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Vanity URLs with Magnolia CMS

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Vanity URLs are short, easy to remember Web addresses used for campaigns, microsites and landing pages. They are a key Internet marketing tool. In this post I whip out my vanity cane, clip on my grill and show you how to get vain with Magnolia CMS. A vanity URL typically contains a word or phrase that describes a specific target such as a campaign slogan. When a user visits the vanity URL they are redirected to the actual target site. The URL can be constructed using a: trailing path: www.shell.com/ eco-marathon domain prefix: experience .virgin-atlantic.com domain suffix: www.amazon. de entirely unique domain name: mynavyfuture.com The URL is often reproduced in print ads, hoping that the short and snappy look makes it easier to remember. Magnolia CMS provides two approaches to creating vanity URLs: 1) Virtual URI mapping is used to create path-based vanity URLs. In this mechanism a trailing path is mapped to an actual page. In the configuration example below, www.example.com/winter...
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Doc Jam 2013

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Magnolia Conference 2013 has left town. Time to sum up the results. I organized a Doc Jam session to collect feedback on documentation. If you haven't been to a jam session before, it's pretty simple: Name a documentation topic that is missing. Help us write a table of contents for it. Here are the top three topics proposed by the attendees. 1. Managing system health How can an administrator tell a system is healthy? Symptoms and numbers to watch out for (too many nodes?) Collecting system statistics. Events to log routinely vs. events to log when in trouble. Serious vs. harmless log entries Issue scenarios like what to do when the search stops returning results. Idea! Create a Health app that provides vital stats. 2. Replicating your environment Replicating a complete site to a dev or test environment.  Configuration to change after cloning. Changing subscribers to avoid publishing content to production. 3. Activation (publishing) best practic...
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Translating jokes into Chinese

In Magnolia 5 technical documentation we have a page titled  Location, location, location . The page explains how the system identifies where you are with a URL history fragment. Examples: I am in the Pages app , editing a page named  about : #app:pages:detail;/demo-project/about:edit I am in the Contacts app , viewing a contact named ldavinci : #app:contacts:browser;/ldavinci:treeview: Very nifty! This means you can bookmark any location and go back there instantly. The document about location fragments is very technical. But the title is a pun. The phrase "location, location, location" is used in real estate for the three most important factors in determining the desirability of a property. The phrase was coined by Harold Samuel, a British real estate tycoon. This in an example of a safe joke technical text. Native English speakers get the punchline and have a giggle. But even non-native readers get the point. For them, the repetition emphasizes impo...
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