Mugo Web main content.
Watermarking PDFs

Stamping PDFs with a watermark in eZ Publish

When running an intranet or an otherwise password-protected site, you sometimes need to share confidential or sensitive files, specifically PDFs. It is a challenge to balance the confidential nature of the files while allowing privileged users to download and work with the files normally. One lightweight approach is to stamp a watermark onto each page of the PDF. Instead of just a big "confidential" watermark you can customize each download so that each file is stamped with, for example, the current user's name and the current date.

LEARN MORE
Online Daily Evaluations

Online Daily Evaluations: a walkthrough of emergency department shift evaluations

With the Online Daily Evaluations portal, student (or "trainee") doctors and attending doctors can easily evaluate each other after every hospital shift with a customizable online course evaluation form. This ensures that mandatory student evaluations are completed within a CanMEDS compliant and RIME compliant evaluation system, and that students get the most out of the learning experience. In such key environments as emergency medicine and anesthesia departments, doctors and patients can appreciate every bit of efficiency! Here is a brief walkthrough of how Online Daily Evaluations works.

LEARN MORE
-

Building a development environment from a production website with Vagrant and VirtualBox

When it comes to local development environments, in a lot of cases Mugo uses VirtualBox images and manages them with Vagrant. These environments are sometimes created after the production environment has been set up. To make a local development environment as similar to production as possible, one approach is to actually copy the production server.

LEARN MORE
-

Marketing automation technical review: Marketo versus HubSpot

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about integrating Salesforce and Marketo in a web marketing solution powered by a content management system (in this case, the eZ Publish CMS). Recently, Mugo had the opportunity to migrate one of our clients from Marketo to HubSpot. The decision to move to HubSpot was made for non-technical reasons; regardless, it is useful to review the technical differences and challenges when it comes to integrating the marketing systems with a content management system.

LEARN MORE
https://openclipart.org/detail/170708/iron-gate-by-merlin2525-170708

Subscription-based sites: softer / combination paywall solution

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.

LEARN MORE
Chicago is enterprising

Enterprise login features in eZ Publish: sub-accounts, log in by IP address or referring URL

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.

LEARN MORE
-

Salesforce and Marketo integration with eZ Publish

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.

LEARN MORE
Speedometer

Rackspace Performance Cloud benchmarking on eZ Publish

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. 

LEARN MORE
CSM archive links

Archiving in eZ Publish: a CSMonitor.com case study

Mugo planned and implemented an article archiving solution for The Christian Science Monitor, an award-winning news website. The site has a large amount of content: visitors have access to articles starting from 1980. In total, the site has almost 800,000 content objects and the current setup serves up to 48 million page views per month.

LEARN MORE
Rasmussen Reports paywall

Paywall case study: Rasmussen Reports

Electronic media company Rasmussen Reports is best known for their US elections polling, but they do public opinion polling on a wide variety of topics, releasing new poll results on its website daily. Their multi-tier paywall subscription system has successfully helped them generate website revenue at different levels of user engagement.

LEARN MORE
Book display

ONIX websites: your bibliographic data and the Mugo ONIX Bridge

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.

LEARN MORE

Running contests within a content management system to engage visitors

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.

LEARN MORE