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In-depth insights on content, code, and creativity

Using Varnish to speed up eZ Publish websites

Varnish Cache is a powerful website caching system that dramatically increases your site's performance. It does so by sitting in front of your Apache, PHP, content management system, and database stack in order to cache your web pages and serve repeat requests. This saves the back-end stack from consuming unnecessary resources to generate the same pages over and over again. Mugo Web has implemented Varnish in front of eZ Publish for several client websites. Although every client has different needs, we've come up with an outline of tips and considerations that are common across most implementations.

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Applying borders to eZ Publish images using ImageMagick

One of our clients recently needed to apply a custom frame / border to all images in a certain section of an eZ Publish site. One way to do this is to edit each image in Photoshop or GIMP, but this can be a time-intensive, manual process. Another is to use CSS, but this again takes time and is also more limited. A flexible and automated way to do this is to configure ImageMagick filters in an eZ Publish image alias. The required style would then be applied to all relevant images.

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Twitter tip: Prompting users to follow you after they Tweet

There are many variations to social media strategies to suit particular client sites and goals. Some implementation details, on the other hand, are universally applicable. One such detail is a Twitter feature whereby a user is prompted to follow your Twitter account whenever they share your content.

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Google Sitemaps for big sites: splitting the sitemap into multiple files

Sitemaps are an important element of search engine optimization (SEO), in order to provide search engines an accurate outline of what content exists on your site. One of our client sites recently outgrew Google's sitemap URL limit. Instead of removing content from the sitemap, we implemented a simple solution of using a sitemap index to reference multiple sitemap files.

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eep case study: Author name resolution in The 49th Shelf

The problem:

One of our favourite projects, The 49th Shelf, aggregates a lot of data from a diversity of sources. Naturally, there is a range of quality; but even more than that: different sources often refer to the same physical object in different ways. Specifically, a person who writes several books can be referred to in a variety of ways:

  • John Reynolds
  • John L. Reynolds
  • John Lawrence Reynolds

There are some heuristics to resolve most of these cases, but there are always seem to be some that defy the code and require a manual fix.

This process has to be performed on the production site, so we want to minimize the amount of time that the data is inconsistent and we don't want to run untested code.

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Complete approval workflow solution for eZ Publish

Approval workflows of various types are required across the web. Whether for legal review, cross-channel media review, or purely editorial review, approval workflows are essential to define and support content publication. Based on our experience with clients in many industries, Mugo Web has developed an eZ Market extension eZ Collaboration Workflow to be a complete workflow solution.

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eZ Flow case study: landing page for Rasmussen Reports Election 2012

For many media sites, news changes fast, and the timely updating of content is key. Landing pages are the main information funnel, and it is important for editors to be able to update the content shown on landing pages as easily as possible. Where relevant, content should also update itself. The Rasmussen Reports Election 2012 page is one such example, where we've empowered editors to make content and layout changes in a graphical user interface, without having to contact a web developer. In this article, we will show you how various areas of the Election 2012 page are updated using the eZ Flow extension for eZ Publish.

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Command line tool for eZ Publish, called "eep"

Mugo has a tool that we use internally to help with the main aspects of a developer's life: development, debugging and maintenance. The tool is called "eep", short for "Ease eZ Publish". It's a command line tool which provides many functions and allows for accomplishing tasks quickly by integrating with tools like awk, grep and xargs for powerful one-liners and supports rapid development of powerful bash scripts by leveraging eep as a library of eZ Publish specific operations.

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Running multiple instances of eZ Find on the same host

The problem:

By default, 2 instances of eZ Find can not run at the same IP address because eZ Find and Solr communicate with each other via an IP port. This becomes an issue if you happen to run a staging instance on the same server as a production instance, or on your local dev machine where there are many sites running.

A nice solution makes use of the symlinking trick for managing platform-specific versions of settings files I recently documented.

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Simple framework for custom datatype validation rules

A common feature need on eZ Publish installations is to have more specific validation on Text Line attributes: if you want to force a field to be in a valid postal code format for example, you have to write a specific datatype for it, or you have to override a template to perform client-side validation only. The Mugo Validated String extension provides a framework around a "Text line (validated)" datatype, where the validation method can be selected via a dropdown list, and developers can quickly create new validation types with a few lines of code. In this post, we explain the extension, as well as how we ported the feature to be used with eZ Survey via the Mugo Survey Addons extension.

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Accidental DDOS by desktop news aggregator

Since the beginning of 2012, for one of our clients with a big news website, we recognized a drastic increase in website traffic without an accompanying increase in ad impressions. Under normal conditions, an increase in traffic would be a positive sign; however, in this case it was caused by end user software that turned normal web users into aggressive web crawlers. This essentially created an accidental but consistent distributed DoS (denial of service) attack.

Here, we explain how we identified the cause and mitigated its effects.

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Read Local map: user interface design and optimization

Recently, we built a map interface for The 49th Shelf's Read Local: The 100-Mile Book Diet website project using the Google Maps API. The website is an online book community focused on Canadian books. Users can visit the map section to find Canadian books by geographic location, and they can also pin books on the map, selecting locations that are meaningful to the books in some way. 

