Kabbalah.com is the flagship website of the Kabbalah Centre. The people at Kabbalah wanted a website that would attractively and effectively portray their spiritual teachings online. They also wanted a site that would allow them to connect with their students, through newsletters, live and Web events, email broadcasts, and blogs.

CommonPlaces was involved in every stage of the development of Kabbalah.com, through planning, design, development, and testing. As a result of this and other projects, Kabbalah continues to engage CommonPlaces and our full line of professional services.

Kabbalah.com presented a number of development challenges. The first was incorporating a complex design, which was created by a third party, into the Kabbalah site. Our experienced themers were able to accomplish this through the advanced use of CSS, JQuery, and Drupal. We also provided strategic advice to Kabbalah when we believed aspects of their chosen designs might not have the best chance of achieving their goals.

Though Kabbalah.com may not appear incredibly complex at first glance, it possesses a very intricate backend. Included in this backend is a full-featured dashboard for managing both on and offline events, which the Kabbalah Centre organizes. The dashboard offers the ability to see registration lists, send out reminder emails at pre-determined intervals, create email templates to send out to registrants, separate attendees from “no-shows”, and generally track these events.

A feature that’s scheduled to launch in early 2010, is the site’s multi-language functionality. The site is designed to support seven languages: English, French, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, Greek and Spanish. Site administrators can create language-specific versions of any content they create. The Hebrew translation in particular presented a unique challenge: it required a complete flip of site content to accommodate right-to-left reading. Our themers used the 960gs theme and advanced CSS to elegantly meet this challenge.