Mugo Web's blog

I recently had a lucky moment and was saved by a happy combination of things, including Assembla, eep, and a couple bits of dev-ops.

Links are the pathways that bind the web and give it structure. For people with web accessibility challenges, perceiving and understanding the links on your website is of utmost importance.

Before you embark on a project to make your website accessible to people with disabilities, it’s critical to understand what such a large and varied audience really looks like -- and what they need from your site.

Insufficient contrasting text elements on your website will limit your audience by preventing users who have difficulty distinguishing colours from comfortably consuming your content. 

Last year, I switched from developing on a dual-boot Windows and Linux machine to working on a Mac. During the transition, I felt my productivity slump: not only was I missing keyboard shortcuts that I had become very accustomed to (such as Alt+←, for instance), but some native MacOS behaviour drove me crazy (like ⌘+Tab cycling through applications rather than cycling through windows of all applications). I also found the Mac terminal to be lacking, missing important utilities, and running some outdated binaries. So, vowing to prove decisively the superiority of humans over machines, I decided to make my Mac Just Work* ™  _{* Like my PC used to.}

Not all of the burden of testing website code lies with automated tests, a QA team, or the end client. There is a lot you can do as a developer to test your own website code and make sure it is as good as possible before passing it over to someone else or an automated system. At Mugo, we've developed a simple and general checklist to follow, in order to make "self-testing" a key step in the QA workflow.

Using a calendar to track events dates back to ancient times, long before the advent of digital media. But five thousand years after stone tablet calendars were the hottest trend, hosting a web calendar is still a popular practice, and a valuable way to engage users and keep them coming back to your site.

When you work with us at Mugo, you benefit from our re-usable solutions to common content management problems. Many of the tools, extensions, and products we’ve built over the years have been the result of seeing the same issues and challenges come up time and time again, sometimes across seemingly dissimilar clients.

Content attribute transformation or conversion in eZ Publish isn't required as often as data import or data migration, but when it is, it can take a similar amount of effort. eep simplifies the process with its flexible built-in attribute module options.

As the plot thickens on book sales trends (with paper books now making a solid comeback and ebook sales on the decline), one thing that hasn’t changed is readers’ thirst for content.

When working with eZ Find fetches, you may want to return only a specific sub-set of data for each of the search results, rather than the whole content object.

You can do that by using the eZ Find 'search' fetch's 'fields_to_return' parameter.

Migrating content from one WordPress site into a new site is typically relatively straightforward, but merging two existing sites together - especially sites with different content types, categories, and functionality - can actually be a labour-intensive process that requires planning, testing, and attention to detail.

Migrating a website from WordPress to eZ Publish affords many benefits for content publishers looking to add robust front-end and back-end features to their site.

eZ Find, the enterprise search extension for eZ Publish and wrapper for the Apache Solr search engine, is a highly performant alternative to manually searching through databases. We recently extended eZ Find to support Solr frange queries, and specifically to support minimum relevance values.

Forms are an integral part of many websites but they pose unique challenges for accessible websites.

Creating alt tags that conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) ensures all of your readers can have access to your website's images. Here's a look at how to create effective alt tags for web accessibility.

In eZ Publish 5.x and eZ Platform, the concept of "view cache" has changed. The "module result" part of it (which was basically page-level caching if we didn't count the pagelayout) has been offloaded to HTTP caching, most often implemented with Varnish. In addition, Cache blocks no longer exist and have been replaced by ESI (Edge Side Includes) blocks.

The persistence caching element -- that is, caching of your actual content from the database -- of the "view cache" still exists, handled by default on the file system through the Stash bundle. Stash also supports memcache (which, as its name suggests, uses memory, and has a much better performance). We use memcache(d) for all of our production sites.

Does your website have account logins or have e-commerce functionality? If so, you’ll want to ensure it runs on the HTTPS protocol by January 2017.

Many people think web development is mainly about code: code in frameworks, code connecting systems, code in different languages. And it’s true, web development is full of code. But it’s also about much more than code; it’s about serving clients.

What makes your web development team a great partner instead of just "those technical people you have to deal with"? Good communication. A solid understanding of your needs. Digital solutions that meet those needs. All of which, ultimately, amounts to good customer service.

With more than one-third of Americans using Dr. Google to search for medical information online, and one in every 20 Google searches related to health information, there is undoubtedly a need for quality medical content on the internet.

Ensuring your website is accessible to people with visual, auditory, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities -- including all of its text, images, video, audio, and even forms and checkboxes -- is good business practice.

Making your website accessible to people with visual impairments involves ensuring that screen readers effectively communicate all essential information to the user -- including information conveyed in toggle boxes. Here's an example of a toggle box that needs to be made accessible. Let's walk through how it's done.

When it comes to creating newsletter campaigns, you have to compile the content and then send that content out through an e-mail marketing service. Having a content management system helps in order to structure your content and automate the creation of the newsletter HTML. Here's an example of a newsletter integration with WordPress and Mailchimp.

Custom tags are very useful for adding custom functionality to rich text fields beyond simple formatting and embeds. Here is a walkthrough of how to implement custom tags in eZ Publish 5.x compared to an eZ Publish 4.x / legacy install.