"In the three months Mugo worked on our new version -- which had stalled with our previous developers -- we have made more progress than ever before. They are fast, precise and thorough, and definitely stand out in the industry!"
Frogs-in-NZ is a New Zealand travel agent catering to French-speaking visitors and expatriates from around the world. Their website provides extremely comprehensive help and material about visiting or moving to New Zealand, and has a lively and engaged community with tens of thousands of forum messages. Mugo helped to push the re-launch of the Frogs-in-NZ website earlier than expected while implementing many eZ Publish best practices.
"From our first contact, the team at Mugo has shown an unprecedented level of commitment to our web projects... ending almost 4 years of struggling! In the three months Mugo worked on our new version -- which had stalled with our previous developers -- we have made more progress than ever before. They are fast, precise and thorough, and definitely stand out in the industry!"
- Sébastien Michel, Director, Frogs-in-NZ Limited
The Frogs-in-NZ website is entirely in French and offers a wealth of free information as well as paid services. The website is of upmost importance to the Frogs-in-NZ business; since they do not have the size of operation to have a direct presence in other countries, they rely on the website as the first entry point for most people to discover what Frogs-in-NZ can offer.
Among the free information that can be found on the site is the following:
As a travel agent, Frogs-in-NZ is able to sell the following through their website:
The Frogs-in-NZ website has a very active forum, with about 15,000 users and 85,000 forum messages contained in about 15,000 topics going all the way back to April 2003. Visitors discuss topics from visas and taxes to recommended neighbourhoods and mobile phone companies.
Broken out from the forum is the "petites announces" section, otherwise known as the classifieds. Here, people can post classified ads to sell their car, to post a job opportunity, or to sell furniture and appliances with a small listing fee. They can post classified ads of other types for free. The behind-the-scenes workflow for the creation of a classified ad determines whether a payment is necessary, accepts the payment and stores information about the requested category, and links the purchased credit to the correct ad.
The revamped website features eZ Flow to create dynamic home pages and sidebars and eZ Find to search content from across the site. Mugo Web helped to set up the publishing process to make it easy for editors to feature different services and stories in content blocks. We helped optimize the content structure so that complex page elements are loaded and searched in a responsive manner. Using eZ Publish template best practices, we optimized smart caching rules, dynamic menu generation, forum user statistic generation, page styling, and more.
On the server end, Mugo Web troubleshooted some issues that were causing regular and significant slowdowns and crashes on the site. We analyzed the types of page requests and properly configured a few important MySQL database settings, which completely eliminated the site issues and dramatically improved site speed.
Events are the buzziest change between Universal Analytics (UA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4). There’s a good reason for that — they mark a very substantial shift in how property owners track data on their sites. This is a daunting prospect and an opportunity. As a property owner, you will need to reevaluate how you use your analytics and how you can make the new system work for you. As you make the switch to GA4 before UA’s End Of Service date (July 1, 2023), you might be focusing on just recreating a familiar pattern and making your GA4 property look the same as your old UA dashboard; the better option is to clarify exactly what you need from your site’s analytics and leverage GA4’s superior flexibility to accomplish your goals.
We’ve discussed eep (Ease eZ Publish) several times over the years. It’s a powerful tool we at Mugo Web have used for innovative solutions. For the uninitiated, eep is a collection of scripts to support developers working with eZ Publish. Now that eZ Publish is a legacy product, we needed a new option for eZ Platform and Ibexa DXP. Introducing eep-bundle, a collection of Symfony commands specifically selected to work with the new system! We’ll dive in and look at some of the more useful functions eep-bundle provides, such as commands to work with cache, content, content field and type, location, section, and user data.
If you have a Google Analytics property, you’ve probably heard about the upcoming switch to GA4. You might have seen the banners across the top of the page when you log into UA. “Universal Analytics will no longer process new data in standard properties beginning July 1, 2023”, a polite yet vaguely threatening notification, easily ignored as a problem for next year. If you are proactive, you might have already started the switch to the new platform, having heard the recommendation to run both concurrently until the switch. And if you are like many, that might be as far as you’ve gotten.
Specialty presses have specific requirements that aren’t met by run-of-the-mill websites or standard e-commerce solutions. Their readers are among the most demanding consumers you’ll find online, and they want precise details about your publications, trustworthy reviews, and recommendations from a community of like-minded readers.
A retail shopping cart e-commerce system isn’t up to the standard these customers expect.
This is part of the reason why Mugo built ReaderBound, an all-in-one, a feature-rich website platform for publishers. The specific demands of this industry require an integrated, purpose-built commerce experience.
Libraries provide a myriad of services for their patrons, which requires a lot of coordination and communication. Patrons need multiple ways to interact with their librarians; in-person, via phone, social media, chat, etc. A modern library needs tools to quickly collect information and requests with an intuitive workflow for staff and the public.
When things go seriously wrong in a well-built but complicated system, the cause is often a cascade of small failures that pile up. Not that we’re building rockets over here, but an excellent example is the ill-fated Ariane flight V88. Solving the issues behind such failures can be problematic. Many things contribute to the difficulty, from the extensive use of caching to the need to convincingly reconstruct the failure in retrospect. Debugging this kind of failure, especially under pressure, is hard. We consider the ability to do this to be the hallmark of a senior developer. Even so, it is essential to have a team of experts working together to troubleshoot issues and find solutions promptly to help keep your site running.
Haliburton County Public Library connects with its patrons through a new, accessible site and brand relaunch
If you manage one of the millions of websites affected by the Google-mandated migration from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you might be following the best practice of simultaneously running UA and GA4 scripts until you’re ready to adopt GA4 fully. One of the analytics features that needs special attention is cross-domain tracking.