We have not built yet another CMS platform. Instead, over the years of building one CMS website after another, we have honed our tool kit down to the bare essentials. The breadBox platform is a combination of off-the-shelf open source components (which have been wrought tried and true by the open source community), a leveraging of the Rails MVC web stack, and proprietary code that we have refined over the years.
Instead of starting with a fully baked system, and attempting to modify it—often inheriting components we wouldn’t have otherwise chosen—we start with a leaner more agile bag of materials and tools. If something is not relevant to the new project, we simply don’t use it.
Additionally, we have found that sites which are customizations of a fully baked platform, tend to look like sites that are modifications of something else. They lack an individual soul and cohesion that a site built from the ground up will have.
We don't start from scratch
Starting from scratch, however, has it’s own problems and constraints. It is often cost prohibitive, and can be more bug prone. breadBox gives us the best of these two worlds. Using standardized parts, we can get the obvious and straightforward pieces out of the way, letting us spend time on the new and interesting components. The platform lets us leverage both our own experience and the experience of the open-source community.