CMS Made Simple Forums

We've just updated our site... still working through a few things, but comments appreciated.

http://www.designworks.co.nz

A few new things with this one...
• all non-static content (ie non-case studies) are housed in the news module, which allows us to 'queue' new content up for release as we see fit.
• pages with subpages are treated as galliries like in the Our People section, add a new staff member under Our people and they appear in the list/gallery
• use of meta tags to drive and link content for discipline crosstagging
• direction finder and streetview in googlemaps on contact us pages
• automatic gallery creation from static pages
• new drop down menu with ajax query for content three levels deep.

Great work. Really clean and fresh site.

I do have one (and only one gripe however), I would really like to see the 'dropdown' menus expanding on the hover state rather than when clicked.

Other than that, really clean, fresh and fast loading

Well done.

Very nice website! Congratulations.

Could you provide some more info on how you created:

"pages with subpages are treated as galliries like in the Our People section, add a new staff member under Our people and they appear in the list/gallery"

What module/tricks did you use to accomplish this?

Really nice, good design!

I'v got the same question as sumpson, how do you manage content and a gallery at the same time.

geeves wrote: I do have one (and only one gripe however), I would really like to see the 'dropdown' menus expanding on the hover state rather than when clicked.

Hi geeves... we did extensive user testing and the feedback was that the nav was getting really confusing when you had so many hover click combos... better to click for everything.

sumpson wrote: Very nice website! Congratulations.

Could you provide some more info on how you created:

"pages with subpages are treated as galliries like in the Our People section, add a new staff member under Our people and they appear in the list/gallery"

What module/tricks did you use to accomplish this?

I actually rolled a combo of user defined tags and jQuery calls - I'm a database geek so querying for what I needed was pretty straightforward. The trick was to sit the results in a php session so I only had to query the database once on page load and use jQuery to to do the heavylifting for each page refresh.

The only code outside the cmsms framework was the jQuery javascript.

I didn't bother with gallery modules, I've always rolled my own using the standard page module – because that way my content remains in the same 'UI space' which is easier for my users to understand.

They key is to create a new template with two content blocks - one for the staff members details and one for the picture. That way I only had to search for the pages using that template onload. Once loaded I just grabbed its content properties (in this case content_en and image_block) through jQuery and displayed tem.