Susan Finch Solutions

Reviewing Mura CMS Again

It's been a couple of years since I had my first experience with Mura's CMS.  I'm back to it as a solution for another client who needs a full CMS with all of the features Mura has to offer.  The newest of which is MURA HOSTING.  This is what's about to make Mura my new favorite CMS solution.

I don't want the hassle of installing and staying current on the latest upgrades. I'd prefer to give them the hosting money to ensure all new features are available to me as the are developed.  Mura has also started their own weekly online sessions, The Mura Show, to cover new features and take any questions from customers or potential customers. I appreciate a company that wants to stay in touch with its customer base regularly and who addresses all issues without a filter.

They also seemed to have addressed any previous concerns I had in my earlier review of their product from two years ago.  I have not used their current editor yet, as my client is still determining when we are converting his HTML site to a CMS.  Once we do, I'll add to this post to let you know how it goes and how easy it was to set up a members only area, banner ads and cart module. I'm still researching the options for a Mura cart module. We only need something very simple.

The other factor in recommending Mura is their support. I get a human - scratch that - a KNOWLEDGABLE human when I call. If no one is available, within minutes I have an email asking if I want to chat on the phone or via email.  Their follow up is terrific and ability to help me think through achieving my client's goals for their site.

 

Coffee Cup's Sitemapper, almost perfect for my needs.

I have enjoyed some of the Coffee Cup tools over the past few years.  I started using their Sitemapper tool when it first came out and have enjoyed how it works with the search engines.  It's handy, easy to use and easy to configure.

Recently I added a new client to my routine.  This is where this review goes awry. 

GoDaddy's QuickBlog Cast USELESS if you want to get marketing info.

Did you know that blogs are the new journal, so I'm told by the rocket scientist and social media expert at GoDaddy.  I took over a client's account over a year ago. In place were every GoDaddy tool available:  email marketing, quick cart, quick blog.  I'm really OK with Godaddy on domain issues and mail, but when it comes to blogs and carts, as Mickey McBride would say at the end of his parties, "GO HOME!"

Have I told you lately, that I love you?

Ahh, Valentine's Day approaches.  Who needs Hallmark when we have the Internet?  We can tell some of those around us how we feel, quickly, for free and then move on with our day.  I'm not talking about your main squeeze, children and best friends; I'm talking about those we encounter each day in our lives.  These include the grocer, dentist, hair salon, gas station, restaurants, coffee houses.  Tell them how you feel the best way you can - REVIEW their businesses for the world to see!

The orange gets to concentrate on being juicy.

I couldn't help the pun.  I have returned from am AMAZING evening with Jan Black.  What?  You've never heard of Jan Black?  No, no, no, that's LEWIS Black. Jan Black is a nationally acclaimed author who inspires people to discover:

THAT ZING YOU DO: A Shortcut to Clarity About Your Purpose and Context
Tonight, our WEO members had a mini-workshop over a fabulous dinner at Kell's downtown.  She opened with an example of two oranges - one out in the open and one in a bag - pretending to be a bag.  Pretty tough.  The orange that was out in the open knew it was an orange.... it was able to -- CONCENTRATE (get it, orange - concentrate) on being JUICY - that's its talent, what it is all the way through.

Review of MURA CMS and FCKEditor

I launched a site this morning.It is a site that I created with CBTechInc's taff using a CMS of their choice: Mura.  It's a MySQL/ColdFusion based system that is free.  Mura runs on CF7+, Railo and OpenBD application servers. It also supports the following databases: MySQL, MS SQL and Oracle 10G.  I like most of the software.

The WYSIWYG editor needs some tweaking. Mura incorporates FCKEditor and it has known bugs that no one seems to fix.  The FCK Editor issues lie in the fact it removes code, adds in <p> tags where you didn't ask for them and makes other decision for you. It is also lacking an image resizer tool, so the end user clients have to either resize their images using Photoshop Elements or similar or loading HUGE images and squishing them down to distortion, killing the load time of a page.

The good news is it can be customized and tweaked.  My team has done this for Commpro's CMS that is used on the City of Brea's site, Laguna Woods Village, South Orange County Chambers , NRBA and others.  We are experts and twisting FCKEditor into shape to behave as it should, remove tools that clients don't want their admin users to have, as well as tying it their CSS files to make formatting of text easy and consistent with the rest of the website that is run by CSS.

Mura's product is friendly to add "components" to, giving the end-user clients a lot of freedom to insert chunks of content with a few clicks to any page or section. The only other negative I see in the navigation layout and limitations. It's not intuitive and you are not able to have drop-down menus if you make the wrong selection for a navigation item type.  This took a lot of rethinking the site layout.  This particular client didn't want to invest in the time for my team to change the navigation and give them more freedom, but they know it can be done.