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Monday, August 11, 2008

How does this website work?

This entry may be a bit dull for those of you who aren’t really interested in technology

I first came to the Circle in January, 2008, after meeting Mistress Lisa and Lady Lisa at the Boston fetish fair. We attended a Mistress Tea, and signed up. At the time, the website wasn’t really very functional, and I offered to rebuild it. Mistress Lisa was quite happy for this to happen

I’m not a professional web site designer, nor am I a professional coder - I’m passingly familiar with HTML, CSS and XML languages, but not to the extent I could build a site like this from scratch - however, I am extremely familiar with a content management system (CMS) called Expression Engine. I’ve been using Expression Engine since early 2004, when I migrated all my websites from Movable Type, when they released version 3.0, and I’ve been with it ever since. I’ve built personal sites, community websites for pug rescue groups in Dallas, and even a blog just for my own pugs.

So almost all of this website is built in Expression Engine - it has a powerful user management system, which is why some of you have different access to others (Mistresses have their own private area’s, slaves have theres).

Since the early days, Expression Engine has released forum modules, which we are using, link lists modules, yes, we’re using those too, a photo gallery module, check

In fact, there is only one area of the website not using Expression Engine, and that is the chat software, which is using a piece of software called Blab.

Something you may take for granted when you use Blab, is that your logged in user name shows up in chat - this is no small feat - there is no other piece of software out there that can integrate into Expression Engine like this, and when I was talking to the guy who wrote Blab, we are the first website *ever* to use Blab and Expression Engine so closely together. In fact, we are so ground breaking in this area that the guy who wrote Blab refers new customers to me to get recommendations on how easy this integration is (it’s *really* easy!).

One really cool area of Expression Engine is that it is very search engine friendly - our website is easy to find now, thanks to the software we use - so we get more traffic, more potential new members, heck, more new members!

So that’s the website in a nut shell. No magic, just some really good management software and 4 years experience in building websites with it

Posted by Mistress Lisa in

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