Migzen - research into Brexit and migration

[millipedia]

Migzen.net is a site we designed and built for Lancaster and Birmingham Universities that gathers academic research into the effect Brexit is having on migration.

Obviously we'd best not get into the whole Brexit debate here, so just let me apologise profoundly on behalf of my country and move on to the site...

It was a new project, so we were able to create the brand and design from scratch which is always nice. It also gives us the opportunity to make sure colours are accessible for use on the website.

As well as the usual blog posts and pages, there's a couple of slightly fancy things we did for them; one of which was to automatically import pages and media whenever they add a new episode to their podcast feeds. We do this using a cron job which loads the MarkupLoadRSS module and parses their XML podcast feeds. If we find any new episodes then we create pages for them with the episode summary from the XML and a nicely styled embedded media player to listen to the audio.

 

We also built them a searchable database of academic resources. That was fairly straighforward, but we do make use of WireCache to build the tag cloud when a page is saved - we use $page->references to work out an article count for each tag which would be expensive to do each page load.

There's also a neat looking Timeline which is just built using a repeater field. Honestly PW is ideal for this kind of thing.

The site gets good scores in Observatory and Lighthouse (thanks ProCache), and most importantly the client is very happy using PW to keep the site up to date.

Edited July 26, 2022 by millipedia
Just annoying typos ... and getting the clients name wrong.

[bernhard]

great site, thx for sharing ? congrats to the lighthouse score ? maybe add a little spacing here?

[DaveP]

Busted link to UKRI in footer. It's a bit weird, but there's a leading slash in the href - 

<a class=partner-link href=/https://www.ukri.org/>

Other than that ? great-looking site and outstanding performance. (I'd like to see anyone achieve those scores with WordPress.)

[millipedia]

@DaveP Thanks for spotting that broken link - fixed now (Its a hard coded link in the template so the weirdness was due entirely to my fat fingered typing).
It is possible to get decent scores in WordPress but it's just so much more effort than it is with PW.

and @bernhard - good spot on that layout issue. It was a long URL that was pushing a div out wider than it should have been.

Interestingly it was fine in Firefox, which is what I use for development, and only breaking in Chrome  / Webkit browsers. I guess this means I really ought to use Chrome for development more to catch this kind of bug which is going to affect more users. Shame because I feel we ought to support FF as much as possible.

[BrendonKoz]

On 7/27/2022 at 4:47 AM, millipedia said:

Interestingly it was fine in Firefox, which is what I use for development, and only breaking in Chrome  / Webkit browsers. I guess this means I really ought to use Chrome for development more to catch this kind of bug which is going to affect more users. Shame because I feel we ought to support FF as much as possible.

If you want to be sure to support Firefox, it's still best to develop in Firefox. Once finished, you then just need to visually inspect (under various viewport resolutions) with other browsers. Chromium supports more CSS and other technologies before other browser rendering engines, so if you develop to Chrome and then go back to Firefox to fix something, it's very often a forced regression type of fix, which isn't fun. Even worse is Safari... Very happy to see that you had the forethought to include (or in this case, exclude) printable formatting! The attention to detail is great.

Congratulations on your launch!