Mura Implementation – First Production Site

After waiting for the right time to launch a new site with Mura, I found a client who was dying to try something new. While most are saying that a CMS is nothing new. Going from Adobe Contribute and its somewhat limited editing environment, to a CMS such as Mura, can be a breath of fresh air for an editor. Also, with the editing environment in the browser and no need to install an application on the users machine, means deployment is a snap.

After meeting with my client on Thursday morning and explaining what we could offer him with Mura, he was sold. Implementation started on Monday and took a bit longer in our production environment than my local development environment due to a database permissions issue. For security reasons I won’t be getting into that.

I did run into another issue that stemmed from the way I setup the default environment. Turns out setting up Mura in a subdirectory with the intention of using multiple domain names with the software was not the best way to go. I created a forum post at Mura that helped out with this issue. You can read all about that here.

Multiple Domain Issue

Matt Levine with Blue River Interactive Group was able to help me out and point me in the right direction. By moving the Mura administration to a subdomain, I was able to resolve the multiple domain issue discussed in the above forum post.

With the above issues resolved I was able to launch our first Mura based site.

Neighborhoods and Families

While it’s nothing special right now and quite similar to the site I worked on in my series on setting up Mura, there are changes on the way. This site will be much more dynamic and interactive than other sites we’ve launched. Mainly because the sites we will be linking to are youth based. So while we are using the standard Town of Manchester template for launch, a new template and framework will be setup for this site. Twitter and Facebook integration will be done through Mura plugins, though I’m not sure if there is a Facebook plugin. I’ll need to look into that one.

I’m really excited about the possibilities moving to this CMS will bring to our organization. Certainly licensing costs for Contribute will be eliminated resulting in a huge savings overtime. The ability to edit one’s site from home or work is another benefit. The main item that excites me is when our site goes through another refresh, transitioning sites to the new look and feel will be a breeze.