Redesign enarion.net

Now the interface is more accurate, contains better and clean colors. It should be more userfriendly, contains more and current information and an improved navigation.

What do you think about the new layout? It would be nice to know your
oppinion - what is good, what is bad, what could be done better?

If you're interested about the used technology, than you can keep on reading. If not, you're done with this post.

The website runs with a little selfwritten cms, I call it enitCMS - but this is a work-in-progress. You might have seen already some of the features, that include multi-language support, and seo-friendly urls. When I started programming, I tried different available cms - but did not found a application that was perfect. On the one had, they had a huge amount of features, but on the other hand an ugly user interface or backend/admin interface, or did not support multi languages, or you had to change a lot of the code to make it seo-friendly. So I decided to create my own cms from scratch, a little handy but powerful "underdog" cms.

Currently, some websites with different sizes run with this software. Over the time, some of the programming hacks have been removed, so it's getting more and more easy to install and use. The admin interface is not yet perfect, but is working quite well.

Let's have a look at some features:

Seo-friendlyness

Most of the cms available were not designed for seo-friendlyness and you'll have to install plugins (if available) to give them clean urls, specify common meta-tags - or even edit the template or (even worse) the program code.

enitCMS uses a human-readable string as url-part that is looking and working user- and seo-friendly. More functions are implemented and/or planned. I might describe them in a later post.

Multi-language support

You can specify language-depended values for each menu and content. A default / fall-back language is used, if no content for a selected language is available. I experimented with language-depending templates - which can be specified in the source code for now - but it's hard to keep them synchronized and so the latest installations run with one template only (eg. enarion.net does - e.g. compare http://enarion.net/ to http://enarion.net/?lang=de ). This is not perfect, but ok for now.

So, now you've seen how the languages are separated: the default language is used without parameter; if you specify a language with the url parameter ?lang= (e.g. ?lang=de ) this language is used instead.

Contentlets

Small portions of common, website-wide information should be visible on the whole website, special part of the website or one webpage only - as e.g. the latest news from the Google Sitemap blog at all pages of the Google Sitemaps section.

I named such a small portion of content "contentlet" - maybe not a perfect name, but it did sound funny to me. Programming is a serious job, but sometimes you have to be a bit nonserious. So, again - you can specify where and when this contentlet should occur. E.g. depending on the pages (with inhertiance to deeper pages), depending on the time (with the start and end timestamp) and of course the language.

Lets have a detailed look at the initial example: the latest post of the Google Sitemaps blog should be visible on all Google Sitemap pages at enarion.net. So the contentlet is assigned to the Google Sitemaps main page http://enarion.net/google/ and all pages inherit this contentlet. The code of the contentlet contains 2 lines of embedded PHP code that grab the latest item of the Google Sitemaps blog from the RSS feed and format it. That's it.

There are more features, but also more not yet nice implemented features ^TM - but it's working and I'm fine with it.

Anyway - now it looks as a documentation and feature description, but the origin target of this blog posting is the new layout.
So again: How you like the new layout? What is good, what is not so good and could be improved?