Digital Butter

China Life Style Portal `Shi Wai Yuan` Launched using MODx Revolution

Today we’ve soft-launched a new site called ‘Shi Wai Yuan’ or ‘世外源’ in Chinese. Here’s a little intro, taken from the actual website:

Shi Wai Yuan is a luxury lifestyle website that focuses on Wine, Travel and Leisure, Luxury Goods, Health, Sports, Automobiles, Entertainment, Culture and Etiquette, Sustainability and being Green and Environmentally conscious, Cuisine and Culinary Arts, and Homes and Property. Education is one of the core elements of Shi Wai Yuan.

^ http://en.shiwaiyuan.com/about/our-philosophy.html

It’s aimed at the Chinese market primarily, and it has some interesting and unique content - I’ve enjoyed watching the tongue-in-cheek etiquette videos especially:

For a site like this we wouldn’t choose to build it in anything other than MODx Revolution.

Right now we’ve got 2 contexts setup for the site, one for each language. But we’ll be adding a third when we launch an ecommerce section of this site in a month or two.

Having launched a handful of sites making use of contexts, I have to say I think it’s my favorite addition to MODx and I think it extends its’ capabilities exponentially.

In case it’s of interest, here’s a list of the snippets we used to develop this site, accompanied by some of our own custom snippets of course:

• getResources
• FormIt
• GoogleSiteMap
• Breadcrumbs
• Gallery
• SimpleSearch

The site is built in two languages, English & Chinese. We’ve done quite a few multi-lingual sites recently, but this one has by far been the most smoothly and efficiently executed now that we have learned from our past experiences with translation management.

One of the rules we will be sticking to is quite a simple one: as a developer, you are not allowed to close a file in your IDE if even one measly bit of hard coded text is left in there… chances are, you’ll forget about it and hunting down loose hard coded language strings is not a fun job for anyone.

I’m also really impressed at how fast this whole system is running - without any specific extra work other than using the MODx caching system, the pages are rendering in around ~0.1 seconds - and that’s before we’ve even had time to do any heavy optimization work or tried out any of the advanced caching abilities (e.g. memcache).