Mugo partner since 2011
"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.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 has the reputation of being a pricey option for cloud-based hosting and compute resources. Certainly, that was our initial impression here at Mugo Web years ago when we began standardizing our hosting and site management business on a single cloud platform.
However, we quickly discovered that AWS is actually quite affordable. In fact, our monthly costs for a virtual machine using 8GB of RAM, at 100% usage, is predictably lower with AWS than with other virtualized or traditional data centers. That’s without aggressively tuning our resource usage, which is often the focus of how to optimize AWS pricing.
In this post, I’ll show you how AWS can be a cost-effective option for professionally managed websites. I’ll also take a quick look at some of the additional savings tactics you can employ to get more value from your decision to run on AWS.
In this blog post I am going to talk about several security best practices, particularly for configuring AWS Access Keys. Some of these practices are based on a project that we inherited which was compromised by hackers. Best practices are often learned from mistakes; and when the mistakes are someone else's, so much the better!
If you were used to the Open Source version of eZ Publish, you are probably familiar with the eZ Flow extension, which allows editors to build pages visually specifying the components based on a Layout, Zones, and Blocks system. Users that have migrated to the Ibexa OSS might have noticed that there is no such system available, only the Ibexa Page Builder, which is restricted to the Enterprise version.
At Mugo, we love to contribute to the Open Source community. After identifying this need, we decided to create a prototype for an alternative to the eZ Flow extensions for Ibexa OSS. With that in mind, we created the Mugo Page Bundle as a simple way to build page layouts.
Managing bot access to your website is one of the least sexy tasks a site manager handles. You just identify the bot’s user agent, edit robots.txt to allow or disallow access, and you’re done. Right?
Of course, nothing’s ever quite that simple when it comes to safeguarding your web identity. Sure, robots.txt is still the industry stalwart – it’s a tactic we often use for our clients here at Mugo Web when we want to block a specific bot for some practical reason.
Mugo partner since 2023
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With Gmail and Yahoo now requiring bulk emailers to implement authentication protocols, making sure you understand the differences between SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and how they work together is essential for your email marketing efforts. We'll walk you through how to set these up in your email provider of choice.
While YouTube embed options are powerful and effective, they are not always the most efficient use of resources when it comes to bandwidth. Using a facade can help decrease page load time and increase site performance without sacrificing any of the utility of the native YouTube embed options.
Generative AI is shaking up every category of knowledge work, and professional software development is on the front lines of the revolution. With new advancements on the horizon, what does that mean for developers in the here and now? Our team experimented with a few of the leading tools and shared their impressions, along with suggestions on best practices for navigating AI usage in web development.
Mugo Web
Unit 205, 332 Columbia Street
New Westminster, BC
V3L 1A6, Canada
Phone: 604-637-6396
E-mail: hi@mugo.ca