Allowing anybody to participate in the evolution of the Read Local map means that we have to pay particular attention to the "Add a Book" user experience. If the user experience is intuitive and pleasant, people will be much more willing (and able) to pin a book and help make the map more useful and fun. On the other hand, a confusing interface can hamper the accuracy of the pin data (in the case where books are pinned in the wrong location) and turn people off from participating.

Here's a look at two main considerations regarding user interface design and optimization in the "Add a Book" workflow.

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Dev / staging / production INI settings files strategy

Overview:

In almost every project we have a small number of settings files that have important differences on the production host versus development or staging hosts. This problem is made serious when the settings are in your version control system.

The resolution is trivial: Create a version of each file for each context that needs to be customized, eg site.ini.append.php_PRODUCTION, put this in SVN, and create a symlink with the name that eZ Publish is looking for.

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eZ Publish object edit interface customizations: browse mode and custom edit actions

Extensibility in eZ Publish is key, down to its object edit interface. This post explains a couple of the lesser documented edit features that you can extend: using browse mode in a custom datatype, and using a custom edit handler to add an edit action.

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Viewing eZ Publish content objects by content class

Description

If you've ever had a hard time finding certain content objects in your eZ Publish installation, just because browsing was a pain, then this extension is for you! The Mugo Content Class Manager helps you look through all content objects using the content class of the objects, not their location in the content tree.

This means that if you need to look through, say, the latest 10 articles on your eZ Publish system regardless of their location, you can easily do that using the new Mugo Content Class Manager. Do you need to find a blog post with a specific title and you`re not sure which folder it`s in ? Just list all blog posts and sort them by name in the Mugo Content Class Manager. This blog post talks about the Mugo Content Class Manager extension and how you can install it and use it on your eZ Publish system.

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SEO: Eliminating duplicate content on eZ Publish sites

A common task in website search engine optimization is to set up Google Webmaster Tools and go through its HTML suggestions. Many of the suggestions center around duplicate content -- pages at different URLs but that have the same HTML title, meta description, body content, and more. This post summarizes a couple of common duplicate content scenarios within an eZ Publish site, and how to solve them.

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mysqldump alternative: MySQL backups with Percona Xtrabackup

Many hosting companies will take care of file system and database backups for you.  We have a few clients where we have file system backups configured, but database backups have to be handled manually, since the database is "live data".  Often we can just configure a cronjob that runs mysqldump so that a database snapshot is stored to a file and thus regularly backed up when the file system backup is run.  However, sometimes you have a perfect storm where mysqldump is too heavy for the server (causing severe slowdowns or even crashing some services), even if run in the least intensive way (such as with the --quick flag) and at a low traffic time: partially due to lack of system resources and a large database.

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Mugo news: April 2012

The start of 2012 has been full of exciting events for Mugo, with customer site launches, extension releases, eZ Publish community initiatives, tutorials, and more. Here is a list of what we've been up to lately.

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eZ Publish template basics: the big picture

If you're relatively new to eZ Publish, you might know about siteaccesses, design, extensions, and overrides. You can build a basic extension, edit a template file, and write a simple full view override rule. However, you might have trouble putting this all together. You might struggle with whether to put your template in the "standard" design or a custom site design folder. You might be confused as to whether to put your template in the "override/templates" folder or the "templates" folder, and/or the overall template path in the first place. This article will take a step back for a high-level look at how eZ Publish loads extensions, particularly design extensions, as well as how to find out which templates are being used and how to properly override them.

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Why Mugoers like working at Mugo

Mugo Web is not a large company that offers perks such as an indoor gym, a company hockey pool, a big travel budget, or a fridge stocked with fresh fruit and snacks every day (although we do our best on an individual basis to share good food with each other!). That said, we love working at Mugo, for reasons that might not be so obviously communicable on our website. Here are our raw responses to an internal e-mail thread that asked "What are 3 things you like about working at Mugo?"

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eZ Ecosystem Conference March 19-20 in Berkeley, California

Mugo Web is jointly hosting the first eZ Publish event of the year in North America with Granite Horizon. We are currently accepting talk proposals and training topic requests.

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Contributions to the eZ Publish code base via GitHub

The open source content management system eZ Publish moved its code repository to GitHub near the end of 2010. Although eZ Publish's code base has been open source since its first version in 1999, before the move to GitHub, it was not an easy process for the community to contribute to the code.  Mugo Web has enjoyed contributing to the eZ Publish code by making pull requests and hopes to make more in the future!

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Exact image resizing in eZ Publish with custom image filters

eZ Publish comes with a useful set of image settings, and has a powerful framework within which you can define custom filters to be executed by the image handler. In this article, we'll show you how to make use of a custom ImageMagick filter to achieve exact image sizes.

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Mobile browser detection and redirection in eZ Publish

When you are setting up a mobile website separate from the main website, one of the elements that tends to be an after-thought is main-to-mobile site redirection. This article goes through some of the considerations regarding creating a mobile setting, and main-to-mobile site redirection specifically.  It explains how to use Apache Mobile Filter as one option to facilitate mobile device detection and redirection.

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