Google Analytics is the most popular tool for understanding how people are finding and using your site. In addition to its standard reports, you can use its User ID feature to get more fine-grained reporting about registered users. This enables you to better measure, anticipate, and meet or exceed your users' needs.
Links are one of the core elements of the web. Links within body content are not only good for user experience, but also for SEO, engagement, and conversion. As we read, for example, a sports article, there might be links on the athlete names pointing to their biography pages. Or, when reading an author's bibliography, the book titles contained therein might be linked to the book pages. Adding and maintaining such in-body links can be very time-consuming; systems that auto-link the text can be a great help for content publishers.
A powerful addition a normal site search is for registered users to be able to save their searches, share the searches with others, and create customized e-mail alerts. This adds a deeper level of interactivity with the site and encourages users to regularly return to the site.
On subscription-based websites, digital publishers often restrict the majority of content to registered users and/or paid subscribers. However, publishers still need a way to enable non-registered users to sample the website in order for the visitors to more fully understand the benefits to subscribing. This is sometimes called a "softer" or "combination" paywall as opposed to a fully hard paywall (everything protected) or a "porous" paywall (everything available given the right conditions).
One solution for a softer / combination paywall that Mugo recently implemented uses special "hash" URLs to provide time-limited, full access to select articles.
If you have a membership-based website, the standard model is to provide users access via a username and password. Enterprise customers often require more advanced validation models. Here, we sketch out use cases around validating by IP address or referring URL; and as a bonus topic: multi-seat accounts. We've implemented these advanced features for a couple of sites and they work seamlessly.
eZ Publish is a powerful Content Management System (CMS), but you typically don't try to build Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and E-mail Marketing features directly into it. Instead, you usually integrate it with existing solutions. We recently integrated eZ Publish with Salesforce and Marketo on a subscription-based website.
Mugo's eZ Collaboration Workflow extension has been released for a few years now. We've been able to make continuous improvements over time to solve different and more complex client needs. Here's an update on some of the recent new functionality around multi-language workflows, editing other users' drafts, and scheduled publishing.
Rackspace recently released their newest generation of cloud servers, called Performance Cloud Servers. Unlike previous new releases, they've made a compelling case to upgrade existing cloud servers, as the "Performance Cloud" servers are cheaper, more powerful, and they use SSD storage. We decided to run some performance tests on an existing eZ Publish site, and saw between a 10-100% performance increase under high loads.
Countless presentations are made daily about the ubiquity of smart phones and the new, groundbreaking uses of smart phone apps. However, in many cases, humble text message services can be more useful and efficient.
In the world of books, book publishing and bookselling, the metadata exchange format “ONIX” is the preeminent method of communicating information about a book. In spite of the fact that ONIX is a rather flawed standard and protocol for exchanging bibliographic information, it is the standard which everyone has settled on. Mugo has been working with ONIX since 2003, first building a freely available ONIX management system as a proof of concept for the Centre for Canadian Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University and most recently building a turn-key system for an ONIX website - that is - an ONIX powered website.
As a web development company, we spend a lot of time deep in code, implementing solutions. However, essential to our success is the proper use of additional administrative and communication tools to keep organized, to run smooth projects, and to interact with clients. Skype, Dropbox, GitHub, and Google Apps are ubiquitous in the industry and embedded in our daily work. An additional set of less obvious tools are also just as important to our work.
Rasmussen Reports runs a contest where visitors have to guess what an upcoming public opinion poll result will be. Participants get points depending on how close they are to the actual result. A new question is asked every week, making for a fun, recurring way for visitors to interact with site content. Here's how we developed the contest on top of an eZ Publish extension called eZ Survey.