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:
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.
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.
One of our clients needed to migrate all their customers to another entitlement service, requiring them to create new Single Sign-On (SSO) accounts. Concerned that many customers might struggle with the SSO setup process and overwhelm the customer support team, Mugo designed a "graduated authentication" system that dynamically balanced temporary free access with required account creation, allowing our client to manage customer support workload in real time. Instead of forcing all customers to the SSO setup at once, a smooth transition was implemented, providing immediate support for anyone who needed it.
Responsive images are a cornerstone of modern web design. They enable websites to deliver optimized visuals that adapt seamlessly to a wide range of devices, screen sizes, and resolutions. By serving appropriately sized images based on the user’s device capabilities, responsive images ensure fast load times, reduced bandwidth usage, and a consistent visual experience.
Recently, we added a new feature to the Mugo Library all-in-one CMS solution for library websites to make it easier for patrons to search for their event registrations. This enhancement makes providing quality customer service in libraries easier and puts more control in the hands of patrons.
Many of our solutions use Solr as a search engine. We find that Solr can provide powerful and flexible search experiences, customizable through its configuration. In this case, we resolved an issue where very generic names of important pieces of content were making them harder to find.
Caching plays a critical role in the performance and scalability of websites. One of the most important tools for controlling caching behaviour is the Cache-Control HTTP header. This header defines how responses are cached by browsers, reverse proxies, and CDNs, and how long they remain valid.
In complex websites, different page types often require different caching strategies. For example, on a news website, an article page may be cached for a few hours to a day, while the homepage — where content changes frequently — may only be cached for a few minutes.
Mugo Web
Unit 205, 332 Columbia Street
New Westminster, BC
V3L 1A6, Canada
Phone: 604-637-6396
E-mail: hi@mugo.ca
