POMPANO Beach, Fla. - Passion Mansion, a retail site that went live on June 29, 2008, said they are the first online community built with CakePHP, an open source web technology, and Zend Core, an enhanced version of open source PHP. Simply, this new tech means that the site manages itself, needing only a small team to double check that everything is running smoothly. As a retailer, Passion Mansion provides a plethora of adult novelties, lingerie, movies, video on demand, web cam, chat, and more.
Creative Director Jonathan Bradley, a six-year veteran in adult on the computer tech end, told AVN Novelty Business, "Our site is completely self-managed; there is no back end. Everything is done by the system. The distributor sends us XML files with a feed of current and discontinued products, what they can retail for, and so on. We built an 'aggravator' that turns the feed into the database. It is updated every day, and automatically cleans out what has been deleted and updates products, using Cake, a new type of framework. We're going away from a basic website to a more enterprising structure. Nobody's gone this route. We wanted to have something that no one else has."
He continued, "Instead of building a site with a database and files, we took it one step forward to build a site with a structure like Microsoft Windows. This may be more stressful for the server, but for the user it's much better. Also, [for best-seller lists] we're not handpicking products. We're looking at sales and views; our own algorithms generate that content."
The user experience, aside from reports that it is remarkably fast, is also more personal. Users are automatically identified by the cookies of their browser, and the person's individual page views are cached, as opposed to more common server-wide caching. So, instead of showing everyone the same page, users see pages based on their use of the site.
Bradley and partner Anthony Capone, operations manager, have been developing their site for a year, and are now getting ready to launch a provider system so other companies can make use of this technology. They anticipate this service will be ready in the next few months.
"[Adult] is not a very saturated market when it comes to software and hosting. So, it's more high risk, but it's going to be worth it," Bradley concluded.
