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Open Book Canada

Mugo partner since 2016

Open Book Canada showcases Ontario’s literary scene, with a focus on books and events produced by the province’s independent, Canadian-owned publishers.

The story of Open Book’s evolution starts with three separate websites: Open Book Toronto, launched in 2007, followed by sister site Open Book Ontario in 2010, and then Open Book Explorer. All three brands were designed to showcase and celebrate books and book culture in Ontario, each with a slightly different angle and approach. But all three had been built on Drupal-based sites, which, over time and with every addition, had become unwieldy, overly complex, and were failing at their objective to manage and showcase great content.

The Organization of Book Publishers of Ontario (OBPO) contracted with the Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP) and its 49th Shelf team to leverage to work they had done on 49th Shelf and its eco-system of book publishing websites, to consolidate the three existing sites into a single, reimagined Open Book site.

The new site needed to enable to Open Book Canada to achieve its goals to:

  • Increase the profile of Canadian authors and publishers
  • Increase the readership of Canadian books through more retail sales
  • Increase awareness of, and accessibility to, Canadian writing, in all its diversity of region and genre

 

The resulting website is a widely read and highly regarded online magazine with a robust editorial program that supports multiple posts per day, a writer in residence, and an active events listing service to promote readings, book launches, and other literary events throughout Toronto and the rest of Ontario. The site is supported by book data from 49th Shelf, a linkage that will eventually see Open Book evolve into the largest-ever online platform dedicated to Ontario books and authors.

Open Book is now part of a community of major literary websites in Canada all maintained by the same systems and technology, including the eZ Publish CMS, that enable us to leverage and publish content, including rich ONIX publishing data, with ease. Its relaunch in fall 2016 was received with great enthusiasm by the literary community.

Learn more about our ecommerce websites for book publishers.

Case studies

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image of the world, with lines representing time zones. The bottom right has a clock, the top right has the Mugo logo.

August 2026 Mugo Digest

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!

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a stylized map with a location marker, followed by dots and a verified check, above a GeoJSON rendering of a geographic area

Verifying addresses within a set geographic region served by a library

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.

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Symfony Mailer: File Transport. Write emails to disk instead of sending them. Image of a window of code, beside a computer with a test email.

Creating a file mail transport for Symfony

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:

  • Local development
  • CI pipelines
  • Automated testing
  • Staging environments where no real emails should leave the application
  • Debugging complex email templates

In this article, we'll build a custom Symfony Mailer transport that stores every outgoing email as an RFC 822 compatible .eml file.

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two views of rich text editors one with full formatting options, one with limited. A stick figure in between the two weighs different options.

Limited RichText formatting per field in the Ibexa DXP admin UI

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.

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Mugo logo with illustrated balloons with the number 18 in front of confettii and banners.

July 2026 Mugo Digest

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. 

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Migrating from eZ Flow to Ibexa DXP: A smooth path with Mugo Page

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. 

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a stylized calendar grid with stars surrounding it

Improvements to the Mugo Library events calendar system

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.

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