UBS ARENA - EURO 2008 Public Viewing in Switzerland

Hi all.
We created the Website for the Public Viewings of UEFA EURO 2008 in Switzerland. At the beginning we looked at Drupal, Typo3 and MODx as CMS. Since MODx is very flexible and extendable by using PHP (instead of some proprietary Scripting Language) and the Backend looked very user friendly, we finally decided to give it a go. Even though the version hasn’t even reached 1.0 i’m very happy with the capabilities of MODx so far. We had some Problems when it comes to Languages, but we were able to resolve most of these issues. The Site as it is of now comes in 4 Languages:

German: http://www.ubsarena.com/de.html
English: http://www.ubsarena.com/en.html
French: http://www.ubsarena.com/fr.html
Italian: http://www.ubsarena.com/it.html

Of course, this was/is not a one man job. There where several People involved: Graphic Designers, Content Writer/Translators and so on. My part was the MODx Setup, Snippets, Templates, CSS, Flash stuff.. these kind of things.
Some informations about the Site:

• 4 Languages, pages linked with the corresponding 3 other pages (where available)
• Automatically generated Navigation Titles (these are images, generated by a MODx Plugin i wrote)
• Multiple User Accounts/Groups for Publishers, Translators etc. (User only sees what he should edit/translate)
• Full path friendly URLs
• Animation in Header plays randomly generated Animations (you’ll never see the same animation there)

There are still some things that need tweaking. Mainly the search functionality (HyperFlexSearch) does not seem to offer an easy way to separate the Languages correctly. Search is currently disabled.

So far so good. Every sort of feedback is appreciated.
Regards -- roman

Hi Roman,

great site! Although my first try to get tickets for the EURO2008 wasn´t successful (ordered over 1200 tickets, result nothing...) I hope to get some tickets next year. And if not...now I know where to go

One thing to the website: How did you manage the multilingual management? Do you have some automatism or is it like in the Wiki provided the manual setting of corresponding documents?

Quote from: MadeMyDay at Dec 11, 2007, 05:50 AM

Hi Roman,

great site! Although my first try to get tickets for the EURO2008 wasn´t successful (ordered over 1200 tickets, result nothing...) I hope to get some tickets next year. And if not...now I know where to go

One thing to the website: How did you manage the multilingual management? Do you have some automatism or is it like in the Wiki provided the manual setting of corresponding documents?

Hi and thanks for the reply.

The UBS ARENA is "just" a public viewing (in 16 cities). The tickets promoted on the Site are not for the official Matches, but for the seated places inside these public viewing arenas. Footings are free.
To answer your question: No, sadly we did not find a good solution for the multilingual management. The Problem is, that the different languages may have different content structures and thus you cannot simply link a document tree leaf with the leaf at the same position in the other language tree. I created a snippet that outputs the document tree as list, to link the documents and provide a better approach than simply entering ids. I attached a screenshot of how this looks in the manager.

Hi Roman,

The UBS ARENA is "just" a public viewing (in 16 cities). The tickets promoted on the Site are not for the official Matches, but for the seated places inside these public viewing arenas. Footings are free.

I realised that, so...

And if not...now I know where to go

;)

You multilingual solution is cute, perhaps you´ll find the time to provide a tutorial in the wiki

Great site, very pleasing clean look and feel. Well done.

I am still getting over England’s elimination, I am not English but I like to see the classic teams playing

Regarding the generated images; do they get generated on each visit or do they get cached? The first time I went to the site they took a little longer to come in (also when the nav changed languages) but load in fast after that. That is a cool feature, the designer I work with is always complaining that I limit her by not allowing images in the nav, with this feature I could resolve that problem.

That is a cool countdown clock.

The gallery seems to always go to German, I guess that this is to make it more straight forward to manage the gallery (better than having 4 copies)? I have a similar problem with a site I am working on and found a solution by using the @DOCUMENT binding to get the content from the original page. Not sure if that would work with MaxiGallery though?

Thanks for the feeback dev_cw

Yes, it sucks that England is out of the tournament. I’ll miss the "english football play" for sure.

Regarding the images. Actually they are generated only when a title changes in the manager. Together with the images, a CSS File is being generated, that references them as background image. Look here to see the generated CSS File: http://www.ubsarena.ch/assets/cache/css/scarf.css
The navigation is a normal unordered list with links. The title links are hidden and "replaced" by the images using CSS only. That way a search Engine would still see regular Links in the HTML Code. But you’ll probably better understand what i mean if you inspect the navigation with Firebug.
What you experienced was probably the loading of CSS Background images. After the first loading, they should be cached though.

You’re absolutely right when it comes to the gallery. Thats another point that needs further tweaking Maybe i should try to solve it with @DOCUMENT Bindings. Thanks for pointing it out.

Nice solution for the images, nice way to make the designer happy. Generating on the fly for every visit would have been overkill on a busy site, generating on save is great. I use image replacement for static navigation but have never been able to use images for dynamically generated navigations. So if the editor adds a new section, the navigation images will automatically get the new images as well as the style sheet will be updated...nice.

Unfortunately the bindings only work with template variables, you can’t use it in the content field or any other document variable (that would be nice). Also @DOCUMENT gets the raw content, to get the parsed content you need to use another function (parseDocumentSource). There is some discussion in this post: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,20371.0.html
In my case I just needed standard content, but in your case since there is the gallery call you may want the parsed data.

Very nice site

ubsarena.ch/en - under Locations - link for Nyon uses /de instead of /en

All other links from each homepage are use /language correctly.

Will check other pages soon.