwhile, though we’re in love with the pixelated squares, we’ve come up with a brilliant idea for a way to add to it, which is still to be seen and announced.

Over time, we’ve gotten to know our product better, and the logo has changed to reflect that. We still think BricaBox is a “Social Knitting” application, but now think it’s best to let heady concepts become evident over time, after the product is out. Also, we think that pitching BricaBox as a social application makes it sound run-of-the-mill. Isn’t everything “social” these days? Not everything is BricaBox, though. We want our logo to respect that.