New Society Publishers

http://www.newsociety.com

newsociety.com

Mugo built the new version of http://www.newsociety.com, New Society Publishers' main online presence. newsociety.com merges publisher information, book information, event listings, blog posts, and a forum onto one website platform. Working in the background is a regular sync of ONIX book data to eZ Publish.

"We thoroughly enjoy our working relationship with Mugo Web. They are customer-focused, take the time to listen, give good solid advice with our best interests in mind, and have a quick turnaround time. We've had a number of compliments on the new website, which looks goods, functions well, and performs solidly."

- Paul O'Sullivan, IT Specialist, New Society Publishers

Background

Born out of strong activist roots and now based on Gabriola Island, British Columbia, New Society Publishers' (NSP) mission is "to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment, in a manner that models this vision." NSP wanted a new website to represent their mission, increase community involvement, and above all, enhance the display and discovery of their books.  With the initial visual design provided by NSP, this new site, built on eZ Publish by Mugo Web, accomplishes these goals while supporting the complex requirements of the ONIX book data standard.

New Society Publishers home page

Books

All of NSP's books are searchable, categorized, sortable, purchasable, and shareable on the website.

Existing categorization is combined with extra categories and tagging to support multiple ways to find books. Books can be listed alphabetically, by category, by author, by tag, in a special "upcoming" list, and by freeform searches.

Each book page shows a cover image, a description, excerpts and a table of contents when available, and other related pieces of information such as ISBN, publish date, and size dimensions. There is a purchase button in order to start the integrated checkout process with Miva Merchant.

Book full view

Books that cannot yet be purchased have a pre-order form. Users can use ShareThis tools to tell others about interesting books. Each book page also has a "You might also enjoy" related books widget.

Authors and other contributors are featured with their own pages, and have with biographies and a list of titles.

Author page

There is also an RSS feed that is automatically updated whenever new books are added.

ONIX bridge

Book data is stored in the industry standard ONIX XML data format and is managed using external tools such as OnixEdit. Mugo Web built a bridge between the XML data and eZ Publish in order to support importing new books and updating existing books. This results in the automatic creation of the book pages and the relevant internal data relations to contributors and BISAC categories for display on the website. Search engine friendly URLs, titles, and page structures are created and updated as part of this process.

ONIX feed sync

Book content can be manually edited in eZ Publish, and where desired, data can be marked to be kept as-is in the next automated import.

Extra fields are also supported that are specific for display on the website. This includes extended biographical notes and social media links.

General content management

The NSP home page is clean and informative, with an interactive book carousel, a featured book, author, and blog post, and a list of upcoming events. Staff have editorial control to update the home page, as well as supporting "about" pages, event pages, a sitemap, a downloadable catalog, and more using a built-in WYSIWYG editor. The site integrates with the Emma e-mail marketing service to power newsletters.

Other community features

NSP posts regularly to its blog on topics of new books, activism, the environment, community, food, sustainable living, and much more. The blog was previously hosted on WordPress; Mugo Web imported all 500+ posts to eZ Publish while preseving all images, author relations and formatting. Extra features include embedded YouTube videos, e-mail / Facebook / Twitter and other sharing tools, Facebook-powered comments, category and date archives, and blog-specific searching and tagging. Also, the blog supports the embedding of books within posts via internal relationships, to automatically display each cover image and link to each book page.

The "Book Club" forum supports sub-forums and threads dedicated to different topics and books. Here, readers can interact with each other and with book authors to discuss relevant topics. A "keep me updated" feature sends e-mails to subscribers whenever new content is posted.

Book Club forum

Contact

604-637-6396
hiATmugo.ca

#414-207 W. Hastings St
Vancouver, BC
Canada


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We thoroughly enjoy our working relationship with Mugo Web. They are customer-focused, take the time to listen, give good solid advice with our best interests in mind, and have a quick turnaround time. We've had a number of compliments on the new website, which looks goods, functions well, and performs solidly.

Paul O'Sullivan, IT Specialist, New Society Publishers

From our first contact, the team at Mugo has shown an unprecedented level of commitment to our web projects... ending almost 4 years of struggling! In the three months Mugo worked on our new version -- which had stalled with our previous developers -- we have made more progress than ever before. They are fast, precise and thorough, and definitely stand out in the industry!

Sébastien Michel, Director, Frogs-in-NZ

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