August 2008

Involvement: PlayShakespeare.com featured on CNN

A simple idea combining historical literature and modern technology

Written by Ron Severdia

Editor: Ron Severdia was invited by Jack Hanson to discuss PlayShakespeare.com on Comcast's Newsmakers for CNN. In this television interview, Ron discusses the purpose of this Web site, the interest of site visitors, and the critical role of site contributors. In this magazine article, Ron shares how Joomla! 1.5 helps empower this community to fulfill their outreach goals.

Ron Severdia: Approximately two years ago, I began working on an idea for a Shakespeare Web site. I wanted to get all the plays online and accessible from my phone in order to avoid carrying a large book with me. I thought this also might be a good resource for other actors like myself. So in the beginning, I was creating a site that I wanted to see and for personal use.

I thought about putting it together in HTML, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that some kind of database would work better and make it more easily manageable. I then began researching content management systems, blogs, and other ways to handle the play texts. When I came across Joomla!, I immediately knew it was the right solution.

After about a year, I was ready to launch the site in April 2007. But in the interim, the original idea had grown to adding a discussion forum, reviews, Shakespeare news, a document library and a myriad of other resources for students of the Bard. Just before the launch, I found Shakespeare lecturer Denise Battista and she has been instrumental in building the reviews area of the site and growing the worldwide team of reviewers to 12 talented writers.

During the first year, the site ranged from 250k-750k hits per month and are increasing. We've established the Falstaff Awards to honor excellence in Shakespeare performance, added multiple versions of plays, and now offer free blogs. We're also the first Shakespeare application in the iPhone and iPod Touch available through the iTunes store (iTunes link), which provides the complete works in a free application.

These are just some of the exciting things we've done with the site in the first year. I've also upgraded to Joomla! 1.5, enabling us to use the latest and greatest extensions. We've grown to over 1100 users and are well recognized by Shakespeare scholars, theatres, and students from all over the world for our ease of use and helpfulness.

The only problem is that developers don't write extensions at the pace at which I work. I have plenty of ideas how to make the site even better, but either the extensions don't exist, or they aren't at the level of functionality or stability that make then usable on an active site.

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