Intended audience: technical managers, senior developers
Agile developers must constantly strike a balance between building solutions for a known existing case and building solutions that can scale to handle unknown future cases. On the one hand, Agile philosophy encourages us to build and iterate as necessary: Move Fast and Break Things. On the other, various programming best practices encourage us to build in an extensible and modular way from the start: Do One Thing and Do It Well. On smaller projects, these two goals can be achieved simultaneously; but on larger projects – especially given time and budget constraints – it is sometimes necessary to prioritize one over the other.
Project managers and full-stack developers face such choices almost immediately, during the initial development, staging, and deployment phases. For instance, a project may begin with a narrow scope and require only a single developer’s time. In this case, it often makes sense to forgo provisioning a dedicated development virtual machine (VM) or staging server, and instead, to use generic or shared environments. But as the scope of the project grows, for instance with caching or proxy layers, it often makes sense to implement better development, staging, and production parity.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It’s the darling of today’s marketing mix: the marketing automation solution. Its very name can bring marketers palpable relief: imagine automating one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of your job -- lead nurturing -- so that lead conversion starts happening with minimal intervention. It’s every marketer’s dream!
You want to be able to track visitor analytics for websites that spread across multiple subdomains and domains in the same Google Analytics property, tracking users across sites in unified sessions. Let's suppose you have a general-purpose publication with a travel section spread across multiple subdomains and domains, as well as across different paths. You can create a view in Google Analytics so that the team in charge of the travel section can focus on the data they're interested in, with statistics and reports for the travel pages only.
Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” to refer to the positive feeling that results from being engaged in a focused task. It’s an apt description for the “workflow” experience we try to create for our publishing clients.