Kidderminster-Husum Twinning

[Pete]

I've officially launched this site today: http://www.kidderminster-husum-twinning.co.uk/

For those not familiar with twinned towns/cities - many places (in Europe at least) are twinned with other places in the world and these are two such places which have built links between their cultures, clubs, associations etc.

It was a relatively straightforward site. A design I had made many months ago actually lent itself to the Foundation site profile (which I upgraded to Foundation 5 without too much hassle) and most of the content benefits from the default styling in this case, which was a bit of a fluke as I'd not done anything with Foundation when I originally designed this I was in two minds whether to use Foundation as I'd not really touched responsive before, but it works nicely on mobile and I'm glad I did it.

There's a bit more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye, and I think that because this looks like a simple site it might well be worth a full case study with a few tutorials of how I personally approach things.

As for the tools I used, here's my list of modules:

• CKEditor
• Markup Yahoo Weather (a modified version)
• Page Link Abstractor (I always use this now so links in the body don't break when moving the site to the live server)
• Thumbnails (I couldn't imagine a site without this!)
• Languages - all of the core modules for languages, as there are English, German and Danish versions of each page (not all translated before anyone spots that but I shall leave that to the Twinning committee )

I also turned on caching for each of the templates. Due to the weather constantly updating on the sidebar I didn't use ProCache on this occasion - I toyed with making the weather a JS/AJAX/PHP combo but it then loses it's synchronisation with the two images in the slideshow on the homepage and that looked so nice that I can live with what is still a relatively quick site without making design sacrifices for the benefit of a bit more speed.

What do you think?

[Craig]

I like the clean design a lot, good work

[Manfred62]

Hi Pete,

on the english version the slideshow has 3 slides (1 image missing/blank). The german and danish only have 2.

[Pete]

Thanks Manfred - that was odd! I'd saved the page which was set to clear the cache but for some reason it didn't. I'll have to keep an eye on that as the only way I could clear it was deleting the cache file in FTP for some reason.

[totoff]

Hi Pete,

I like this site very much. Looks simple and a bit old fashioned at first glance, but is very modern under the hood and a lot of attention was paid to detail, in particular to usability. "Straightforward" in a very positive manner. Brilliant.

[ryan]

Nice job Pete!

[Pete]

Thanks guys - it came together quickly, but it didn't have too much fancy content to deal with. Probably the way the Who's Who section is handled behind the scenes would be a good example to show you as all people are the same in the backend, but through a variety of checkboxes and showIf's there are four people that are highlghted at the top with photos, with the President only showing at the top and not in the list further down.

I love conditional fields in the dev branch already as it just made it so neat and tidy

[Marty Walker]

Nice work Pete!

My only niggle is the thumbnails for the gallery are probably bigger in filesize than they need to be.

[Pitbull]

nice website Pete!! clean and eayse to eye..

can you tell how you use image for languages links?

thank you.

[Nico Knoll]

My grandma lives next to Husum

[Pete]

Nice work Pete!

My only niggle is the thumbnails for the gallery are probably bigger in filesize than they need to be.

I can't remember how I sized them - I think it was to cater for the various screen sizes but I may have left the thumbs too big at max size - I'll take a look, thanks!

nice website Pete!! clean and eayse to eye..

can you tell how you use image for languages links?

thank you.

All of the language stuff was just from this page: http://processwire.com/api/multi-language-support/multi-language-urls/

My grandma lives next to Husum

Cool Never been there myself, but it looks nice!