blues-baltica.de relaunched with PW

[yellowled]

So it finally happened – I (re)launched my first multilingual site built with PW. For the first time, I do not have to mention that the site is in German only and most of you will probably not be able to etc. etc.

blues-baltica.de is a site for a couple of events surrounding the most important of them – the BluesBaltica or Bluesfest Eutin, which is considered to be Europe's second most important Blues festival. It will take place for the 27th time in a couple of weeks, as it does every year in May in the small town (about 17K people) in northern Germany that I live in. It's an admission-free, open-air festival. In addition, the association organizing it also hosts the German Blues Challenge & Awards, which is the German qualifiers for the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, TN.

Okay, technical stuff. It's multilingual, which is the biggest thing about it for me since it was my first multilingual site. And it's been a blast. Seriously, all that multilingual stuff in PW? The multi-language fields, the alternate language fields, the tabbed interface? It's friggin' perfect. Whoever came up with all that is a genius.

Other than that, it uses just a few modules, most of them are my “go-to modules” that I use in every project, like Markup Simple Navigation and Markup Sitemap XML. Used Hannah Code for the first time to include the code for the Piwik opt-in iframe in a WYSIWYG editor field – works like a charm. Also use Scheduled Pages since this site sometimes needs news posts to go live in the middle of the night. And Export Site Profile because it's the easiest way to back this up regularly.

As for the design, it is a bit “special” because the main organizer, who is my contact person, it a bit particular about it. Also, they really don't have a huge budget, so this is kind of a pet project anyway. The main objective besides moving away from the old CMS really was to make it easier to maintain in the backend. But it is HTML5, responsive and even uses SVG sprites for icons, and hopefully performs well for everyone despite the about 60 301 redirects it needed after moving from Contao to PW.

[arjen]

The multi-language fields, the alternate language fields, the tabbed interface? It's friggin' perfect. Whoever came up with all that is a genius.

The genius here is I believe adamspruijt for creating languagefieldtabs 

[yellowled]

The genius here is I believe adamspruijt for creating languagefieldtabs 

That is a huge part of it, yes.

As I said, this site used to run on Contao. Contao's way of handling this is two seperate page trees, which means every time you so much as edit a page, you have to do it twice in two different places in the backend. Now it's just a click away on the same page. This is a great testament as to how well the PW backend works in general and completely unrelated to which backend theme one chooses to use.

I may be “surprised” by how well all this works since I haven't even so much as tested the multilingual stuff in quite a long time. When I last checked this out, languagefieldtabs was still a separate module!   I remember when it wasn't easy to have a page exist in one language, but not in another – now that's just a checkbox to uncheck. I also remember when we did not yet have language-specific image descriptions. This really has come a long way, and it has improved as well. Very good job by everyone involved.

[arjen]

When it comes to handle multilingual content ProcessWire really outperformes any other system I've ever seen.