Conversio Virium

Technical Colophon

The Conversio Virium web site is powered by WordPress, primarily weblog software that in our case is also used as a content management system. Many core features of WordPress align very well with Conversio Virium’s web site requirements, most notably the different roles of its users. In addition, several key plug-ins give the system added functionality.

User roles and content publication management

Using WordPress, users who register a free account on the CV web site can be assigned a role. Depending upon that assigned role, users are given certain capabilities. (The WordPress documentation on user roles and capabilities provides more detailed information.) Only users assigned the administrator role may change another user’s role. All registered users, regardless of their assigned role, will receive the CV email newsletter.

CV Subscribers

By default, all users are subscribers. Subscribers have the capability to view public content and to comment on posts. Anyone can be a subscriber on the Conversio Virium web site, regardless of whether they are a member of the club or not. In other words, registering and becoming a subscriber to the web site is the cyberspace equivalent of attending our public events, such as our regular meetings or our public special events.

CV Editors

Conversio Virium’s president, vice president, and secretary assume the role of editors. An editor has the capability to publish new content, edit all content, and remove any content on the Conversio Virium web site as well as the capability to send email to all registered users.

CV Contributors and CV Authors

At the discretion of the CV leadership, any registered user may be given the role of a contributor or an author. Users granted these role may submit content for publication on the Conversio Virium web site. Contributors’ submissions are only published pending review and approval by a CV editor. Authors’ submissions are published immediately. Such users may be active volunteers, presenters, Executive Board or special committee members, or people otherwise involved with contributing their efforts to promote Conversio Virium.

Calendar and event information management

Conversio Virium’s primary goal has and always will be to provide a safe space for discussion about BDSM to the young adults of New York City, especially college students. Therefore, information on our weekly meetings needs to be available in a timely manner, with this time-sensitive nature kept firmly in mind at all times. Thanks to its weblog heritage, WordPress is ideally suited for maintaining content in a time-sensitive manner.

Extending this functionality further, the Conversio Virium calendar is powered by the Event Calendar WordPress plug-in, which provides the list of upcoming events, the small calendar in the side column of the site, and the calendar feed. Each event on the calendar is actually a regular WordPress post with additional temporal metadata and is specially categorized (as Calendar Events). Any user submitting content for publication can additionally place their content on the CV calendar by giving their post this extra information.

Syndication and alternate views

WordPress natively syndicates content in a variety of formats, such as RSS and Atom. To learn more about the news feeds this web site publishes, see our news feed listing.

In addition to the content syndication provided by WordPress, the Event Calendar plugin provides an iCalendar file that users can subscribe to in order to display event information from our calendar in their own personal calendars however they’d like.

Archiving and revision control

Another benefit to WordPress’s weblog heritage is that the software natively stores most of the content in the system in a time-stamped format that is ideal for archiving. This allows the Conversio Virium web site to host not just current information, but many years of history as well. Archiving this information enables CV to build upon its history, retain shared experiences in the form of its organizational memory, and provide an increasing, cumulative amount of educational resources to our members and the world.

Additionally, the Conversio Virium web site also makes public important organizational documents, such as the constitution, in order to increase the organization’s transparency to the membership and the public. However, due to the sensitive nature of these documents, it’s critical to know when, why, and by whom they were changed over time.

This is accomplished with the Audit Trail WordPress plugin, which stores each successive version of all content any time it is changed. This not only enriches CV’s historical data, but also provides a fail-safe that enables us to easily revert to any earlier version of a document if needed.

Disaster recovery plan

Finally, a minimum of weekly off-site backups of the entire database are maintained by (at most) two individuals: the technical administrator and a chosen member of the CV leadership. This ensures that even after disastrous circumstances, Conversio Virium’s information will be kept safe and can be restored. The process is semi-automated using the WordPress Database Backup plugin.

Notifications and emails

The Conversio Virium web site has the capability to generate notifications that it sends to registered users in the form of emails. This functionality manifests in several ways and is jointly provided by the Email Users, WP-Email, and Subscribe to Comments WordPress plugins. Most notably, this is used to compose and send CV’s email newsletter and ensures that the software—not a human—maintains the membership’s listing of email addresses.

Ongoing development

There is continuous, ongoing development of the Conversio Virium web site and related projects. If you’re interested, you can follow the technical aspects of our web development efforts at the Conversio Virium web development Trac project homepage. In fact, you can even volunteer to help out yourself!