Designworks New Zealand meets cms made simple

[robsta]

Hi

Been a busy busy week.

http://www.designworks.co.nz

• Uses siFR3 for headings, so you need flash to see the 'pretty' typeface, otherwise you get just plain text.

• Integrated google maps (click on the street map to trigger it)

• Highly customised menus that automatically create lists by category and alpha on the fly..  which means the editor doen't have to create a list for 'by brand' or by discipline etc, they just insert a meta tag into the page's metadata that tells the menu which list or lists it should appear in. Which means you can cross tag to your heart's content.

• Extensive use of Javascript for image fades etc so flash isn't required...

• Custom news section which overrides the 'summary then detail' and puts them together so that the latest articles detail is always shown on load along with the list of other articles.

• UDTs that combine multiple pages so that they are displayed as 'one page' on the site, but the editor has control over which images go with which copy and the order they appear in. Rolling over that page's images displays that page's text... which means content can be split into nice chunks and fit into the design template.

• swfObject for all flash elements so that static images get swapped out if no flash is detected.

• custom script that add's the page's content to the meta description tag automatically, that way the editor can just make a page and the description is done...

Cheers

Rob

[ataxel]

Wow ! truly amazing what has been done with this CMS here. The look and feel is so different. Good job !

[robsta]

Thanks Sub_Kovert and ataxel...  it took a couple of weeks to implement it but it was an excellent proving ground... we're now rolling out new content on a regular basis... and yes googlemaps integration is the way to go.

Cheers

Rob

[jeffunk]

Yeah I agree with the other guys here... This looks great.

Good work customizing the cms to make it work for you!

[Max Patmoy]

Great New Zealand site. Well done.

[kermit]

very nice; a bit rough on the sql though.. oh, my.

using 111 SQL queries

i do believe that's all due to the menu; it's a dooozie. 

the images at the bottom perhaps resize them so the thumbs are truly thumbs instead of just resized "big ones"?  the 'byte count' per page is a bit high. the gzip encoding helps, but not when there's 500kb + worth of images on a page.

(browse the site without css enabled in firefox....)


i have tweaked a couple of sites to wrap pretty much the ENTIRE page within cached_content (menus too); and that really drops the query count (to 6 or 7 here) and times (next-to-nothing) .. you have to remember to clear the cmsms cache when you're done editing pages; and page 'preview' doesn't work when editing them, but its a workable solution if pages aren't going to change too often.

[Ziggywigged]

Good work, Rob.

• custom script that add's the page's content to the meta description tag automatically, that way the editor can just make a page and the description is done...

Mind sharing this? 

[robsta]

Sure that's what CMSMS is about

Okay create a new user defined tag call it 'add_descriptions' (or whatever you want)

$text = stripslashes(strip_tags($params['metatext']));
echo str_replace(" ", "", $text);

Then in the Global Metadata field in Admin->Global Settings

''

The bold text calls the User defined tag... it essentially places the pages content into a variable and then adds it before the default content [in italic] giving you page specific descriptions

Enjoy

[levinho]

Just found a minor glitch when browsing the site: On http://www.designworks.co.nz/index.php?page=Guardian_Healthcare there are some useless characters visible on the top left corner (just after the body tag in the source code).

Otherwise I found the site very pleasing, particularly the high quality images are used very effectively. The loading times are a bit too long, though. Perhaps the database queries could be somewhat reduced (as mentioned above).

[robsta]

Thanks...

That's the joy of a cms with 5 editors : )

Cheers

R