In-depth insights on content, code, and creativity
This year, after 10 years of steady growth, we reached the milestone of having 10 people on the Mugo Web team. And yet, in early sales discussions, we continue to face concerns about our size and stability: "How can I count on you still being there next year?" We've had to prove that we compare well against -- and outlast -- competing web development partners with hundreds of employees. Inherent to the Mugo story is a long-term, stable team, and our small size is one of the reasons our clients choose us.
Follow along as we demonstrate a stunning example of the importance of testing changes to your site.
If content is or needs to become a core part of your business, choosing a content management system (CMS) is critical. Here's a look at why some of our clients and partners chose eZ.
I have a short list of suggestions for people applying to programming jobs and who have to do a programming test. I am driven to make these suggestions after watching a lot of programmers applying at Mugo: I am a programmer myself, but I am in the position of judging candidate's efforts on the basis of a business owner or project lead.
eZ Publish allows you to develop custom REST APIs to transfer data among different platforms. This "getting started" guide will show you how to build and integrate a REST API into an eZ Publish installation by developing a custom module view that returns a JSON object.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is Google's technology designed to create fast mobile pages. AMP allows developers to take advantage of fast rendering and improved performance. Here's a look at how it can be integrated into an existing eZ Publish website.
Sending e-mail newsletters comes with a variety of challenges: selecting the contents, sorting them into sections, writing the HTML code, entering the title, description, images, and other data for each piece of content, and finally, previewing the e-mail. The process can be long and stressful if done manually.
The Mugo Feed Manager is easy to use, requires no background knowledge, and has an intuitive interface recommended for publishers and content managers.
A Mugo developer's toolbox is packed full of tools. Big tools, small tools, new tools, old tools. We don't care if they're shiny or use all the latest buzzwords to describe their functionality. Much like the solutions we build, we care that they work, and work well.
Here's a brief look at our favourite tools to work with.
Publishing is something of a calling and has often been described as a labour of love. It is also a key business practice whose importance has spread well beyond the boundaries of ‘traditional’ publishers. These days everyone from the basement blogger to the sophisticated brand is using content to capture audiences and drive sales.
When you choose to build a website in eZ Publish or eZ Platform, you’re not just getting a super functional and long-lasting content management system, you’re also getting access to a community of developers who work together to ensure you’ll get the best possible solutions and service over the long term.
We’ve worked with many marketing automation platforms and have written about custom integrations using MailChimp, Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, and Bronto. Recently, we’ve been impressed by the combined power of Bronto’s fields, segments, and workflows. Fields are user metadata and can be updated remotely via the Bronto API. Segments are automatically generated lists of users who meet the segment’s criteria. Finally, workflows are intelligent triggers that can be used to initiate a complex series of events. The combination of these features can be extremely powerful for marketers looking to send customized messages to highly targeted lists.
For instance, we recently built a CMS-based blogging platform for FindaTopDoc, a client that showcases medical professionals and their content. Their blog posts go through a series of editorial controls before they are made publicly visible, and if the author has opted-in and configured social sharing, the published posts are also shared to the author’s social media accounts.
Your eZ site might be serving megabytes of unnecessary image data on every page load. Do your users and your SEO rankings a favour: strip image metadata and set a reasonable image quality setting for your image aliases!
One way to attract visitors to your site is through e-mail marketing campaigns, but sending thousands of generic e-mails might not generate the kind of returns you're hoping for. One of our clients, FindaTopDoc, needed a customized approach for its e-mail campaign targeting potential new content contributor doctors. The goal was to generate an image that would show the recipient exactly what their personal blog would look like, including their profile picture and personal details.
Selecting any new technology for your organization often results in a comparison of features, and the decision can come down to which product has the features you want.
But when it comes to choosing a CMS, to some extent they all have the same set of core features. You're not usually technically limited on what you can do; the key is often in understanding how those features can be used effectively in conjunction with your organization's processes.
It’s no secret that eZ Publish / eZ Platform is our favourite CMS, and we recommend it to most of our clients when content creation, distribution, and monetization are key to their business. But the fact is, most CMSs have similar structures and similar goals: to make the process of creating and managing digital content easy. Does it really matter which one you choose?
With eZ Publish / eZ Platform at the centre of your content management strategy, from a single interface you can manage not just your users and content, but also multiple social channels.
Adding the Facebook Page Plugin to your website is a great way to feature your community's activity on the world's largest social network. In most cases, adding the plugin isn't difficult, but if you need to make it responsive, a little extra work is required.
To set up Apache Solr -- the search platform that powers eZ Publish (through the eZ Find extension) and eZ Platform -- as a service on CentOS 7, you have at least two options. We’ll cover both: a manually created service for the new systemd as well as the older SystemV -- via the service script included with eZ Find.
It's 9am on a Monday morning; do you know where your team members are? For most companies, there's a straightforward answer to that question: they're in the office, at their desks. That's not the case at Mugo, but not just because we offer flexible schedules and treat work/life balance seriously. It's because we're a distributed team, which is an essential part of what makes us a good team.
Update (November 2017): Unfortunately, Facebook has deprecated Comment Mirroring and it is no longer possible to use this feature: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2017/11/07/changes-developer-offerings/.
We recently migrated a client to Facebook comments and enabled Comment Mirroring. Though the process is simple, it’s poorly documented and a little finicky. Here's a rundown!
When you share a page from your website to your Facebook page, Facebook Comment Mirroring brings together the comments from both places into a single conversation. This means that you can use an active Facebook presence to generate engagement on your website, and vice versa. Once configured, comments are updated and synced in realtime by the Facebook JavaScript SDK.
Here's an overview of what's involved:
Want to pick up some pro strategies on how to make your website accessible to people with disabilities?
On Tuesday, July 11, our in-house accessibility expert will share his knowledge and technical tips on web accessibility.
We’ve been writing a lot about accessible websites lately because it’s a topic we’re passionate about at Mugo Web. We believe that whether or not web accessibility is governed by law in your region, making your site accessible to people with disabilities is good business practice. And there are literally millions of reasons to do so.
If you landed here because you’re researching a content management system, then you already know there are literally thousands to choose from. Some you’re probably familiar with, but most you likely haven’t heard of. Narrowing down a shortlist can be overwhelming.
But if content is key to your business, you’ll want to choose a system that makes dealing with lots of content -- and leveraging it throughout your site and across other channels -- easy and intuitive.
Working with CSS preprocessors like Sass or Less is much more fun than working with pure CSS. Here's a simple shell script to integrate Sass into your eZ Publish project.
Mugo Web
Unit 205, 332 Columbia Street
New Westminster, BC
V3L 1A6, Canada
Phone: 604-637-6396
E-mail: hi@mugo.ca
