Wide Open Windows is not built around a conventional hierarchy of pages. Its essays, perspectives, publications and other materials form a network: things can belong to more than one context, connect sideways to other things, and be approached by different paths.
Rhizome Publisher grew out of the need to publish such a network without flattening it into an ordinary website tree.
It takes structured material — in the case of Wide Open Windows, a network maintained in TheBrain — and turns it into a static website while preserving the relationships between its parts. Parents, children and lateral connections can become navigational possibilities rather than being reduced to a single menu hierarchy.
The project has since developed beyond the needs of Wide Open Windows. Rhizome Publisher can work with other sources as well, including spreadsheets and structured data, and is being developed as a general-purpose publishing system for websites whose structure is better understood as a network than as a tree.
Its underlying principle is simple:
content has structure, presentation has style, and publishing should not confuse the two.
The source remains the source. Themes determine how a site looks. The generated website is static, portable and independent of a database-driven content management system.
Rhizome Publisher also has a history. Its conceptual lineage reaches back to 'Lucid Fried Eggs' and later 'transLucid', early experiments in publishing interconnected nodes rather than conventional hierarchical pages. RP revisits that idea with contemporary web technology and a broader range of possible sources.
Rhizome Publisher is currently under active development as a Wide Open Windows project.
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