New Site Online

After 3 months of work and about 80 hours logged a new version of Mit Maro Productions has been released. This version of the site improves greatly over the previous version in all aspects. I have revamped the look of the site, improved the performance by about 50% and fixes the many issues with comment spam.

The site has a brand new look that looks a hell of a lot nicer then the red and black mess that was an attempt at a Web 2.0 design, opting for a more graphically diverse style. Another big change is the use of a navigation menu on the right, all my previous designs used a left menu or used a three column design.

This is the first time I have used AJAX in my site, the admin (which you can't see, pictures later maybe) uses AJAX for all actions and the contact form in the navigation to the right uses AJAX. JavaScript/jQuery is also used throughout the site for other things like form validation and the fading tabs to the right. Despite the use of JavaScript the site is still functional (besides the contact form) with JavaScript disabled.

I have also ditched the Smarty template engine for the Dwoo template engine. I have done this for two reasons, first it would not cache pages in a way I found useful and second, and more important, I found it way to slow. Since switching template engines I have noticed an improvement of greater than 50% in performance. Since Dwoo offers a better caching mechanism and better performance then Smarty it was the ideal choice.

I am very content with the new version of the site and I am only getting started. I have several other ideas started and I am planning to release new updates on a monthly basis. I also have several great ideas for posts which should be going online in the up coming weeks.