Mugo Web's blog

A powerful addition a normal site search is for registered users to be able to save their searches, share the searches with others, and create customized e-mail alerts. This adds a deeper level of interactivity with the site and encourages users to regularly return to the site.

Multi-language sites often have a set of base rules and then edge cases for different parts of the site. For example, on the French version of the site you might only want to show French content on most pages. For the news section, you might want to show press release results from all languages sorted in reverse chronological order, regardless of language. But for the case study section specifically, you might want to show all French versions first, following by case studies in any other language. For the most part, eZ Publish supports these features out of the box. In this post, we'll show you how to extend eZ Publish to sort results by language.

We recently added "quiz" functionality to eZ Publish by extending the eZ Survey extension. The purpose of this functionality is to enable companies to create "on-boarding" quizzes for new hires to learn about company policies and benefits.  This was part of a larger intranet implementation.

On subscription-based websites, digital publishers often restrict the majority of content to registered users and/or paid subscribers. However, publishers still need a way to enable non-registered users to sample the website in order for the visitors to more fully understand the benefits to subscribing. This is sometimes called a "softer" or "combination" paywall as opposed to a fully hard paywall (everything protected) or a "porous" paywall (everything available given the right conditions).

One solution for a softer / combination paywall that Mugo recently implemented uses special "hash" URLs to provide time-limited, full access to select articles.

Object states are used in many ways in eZ Publish, from workflows to menu management to controlling SEO tags. In eZ Publish 5, object state information is not available by default as one of the intrinsic attributes of a content or location object. In this post, we will show you how to access object states in PHP (usually in your custom controllers) or in Twig templates.

The eZ Tags extension by Netgen is a great solution to the problems of managing large or ad hoc taxonomies. It especially solves problems around editorial user experience. 

Recently, Mugo has added a bunch of improvements to the extension. This post talks about 2: allowing users to reorder tags by assigning priorities, and to select tags from a tree menu.

If you have a membership-based website, the standard model is to provide users access via a username and password. Enterprise customers often require more advanced validation models. Here, we sketch out use cases around validating by IP address or referring URL; and as a bonus topic: multi-seat accounts. We've implemented these advanced features for a couple of sites and they work seamlessly.

eZ Publish is a powerful Content Management System (CMS), but you typically don't try to build Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and E-mail Marketing features directly into it.  Instead, you usually integrate it with existing solutions. We recently integrated eZ Publish with Salesforce and Marketo on a subscription-based website.

Mugo's eZ Collaboration Workflow extension has been released for a few years now. We've been able to make continuous improvements over time to solve different and more complex client needs. Here's an update on some of the recent new functionality around multi-language workflows, editing other users' drafts, and scheduled publishing.

In eZ Publish 4 / legacy, formatting link URLs is handled by the well-known ezurl() template operator. This is especially useful when you have multiple siteaccesses and you use URL-based matching. In eZ Publish 5, there is no single ezurl() equivalent; instead, there are several options depending on the type of link you want to display.

Varnish is great for high traffic sites where the same pages are served over and over to millions of visitors, but when you have to do something differently depending on the specific user or user group, things get complicated. There are several techniques, and how you might use them depends on the details. Here, we have outlined a solution for a particular use case on eZ Publish.

Index time plugins are one of the most important techniques of extending eZ Find functionality; they allow you to control how and what data is indexed. Combined with custom eZ Find queries, this opens up huge opportunities for providing access to content, well beyond mere 'search'.

In this post we will look at some typical use cases, briefly consider out of the box functionality and then dive into why you would want to make use of index time plugins and how you would go about setting one up.

Whenever you edit content in the eZ Publish Administration Interface, eZ Publish stores a new version. eZ Publish has a built-in feature to limit the number of previous versions it stores. However, as of the time of this posting, the eZ Publish 5.x public API to create and update content does not respect the version history limit (which, by default, stores 10 previous versions). We've written a quick function that restores this feature.

Fetching content in eZ Publish 4 (the "legacy" stack) and eZ Publish 5 (the "new" stack) follow many of the same principles, which is not surprising since the data layer is the same for both versions. You typically have a parent node or location and a set of filters. User permissions -- especially bypassing those permissions -- is often a consideration. In this post we'll explore how to fetch content in the legacy and new stack (as of eZ Publish 5.2).

Using virtual machines when developing eZ Publish websites have been useful in 2 main ways (if not more): working in a different server environment than your current machine and standardizing the dev environment for a team of developers. At the moment, I have Ubuntu 13.10 installed as my main operating system, and from time to time I need to work with some older eZ Publish versions that require PHP versions older than Ubuntu 13.10's default; in fact, the oldest eZ Publish version that I can run out of the box on Ubuntu 13.10 is eZ Publish 4.7. I don't like the idea of installing another OS just to work with an older eZ Publish version; that requires creating another partition, configuring grub, and so on. Using virtual machines enables me to work within another OS inside my main OS. That way I can work on a standardized environment specific to each client, while continuing to use my favorite base OS and tools. In this tutorial, I will describe how to install and configure Oracle VirtualBox to create virtual machines that run eZ Publish.

Rackspace recently released their newest generation of cloud servers, called Performance Cloud Servers. Unlike previous new releases, they've made a compelling case to upgrade existing cloud servers, as the "Performance Cloud" servers are cheaper, more powerful, and they use SSD storage. We decided to run some performance tests on an existing eZ Publish site, and saw between a 10-100% performance increase under high loads. 

Countless presentations are made daily about the ubiquity of smart phones and the new, groundbreaking uses of smart phone apps. However, in many cases, humble text message services can be more useful and efficient.

Disqus is one of the most popular third-party commenting tools that can be integrated onto your website. There are a few special considerations when implementing Disqus onto a website where an article might have multiple locations and/or the article's URL might change. In this post, we'll walk you through a basic but robust implementation within an eZ Publish site.

The eZ Publish events system, known otherwise as "ezpEvent" (the name of the PHP class), supports multiple extension points into the content management system and also enables you to define your own extension points. It was quietly introduced in eZ Publish 4.5.

Mugo planned and implemented an article archiving solution for The Christian Science Monitor, an award-winning news website. The site has a large amount of content: visitors have access to articles starting from 1980. In total, the site has almost 800,000 content objects and the current setup serves up to 48 million page views per month.

We were called to investigate a clustered eZ Publish 4.5 (with eZ DFS) site where most of the images were suddenly missing. As we discovered, due to an erroneous MySQL command, the "ezdfsfile" table had been truncated. It was near the end of the day, and there were no viable database backups since the previous night. We either had to somehow rebuild the "ezdfsfile" table or ask many editors across different departments to re-do all their work from that day. It was a rather panicked situation.

Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP that eZ Publish 5 uses. The following is simple step-by-step how-to on using Composer to install eZ Publish (legacy) with additional extensions.

Electronic media company Rasmussen Reports is best known for their US elections polling, but they do public opinion polling on a wide variety of topics, releasing new poll results on its website daily. Their multi-tier paywall subscription system has successfully helped them generate website revenue at different levels of user engagement.

Retrieving content is one of the most common use cases when working with a content management system. eZ Publish provides a powerful way to retrieve content with its fetch functions. Although it provides a powerful framework for filtering and sorting the content based on a wide range of criteria, sometimes you need to extend the framework. Adding new filters to fetch functions is achieved by using extended attribute filters.