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In-depth insights on content, code, and creativity

5 ways your CMS makes a web accessibility implementation easier

Making your website accessible to people with disabilities - whether you’re launching a brand new site, or remediating an existing one - may seem complex when you consider all the components that require attention (in-page navigation, links, colour contrast, forms, and alt tags, among other things). But the right CMS can make the job a lot easier.

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Switching CDNs from Akamai to Amazon CloudFront

For one of our high-traffic clients, we switched the Content Delivery Network (CDN) from Akamai to Amazon CloudFront. This blog post looks at why we decided to change the CDN and describes the switching process. Plus we share some useful tips about how to configure CloudFront.

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Building an accessible website: in-page navigation

A key component of an accessible website, accessible in-page navigation provides a way for website visitors to jump straight into the main content on your site and access different sections of the page quickly, without having to tab through every link to get there.

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Plagiarism scanner integrated into an editorial approval workflow

In our case study FindaTopDoc Prescribes eZ Publish for Healthy Content Management, we briefly covered our integration of PlagScan into the editorial approval workflow. When writing about medical topics, content -- especially medical term definitions -- can end up being duplicated on other sites, even if it was not purposely copied. Therefore, it is important for SEO reasons to ensure that all content on the FindaTopDoc site is as unique as possible. Here we'll take a closer look at how the plagiarism scanner integration works.

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Why web accessibility is more art than science

Ensuring your website is accessible to all members of your target audience can add unique requirements that demand novel solutions from your development team.

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Attribute management in eZ Publish with eep, and robust dev practices

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

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Building an accessible website: Links

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.

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Understanding your web accessibility audience

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.

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Building an accessible website: Contrast

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

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Turbo charge your Mac development environment

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.

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Efficient QA workflows: a checklist for testing your own code

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.

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Is it time to upgrade your website’s event calendar? Try our eZ Publish calendar extension

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.

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8 re-usable web solutions you can make use of right now

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.

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eZ Publish content attribute transformation made easy with eep

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.

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Why better online content management leads to more book sales

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.

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eZ Find: How to return specific fields of indexed data

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.

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What to consider when migrating WordPress content to another WordPress site

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.

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How publishers can benefit from a WordPress to eZ Publish migration

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.

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Extending eZ Find: How to specify minimum relevance values using Solr frange queries

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.

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Building an accessible website: How to create accessible forms

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

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Building an accessible website: Writing accessible alt tags for images

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.

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Persistence caching with memcache in eZ Publish 5.x and eZ Platform

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.

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It’s time to secure your website: Chrome enforces deadline for HTTPS

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.

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Web development as a service: customer service is as important as code

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.

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