Mercedes-Benz Passenger Cars

Kaufmann has represented Mercedes-Benz in Chile since 1926. Its portal is the brand's commercial front door in the country, and the brief was to redo the entire passenger-car area: the brand home page and the page for every model in the range, AMG versions included.

The underlying problem in a car catalogue isn't laying out a pretty page, but making sure thirty models don't become thirty hand-maintained pages. Every launch, every price or equipment change would mean touching templates one by one. The solution was to separate structure from content: a master page defines the common skeleton of every model page (model header, gallery, equipment blocks, call to action) and the catalogue lives as Objects, Liferay's own data model.

With that, publishing a new model stops being a development task. The marketing team creates the record, fills in its fields and the page appears with the same design as the rest. Display templates (ADTs) decide how that information is painted in each context: the home-page grid, the listing by body type or the full model page.

The result is a site where the design lives in one place and the data in another, which is what lets the range grow without the maintenance growing with it.