In-depth insights on content, code, and creativity
As developers of websites where content is key, one of the questions we are frequently asked by our clients is "how do we ensure our content ranks well in search?" It's a common concern for digital content creators, whether they're launching a new site or refreshing an existing one.
If you're publishing content online, one of your key considerations should be search engine optimization. In other words, you need to do what you can to make sure that people can find your content when they Google it.
Making your website accessible to people with disabilities - whether you’re launching a brand new site, or remediating an existing one - may seem complex when you consider all the components that require attention (in-page navigation, links, colour contrast, forms, and alt tags, among other things). But the right CMS can make the job a lot easier.
For one of our high-traffic clients, we switched the Content Delivery Network (CDN) from Akamai to Amazon CloudFront. This blog post looks at why we decided to change the CDN and describes the switching process. Plus we share some useful tips about how to configure CloudFront.
A key component of an accessible website, accessible in-page navigation provides a way for website visitors to jump straight into the main content on your site and access different sections of the page quickly, without having to tab through every link to get there.
In our case study FindaTopDoc Prescribes eZ Publish for Healthy Content Management, we briefly covered our integration of PlagScan into the editorial approval workflow. When writing about medical topics, content -- especially medical term definitions -- can end up being duplicated on other sites, even if it was not purposely copied. Therefore, it is important for SEO reasons to ensure that all content on the FindaTopDoc site is as unique as possible. Here we'll take a closer look at how the plagiarism scanner integration works.
Ensuring your website is accessible to all members of your target audience can add unique requirements that demand novel solutions from your development team.
I recently had a lucky moment and was saved by a happy combination of things, including Assembla, eep, and a couple bits of dev-ops.
Links are the pathways that bind the web and give it structure. For people with web accessibility challenges, perceiving and understanding the links on your website is of utmost importance.
Before you embark on a project to make your website accessible to people with disabilities, it’s critical to understand what such a large and varied audience really looks like -- and what they need from your site.
Insufficient contrasting text elements on your website will limit your audience by preventing users who have difficulty distinguishing colours from comfortably consuming your content.
Last year, I switched from developing on a dual-boot Windows and Linux machine to working on a Mac. During the transition, I felt my productivity slump: not only was I missing keyboard shortcuts that I had become very accustomed to (such as Alt+←, for instance), but some native MacOS behaviour drove me crazy (like ⌘+Tab cycling through applications rather than cycling through windows of all applications). I also found the Mac terminal to be lacking, missing important utilities, and running some outdated binaries. So, vowing to prove decisively the superiority of humans over machines, I decided to make my Mac Just Work* ™ * Like my PC used to.
Not all of the burden of testing website code lies with automated tests, a QA team, or the end client. There is a lot you can do as a developer to test your own website code and make sure it is as good as possible before passing it over to someone else or an automated system. At Mugo, we've developed a simple and general checklist to follow, in order to make "self-testing" a key step in the QA workflow.
Using a calendar to track events dates back to ancient times, long before the advent of digital media. But five thousand years after stone tablet calendars were the hottest trend, hosting a web calendar is still a popular practice, and a valuable way to engage users and keep them coming back to your site.
When you work with us at Mugo, you benefit from our re-usable solutions to common content management problems. Many of the tools, extensions, and products we’ve built over the years have been the result of seeing the same issues and challenges come up time and time again, sometimes across seemingly dissimilar clients.
Content attribute transformation or conversion in eZ Publish isn't required as often as data import or data migration, but when it is, it can take a similar amount of effort. eep simplifies the process with its flexible built-in attribute module options.
As the plot thickens on book sales trends (with paper books now making a solid comeback and ebook sales on the decline), one thing that hasn’t changed is readers’ thirst for content.
When working with eZ Find fetches, you may want to return only a specific sub-set of data for each of the search results, rather than the whole content object.
You can do that by using the eZ Find 'search' fetch's 'fields_to_return' parameter.
Migrating content from one WordPress site into a new site is typically relatively straightforward, but merging two existing sites together - especially sites with different content types, categories, and functionality - can actually be a labour-intensive process that requires planning, testing, and attention to detail.
Migrating a website from WordPress to eZ Publish affords many benefits for content publishers looking to add robust front-end and back-end features to their site.
eZ Find, the enterprise search extension for eZ Publish and wrapper for the Apache Solr search engine, is a highly performant alternative to manually searching through databases. We recently extended eZ Find to support Solr frange queries, and specifically to support minimum relevance values.
Forms are an integral part of many websites but they pose unique challenges for accessible websites.
Creating alt tags that conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) ensures all of your readers can have access to your website's images. Here's a look at how to create effective alt tags for web accessibility.
In eZ Publish 5.x and eZ Platform, the concept of "view cache" has changed. The "module result" part of it (which was basically page-level caching if we didn't count the pagelayout) has been offloaded to HTTP caching, most often implemented with Varnish. In addition, Cache blocks no longer exist and have been replaced by ESI (Edge Side Includes) blocks.
The persistence caching element -- that is, caching of your actual content from the database -- of the "view cache" still exists, handled by default on the file system through the Stash bundle. Stash also supports memcache (which, as its name suggests, uses memory, and has a much better performance). We use memcache(d) for all of our production sites.
Does your website have account logins or have e-commerce functionality? If so, you’ll want to ensure it runs on the HTTPS protocol by January 2017.