It's a Deal

We can finally take the wraps off something we have been cooking up for a while. Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght (press release)! The expanded company will operate under the Raincity Studios banner and the Bryght name will live on through the hosting products (i.e. Bryght Light Sites and Bryght Virtual Private Servers will continue). Raincity Studios will also continue Bryght's work in leading edge technology like Jabber / XMPP and OpenID. And of course, all Bryght guys are now Raincity guys!

Looking forward by looking a wee back

The Bryght Guys first met Robert Scales, Mark Yuasa and the Raincity Studios folks at a New Media BC "Building 21st Century websites" event way back in November 18, 2004 (here's photographic evidence). Amazing to think that was almost exactly three years ago.

The Bryght crew is working with Rhino Records on Drupal architecture and strategy. You can see the results of this with the next generation of the Grateful Dead site, featured on Tech Crunch and elsewhere.

The new Dead site takes full advantage of the great built in social networking features of Drupal like user profiles, tags, and forums as well as the wealth of modules that have been contributed by the amazing world wide Drupal community such as the easy creation of custom content (shows) and personal bookmarking that lets people mark which Dead shows they have attended.

"Rather than doing straight production for Rhino Records, myself and the Bryght team worked with Patrick Goddard and the rest of the Rhino crew to support and teach them some best practices around Drupal and social media" says Boris Mann, CEO of Bryght. "The Rhino team took our recommendations and ran with them, and we're looking forward to adding more interesting functionality to support this community."

The revamped Dead site builds on our experience of working with online social music networking sites including our ongoing Drupal architecture and strategy work with Warner Brothers Records. We love working at the intersection of our favourite things: web technology, online communities and music.

The best praise a company can receive is when its customers win awards for jointly developed projects. Today, we have the pleasure of announcing that Placeblogger.com from Lisa Williams, founder of influential placeblog h2otown.info, has won a Knight 21st Century News Challenge Award.

From the press release:

"As one of the winners of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge, Placeblogger will receive funding for two years to develop and enhance its technology and fund the site's continuing expansion and operation.

Placeblogger.com, the largest directory of local blogs on the web, was launched on January 1, 2007. Founder Lisa Williams developed the site as a way to understand the scope and growth of community sites that allow the residents of a neighborhood, city, town, or region to connect and grow the civic conversation. Built on open-source technology in partnership with Bryght, a leading developer of community sites, Placeblogger surfaces thousands of items from local communities every day. The site allows visitors to find nearby blogs and subscribe to blogs across their city or region.

Through the Knight 21st Century News Challenge, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation pledged to invest up to $5M to fund an array of projects aimed at using digital technology to transform how news is delivered online."

Working closely with Lisa Williams and designer Andrew DeVigal, Bryght delivered information architecture, Drupal development and configuration, social design, hosting and online community strategy to the Placeblogger project.

The Drupal community has just announced the release of Drupal 5, the latest and most impressive upgrade to date. Lots of hard work and sleepless nights have led to loads of new features, increased usability, and a level of polish unparalleled in the world of Open Source software.

Bryght has been busy too! In addition to contributing to the Drupal 5 release, we have upgraded our own service so now anyone can create their own Drupal 5 site, with the push of a button. But that's not all! We're also cutting our prices in half, from $40 to only $20/month.

• Try out the latest, most impressive upgrade to the Drupal CMS ever, free for 30 days.
• Take advantage of Bryght's lower pricing and continue using the power of Drupal for only $40 $20/month!
• Get the security and convenience of a fully hosted service with a variety of add-on features. No installation headaches, no worries about security patches, no servers to worry about, just good clean Drupal 5 fun.

This latest release of Drupal introduced the concept of 'install profiles', a way to bundle a set of modules and default settings together. By signing up for a Bryght site, you will be using our Bryght Basic install profile. Some of the included features in Bryght's Drupal 5 "Basic" hosted service are:

• Sprinklings of delicious AJAX using the powerful jQuery library
• The beautiful new colour-changing Garland theme enhanced with the ability to add your own logo and custom CSS
• Bryght guy Steven's "Menu Scout" module to make finding admin functions easier (see the screencast)
• The power of Views and CCK, letting you build custom data structures and reports.

If you need production Drupal hosting with full control, we've got advanced Virtual Private Server hosting as well.

This is still a Drupal 5 preview release from Bryght, and we will be rolling out lots of new features in the weeks and months to come. Stay tuned for further announcements, and check out support.bryght.com for any questions you may have.

As part of our infrastructure move to FireBright's servers, we had to temporarily disable new site creation for the Bryght hosted service. We've moved everything over, worked out a few bugs, and we can proudly say that signups are active once again. Visit our signup page to create a Bryght hosted service site. As always, your site is free for the first 30 days, and after that, we will send you a bill.