Mitsubishi Motors new website/ AJAX and Flash

[ganar]

Hello Joomla friends!

We recently launched the new Mitsubishi Website for the venezuelan community and would like to have your constructive feedback on it.



Website URL: http://www.mitsubishi-motors.com.ve

Template:

We made 6 custom templates for the site

Additional Extensions (Components, Modules, Plug ins):

• DBQ manager: used to display prices
• DOCMAN: file downloads for the general public
• MGM Joomla! Gallery Manager: Still the best gallery manager out there, used for all the galleries in the site
• Moslate: for custom element design, there is no way to do what we did without it. Great stuff!. Custom code for page structures, custom titles, custom video loaders and a long etc.
• Extended Menu: at last a great module for professional templates , with the level of detail and flexibility needed
• mod_flexcontent was used for the videoblog list display (the button on the first page)
• AllVideos Plug in
• Tabs & Slides In Content Items
• And a hack to the mospagebreak bot that allowed us to put the TOC were we wanted

Custom Development:

We built a custom flash menu that uses AMFPHP to communicate with the joomla DB. The menu does just what we needed. We have a lot of trouble with the commercial and free solutions available.
We also modified mod_latestnews to include a link to the news section, this is a very useful addition.


Other Features:

This site uses the fork of JOOMLA's Accessible Joomla! (http://forge.joomla.org/sf/projects/accessible_joomla). this fork is being actively maintained and is a great option if you need to use a tableless xhtml compliant version of JOOMLA.
The site use the last version of sfir from http://novemberborn.net. The titles use Univers Condensed Light.
We integrated mootools (http://mootools.net) in two of our templates in order to get that AJAX feel. We had many problems with this due to the interaction between flash and mootools: this technologies don't go well together at all.


Three (at least) specific areas of my site that I'd like feedback on (design, code, graphics, etc.):

We would like your input in the usability, design and implementation of joomla technologies. We still need help on testing the site on Opera and other browsers. Your input is very important to us

Additional Comments:
We would like to thank the Joomla development team and the developers of each and every component we are using in this site. We also thank the community in this forum for the ideas, solutions to problems and feedback.


The Triphase Team
http://www.3ph.com

[usasportstraining]

Wow!  Very nice!  Very professional and smooth.  I'm impressed.  I don't have any suggestions or criticism.

[eyezberg]

Señor Orange, very nice, very non-joomla looking. Like it a lot.
Comments:
* Intensive usage of com_contact => I would style the input fields as (on my laptop screen) they are very hard to see.. just a slight background color.
* Menu "Carga" / Submenu "Centros de ..?" is behind the car names here (so not readable) on FF2.
* VERY! nice usage of AJAX in "Noticias" section
* Nice touch to make "inicio" appear only on other pages

So tell us, when are you gona release all the great stuff you developed for this site (ya sabé de que estoy hablando..)?

[ganar]

Hello Mr. Eyezberg,

Thanks, a lot for stopping by and leaving your comments, I guess I'll have to include "AJAX" and "Flash" on the subject of the post to get more visits in this thread (I'm also shown as "new member", which is odd...)

1.-  Intensive use of com_contact... form field CSS design
This issue has been corrected, thanks a lot for your comment.

2.- Menu "Carga" / Submenu "Centros de ..?" is behind the car names here (so not readable) on FF2
We are about to correct this issue, thanks for the tip

3.-  VERY! nice usage of AJAX in "Noticias" section
Thanks! took a lot of effort to get it to work, still has a couple of issues that we would like to correct but have been unable to do so

4.- Nice touch to make "inicio" appear only on other pages
Yes , this is possible thanks to extended menu by Daniel Ecer: great developer, great module

Did you get the chance to view one of the news items? the flash titles are very, very nice. We broke joomla conventions – and coding– on those. Here is an example:

http://www.mitsubishi-motors.com.ve/cms ... ew/430/20/

This was very hard to do using css... In Joomla 1.5 it will be quite easy, but it was hell to obtain in this version. The worst–or the best–  part is that very few people will notice... :P

We want to release the code for the menu, our only concern is to get it cleaned for the general population and that one of the php extensions that AMFPHP uses, iconv(), is not available in every installation of PHP 4.

The AJAX part can be released, but we would like some help to clean up the code, we would like the black window to be hidden in css, instead of hiding it with JS , or better yet, to be written completely by JS only if the script appears.

[ganar]

Wow!  Very nice!  Very professional and smooth.  I'm impressed.  I don't have any suggestions or criticism.

Thanks for the kind words!

[andrespq77]

Hola,

los botones de los autos están un poco pixelados 

[ganar]

Indeed: we had to downgrade from flash 9, wich has a  much better rendering engine, to flash 6 due to the fact that many people on the corporate realm can't upgrade flash to version 9. We are looking for a way to include either a 6 or 9 version of the menu depending on the flash version tha the user has.

[drewhiggins]

Parece impresionante a mí, bueno ver incluso a compañías masivas como Mitsubishi está utilizando Joomla. En hecho, es mejor que la mayoría del coche unos yo ha visto. Gran compañero del trabajo.

[eyezberg]

Yes, those titles look like html -untill you right-click.. good job fixing the other stuff already .
and good news about releasing some of this, would be cool.

[matthewhayashida]

Doesn't look very much like Joomla. I really like the template.

[ganar]

Thanks Mathew!

we are trying to get away form the portal look with our corporate clients. This friday we had a wonderful conversation on how to break away from the page metaphor altogether when working with content.

Some applications have already done this (gmail, google maps). What kind of media and user experience is needed in order to do that with a CMS? More video? less text? can we really go all the way wth AJAX or do we need to stop in the lower levels and leave the current design of the pages?

Maybe we should start a thread on the matter...

[matthewhayashida]

Good idea.

[ganar]

Hola,

los botones de los autos están un poco pixelados 

------------------------------------

Hello Andrés,

We did the modification mentioned above: now the site will render the menu in flash 6 if you don't have flash 9, allowing the people that have the recent version of flash to have the best experience.


------------------------------------


Hola Andrés:

Hicimos la modificación que mencionamos más arriba, ahora debes ver el menú de showroom sin pixelación

[Magicspon]

Awesome Site... looks miles apart from normal joomla sites. Top stuff.

The site which i am building in many respects is similar to your site.  I will be using a lot of flash on the site.

In regards to your gallery component, where did you get it from, i've search for the gallery component you listed but not been able to find it.

many thanks
dave

[ganar]

Hi magicspoon,

Thanks for the nice comments!

MGM seems to be out of luck this days, the homepega is this one MGM Joomla Gallery Manager

I still feel this is the best gallery component by far, at least from the point of view of the developer, the flexibility is astounding. The problem is that it has been abandoned: I've tried many times to get in touch with the developers but they don't answer...


I think that MGM needs a complete rewrite the code is a little bit sloppy and no longer works in MySQL 5

[candidosa2]

sorry that link she not work http://www.mitsubishi-motors.com.ve
ou you change to http://www.mitsubishi-motors.com

[kickarse]

Wow looking great!