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When using eZ Publish's eZ Find extension on a public facing site or project -- arguably any project -- it is vital to secure it to prevent unauthorized access and potential data loss. eZ Find is powered by Apache Solr, an open-source search server based on the Lucene Java search library. Its power and flexibility make eZ Find a great tool when working with a lot of content in eZ Publish.

There are a number of ways a Solr installation can be secured. We'll look at BasicAuth via Jetty UserRealms and iptables firewall rules in detail.

Vagrant and Ansible are tools to efficiently provision virtual machines (also called VMs or simply boxes).

This blog post will begin with a short discussion of why one would invest the time to use these tools, then cover the required software, an overview of how Vagrant works with VirtualBox and the use of Ansible to provision a VM.

Using HubSpot together with Salesforce, you can tie your inbound marketing campaigns to your customer and lead records for a nearly complete view of every user interaction with your business. (Add some analytics and you're all set!) However, with so much data syncing going back and forth, you must take care not to go over your storage and API call limits in Salesforce. Surprisingly, data overage charges are not cheap, and if you use up your API call limits, not only will your data stop syncing between HubSpot and Salesforce, but other systems -- such as your website -- will not be able to access and update important data.

In order to increase the image serving performance of high-traffic websites and improve the editorial user interface around image management, Mugo Web came up with an alternative way to serve content images in eZ Publish.  It is aptly titled the "Mugo Image Server for eZ Publish".

eZ Publish 5 comes with built-in Varnish Cache support. Essentially this means that when content is published in the eZ Publish back-end, it notifies Varnish so that the Varnish cache is cleared. This feature is often called "purge-on-publish" and makes it so that you can cache your pages for a very long time, but that edits refresh the cache and thus appear immediately. To get this native support, you just have to use the "new stack" in eZ Publish. However, even if your legacy site is not ready to be fully upgraded to the new stack and you are running eZ Publish 5 in "legacy mode", you can take advantage of this native support.

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about integrating Salesforce and Marketo in a web marketing solution powered by a content management system (in this case, the eZ Publish CMS). Recently, Mugo had the opportunity to migrate one of our clients from Marketo to HubSpot. The decision to move to HubSpot was made for non-technical reasons; regardless, it is useful to review the technical differences and challenges when it comes to integrating the marketing systems with a content management system.

One of our customer websites sells research reports where all of the content is built and managed in the eZ Publish content management system. These reports are served via HTML through a gated website portal. They wanted to add a dynamic PDF report generation feature (based on content in the CMS); the PDF template was highly customized with nice layouts and styles, cover and back pages, custom page breaks, and much more. Over the years we've had good experiences with the ParadoxPDF extension. However due to its lack of HTML5 + CSS3 support and relatively high server load, we decided to look for an alternative solution. We found that wkhtmltopdf does a great job at producing highly styled PDFs, and we were able to integrate it nicely with eZ Publish.

Until some time ago, it was necessary to hack the eZ Publish legacy kernel in order to customize its generic error message, "Fatal error: The web server did not finish its request". This error occurs on all eZ Publish installations whenever there is an HTTP 500 status server error. It is a very common error; some examples of how it's triggered include: trying to access the value of a non-existent object attribute; the use of a non-existent PHP class or function; and too much memory usage.

Now, since this pull request from Mugo has been merged to the eZ Publish kernel, we have made it possible to customize the error page without hacking the kernel. In this post I will show you the new standard way to do this with a simple INI setting and your own PHP function.

Mugo Web and the Royal Columbian Hospital / Eagle Ridge Hospital emergency departments have created an online shift evaluation system now in use in 5 emergency departments across the region. The system is called Online Daily Evaluations and is being used at Royal Columbian Hospital, Eagle Ridge Hospital, Vancouver General Hospital, Victoria General Hospital, and Kelowna General Hospital.

Mugo partner since 2010

This Business Intelligence website features a paywall, caching of content for logged in users, a responsive design, enterprise login features, Salesforce and Marketo integrations, and more.

Google Analytics is the most popular tool for understanding how people are finding and using your site. In addition to its standard reports, you can use its User ID feature to get more fine-grained reporting about registered users. This enables you to better measure, anticipate, and meet or exceed your users' needs.

A key component of a content management system or web application is the handling of JavaScript and CSS files, specifically around loading, combining, and minifying them. Loading fewer files and a smaller amount of data in each file leads to both server-side and client-side performance improvements. In eZ Publish 4 / legacy, this was handled nicely with an extension called ezjscore. Now in the eZ Publish 5 new stack, we have a Symfony tool called Assetic. In this post we'll introduce how Assetic works in eZ Publish 5.0 through 5.4.