It was a very pleasant surprise indeed when Chicago’s Music Box Theatre contacted Engaging.net to deploy ExpressionEngine for their two web sites, musicboxtheatre.com and musicboxfilms.com. Not only are movie-related sites fun to work on, but I actually knew the theater from back when I was a student at the University of Chicago.

My previous-century patronage is not however why Music Box made contact; instead, what happened is that Chris Welch, then Music Box’s web designer, had read about Engaging’s role in the EE conversion of subtraction.com and figured that what’s good enough for Khoi Vinh is good enough for them. So thanks again, Khoi! — this one was a satisfying bit of personal continuity.

Converting MBT and MBF to EE wasn’t only fun, it was also quite challenging, as Program Director Brian Andreotti and I discovered during numerous Skype conversations in which we hammered out the sites’ publishing business logic, which became more subtle and complex from an EE perspective the closer we looked at it. But that challenge — pushing EE to places I’d never taken it — was also fun. Really!

The result is two web sites that appear the same as ever — except where Music Box wanted design changes and additional features — but that are now regularly updated with ease by Music Box staff.

Thanks to the bright and generous Yvonne Martinsson of fellow EE Pro Network member Studio.Freewheelin for helping with the build-out.