Why Byline

Companions:

• Getting Started — the shortest paths to a working Byline application.
• Key architectural decisions — how the product goals described here become storage, versioning, configuration, and authorization boundaries.

Before the APIs and the storage model, it helps to know what Byline is trying to be, and what it is reacting against. These essays set the context for everything else in the documentation.

• Mission & Vision — why Byline exists, the three pillars it is built on, and the stance it takes on data ownership and open development.
• Content Management in the Time of AI — what changes when your content is consumed by language models and agents as readily as by browsers, and why that shaped Byline's design from the start.
• Byline for Collections — why immutable versioning, definable workflow, and an atomic audit trail make Byline a strong foundation for digital collections management, and how OAI-PMH, fixity, accession controls, and standards-based discovery would build on it.

If you would rather see it working first, start with Getting Started; if you want the engineering rationale, jump to Architecture.