Mugo partner since 2011
Habitat Magazine, based in New York, has been providing topical and important content for co-op and condo boards, residents, businesses, and other interested parties for 35 years.
Habitat Magazine needed to be creative in evolving its traditional print paid circulation model into a thriving multi-channel, online strategy.
I am very excited for Habitat’s continued growth as we launch new products and digital offerings. We are proud to serve the New York real estate community and provide a great customer experience. Mugo Web has helped us manage our content wisely and ensure we are prepared for the future.
- Carol Ott
Habitat’s clearly defined focus on the concerns of co-op/condo board directors and property managers in the greater New York area has earned it a high-value audience of about 7,500 paid subscribers. However, its ability to scale is limited to a relatively small geographic area – as big as it is, New York is just one market. And Habitat targets a very specialized audience.
So Habitat’s growth initiatives are focused on creating new digital revenue streams and engagement for its established user base. This has meant trial and error powered by a modern, flexible DXP.
Since moving to eZ Platform two decades ago, Habitat has launched a series of iterative projects to advance its digital transformation. Each of these projects has shared these key underlying business requirements:
The agility of eZ Platform has enabled Habitat and its development partner, Mugo Web, to innovate without facing prohibitive development costs. Following a complete site relaunch and platform update, Habitat has taken an iterative approach to rolling out new features, all tied to specific business metrics.
Habitat’s willingness to try creative new strategies has led to many successes. And even when an experiment doesn’t quite meet its three core business goals, Habitat can recalibrate its strategies with a better understanding of its audience.
Here’s a look at a couple of projects the team at Habitat and Mugo Web have conceptualized and implemented, and the impact each has on Habitat’s core business.
Much of Habitat’s print reporting has “evergreen” value to its core audience. Habitat publishes unique web content daily, but an online content repository of its print articles made sense. Habitat is using a gated content model that allows readers to see a few articles before requiring them to sign up for a subscription. Users can opt for a 24-hour pass or an annual subscription. Mugo implemented a rich taxonomy structure so that users can easily search and drill down into the types of articles they want to read.
The results: Habitat has seen that most people opt for an annual subscription, which includes the archive as well as the digital magazine and e-newsletters. Habitat can now take advantage of this asset and in entirely new ways -- for instance, as a specialized knowledge base for a co-op board of directors. Having all its content in a scalable CMS enables Habitat to quickly respond to any such opportunities in its market, where information is considered at a high premium.
Habitat has developed several multi-channel, interactive user experiences that also provide unique sponsorship opportunities.
These include Ask the Experts, which are sponsored videos showcasing industry insiders, and Seeking Counsel, which offers legal insights. These digital elements build upon print elements, and are made possible by the flexible content model set up in the CMS. It also uses targeting and inventory management features of Google Ad Manager, which Mugo implemented during Habitat’s site re-launch.
The results: Revenues from multi-channel editorial experiences have grown by 68% since 2016. (Overall, online ad revenue has doubled since the Ad Manager implementation.) The three-pronged strategy of print/video/display has proven so successful that Habitat has developed branded offerings on many topic areas.
So, what are the biggest lessons Habitat has learned during its ongoing evolution from a traditional print publisher to a multi-channel digital platform?
This year, two Canadian provinces, BC and Alberta, moved to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. This created an issue with event registrations for some of our library clients, an interesting technical solution, and the potential for future implications down the road as other provinces (and the US) potentially join the trend. This and more in August’s Mugo Digest!
Our library client wanted to allow patrons to apply for library cards via their website. The client had existing restrictions on access to cards. Local residents receive free cards while visitors and non-residents pay a fee. Individual patrons should not have access to more than one library card. Therefore the system had to automatically validate and standardize addresses to support duplicate detection, determine a geographical position for each address, and finally classify addresses as local or non-local. We supported this using GeoJSON and integrating with the library's ILS. We tested this functionality a number of ways, including an exploration into the mathematic principles behind the solution.
When developing a Symfony application, you often need to inspect the emails your application generates without actually sending them. While tools like Mailpit or Mailtrap are excellent choices, sometimes you want something even simpler: write every email to disk as a standard .eml file.
This approach is particularly useful for:
In this article, we'll build a custom Symfony Mailer transport that stores every outgoing email as an RFC 822 compatible .eml file.
When creating content in Ibexa using the RichText Editor, it is easy to realize that not every RichText field needs the same toolbar. A ”Body” field may need headings, embeds, and tables. A ”Short Description” or ”Caption” field usually needs bold, italic, and little else. When every field gets the full CKEditor toolbar, it might make editors waste time or even make them think they can add markup your templates were never built for.
Legacy eZ Publish solved this. Ibexa DXP does not, at least out of the box. In this blog post we describe how we added this feature to Ibexa 4.
Welcome to Mugo Web's new monthly digest, a quick way to catch up with some of the things we've been working on. In July we marked a momentous anniversary, launched a brand new site for a client, and offered free educational opportunities.
A new update to the Mugo Page Bundle now allows for a straightforward migration from eZ Flow to Ibexa DXP. We’ve also added functionality to this versatile tool with a new rich text block type.
Mugo partner since 2025
St. Thomas Public Library launches new website with expanded features.
The latest improvements to the Mugo Library platform focus on enhanced usability for library staff. Since these back-end improvements aren’t as noticeable as the front-end user experience, we wanted to take the opportunity to give a peek “under the hood”, and showcase what makes the Mugo Library event and calendar solution ideal for public libraries. Our new enhancements include expanded reporting, a new viewing interface, back-end patron search, and integration with the meeting room module.
Mugo Web
Unit 205, 332 Columbia Street
New Westminster, BC
V3L 1A6, Canada
Phone: 604-637-6396
E-mail: hi@mugo.ca
