Mugo Web's blog

We recently used OneAll to develop a feature that allows user generated content to be created, submitted for review, published, and then automatically posted to the creator's social media channels without additional effort on their part. Here's how we accomplished this.

Imagine thousands of Canadian kids’ books, located in one place. They’re here, complete with a database you can search by genre, age range, grade level, and theme. Add to that hundreds of classroom resources for teachers, librarians, and educators to explore by type, subject, and grade level and you've got the perfect match.

ReaderBound is a powerful website platform that helps publishers easily showcase and sell their books online.

It combines sophisticated content management and e-commerce solutions, client support, website hosting, and maintenance into one convenient package.

We often explain the ReaderBound benefits in terms of what it enables you to do. However, one of its key benefits is what it takes off your plate: a number of site maintenance worries.

Whether you're a B2B publication such as Habitat Magazine or a B2C publication such as The Christian Science Monitor, you've likely been facing challenges around advertising, the erosion of print dollars, and intense competition for reader attention (both in print and digital) for years. To stay competitive and be able to thrive, you need to innovate digitally. Carol Ott, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Habitat Magazine, states that "without digital, we would no longer be in business". Is your digital platform and website enabling or hindering you?

Words like innovation and digital transformation tend to be sprinkled liberally in discussions about digital publishing and online revenue models these days. But stories about publishers that have actually implemented new digital strategies resulting in positive revenue streams are not nearly as common. One of our clients, The Christian Science Monitor, however, has done just that, reinventing itself online to better resonate with its readers, and generating a critical new stream of subscriber revenue.

Facebook's solution to speed up mobile web page loading is called Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA), and it's only available to Facebook app users. Here's a look at how to integrate FBIA into eZ Publish / eZ Platform.

On content heavy sites, it can be useful to inject snippets of code into CMS data before display (for example, into the body copy of an article). These snippets could be automatically generated glossaries, tables of contents, or ad units, placed mid-content.

Let's explore a general approach to getting such snippets into place.

Giving association members the ability to submit insurance claims online saves time and money for the Alberta Gymnastics Federation. Here we'll take a look at the insurance claims submission web app we built in eZ Publish / eZ Platform. 

In an effort to engage its audience, our client, FindaTopDoc, wanted to integrate a custom Q&A platform into its site. They chose Oracle + Bronto as the accompanying marketing automation tool. Here we outline how we integrated Bronto with eZ Platform to build a robust Q&A and newsletter system with the capacity to send customized e-mails to tens of thousands of users.

The content business used to be the exclusive purview of media outlets, book, and magazine publishers. But today, the maxim “everyone is a publisher” has become more relevant than ever, particularly online, where audiences are not only wary of ads, they may not ever see them.

Intended audience: technical managers, senior developers

Agile developers must constantly strike a balance between building solutions for a known existing case and building solutions that can scale to handle unknown future cases. On the one hand, Agile philosophy encourages us to build and iterate as necessary: Move Fast and Break Things. On the other, various programming best practices encourage us to build in an extensible and modular way from the start: Do One Thing and Do It Well. On smaller projects, these two goals can be achieved simultaneously; but on larger projects – especially given time and budget constraints – it is sometimes necessary to prioritize one over the other. 

Project managers and full-stack developers face such choices almost immediately, during the initial development, staging, and deployment phases. For instance, a project may begin with a narrow scope and require only a single developer’s time. In this case, it often makes sense to forgo provisioning a dedicated development virtual machine (VM) or staging server, and instead, to use generic or shared environments. But as the scope of the project grows, for instance with caching or proxy layers, it often makes sense to implement better development, staging, and production parity.

It’s not every day you hear about lucrative new revenue streams opening up for magazine publishers. In fact, most media outlets prefer to paint dark doomsday pictures when it comes to the future of magazines. 

This year, after 10 years of steady growth, we reached the milestone of having 10 people on the Mugo Web team. And yet, in early sales discussions, we continue to face concerns about our size and stability: "How can I count on you still being there next year?" We've had to prove that we compare well against -- and outlast -- competing web development partners with hundreds of employees. Inherent to the Mugo story is a long-term, stable team, and our small size is one of the reasons our clients choose us.

Follow along as we demonstrate a stunning example of the importance of testing changes to your site.

If content is or needs to become a core part of your business, choosing a content management system (CMS) is critical. Here's a look at why some of our clients and partners chose eZ.

I have a short list of suggestions for people applying to programming jobs and who have to do a programming test. I am driven to make these suggestions after watching a lot of programmers applying at Mugo: I am a programmer myself, but I am in the position of judging candidate's efforts on the basis of a business owner or project lead.

eZ Publish allows you to develop custom REST APIs to transfer data among different platforms. This "getting started" guide will show you how to build and integrate a REST API into an eZ Publish installation by developing a custom module view that returns a JSON object.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is Google's technology designed to create fast mobile pages. AMP allows developers to take advantage of fast rendering and improved performance. Here's a look at how it can be integrated into an existing eZ Publish website.

Sending e-mail newsletters comes with a variety of challenges: selecting the contents, sorting them into sections, writing the HTML code, entering the title, description, images, and other data for each piece of content, and finally, previewing the e-mail. The process can be long and stressful if done manually.

The Mugo Feed Manager is easy to use, requires no background knowledge, and has an intuitive interface recommended for publishers and content managers.

A Mugo developer's toolbox is packed full of tools. Big tools, small tools, new tools, old tools. We don't care if they're shiny or use all the latest buzzwords to describe their functionality. Much like the solutions we build, we care that they work, and work well.

Here's a brief look at our favourite tools to work with.

Publishing is something of a calling and has often been described as a labour of love. It is also a key business practice whose importance has spread well beyond the boundaries of ‘traditional’ publishers. These days everyone from the basement blogger to the sophisticated brand is using content to capture audiences and drive sales.

When you choose to build a website in eZ Publish or eZ Platform, you’re not just getting a super functional and long-lasting content management system, you’re also getting access to a community of developers who work together to ensure you’ll get the best possible solutions and service over the long term.

We’ve worked with many marketing automation platforms and have written about custom integrations using MailChimp, Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, and Bronto. Recently, we’ve been impressed by the combined power of Bronto’s fields, segments, and workflows. Fields are user metadata and can be updated remotely via the Bronto API. Segments are automatically generated lists of users who meet the segment’s criteria. Finally, workflows are intelligent triggers that can be used to initiate a complex series of events. The combination of these features can be extremely powerful for marketers looking to send customized messages to highly targeted lists.

For instance, we recently built a CMS-based blogging platform for FindaTopDoc, a client that showcases medical professionals and their content. Their blog posts go through a series of editorial controls before they are made publicly visible, and if the author has opted-in and configured social sharing, the published posts are also shared to the author’s social media accounts.

Your eZ site might be serving megabytes of unnecessary image data on every page load. Do your users and your SEO rankings a favour: strip image metadata and set a reasonable image quality setting for your image aliases!