Seb Duggan

One feature that is missing from Mura’s site member tools is the ability for an administrator to log in to the site as a particular user.

So I hacked together a very quick tool which will allow you to do just that.

Once installed, go to the plugins page for your site, and click on the name of the Impersonate User plugin.

You’ll then get a form in which you can enter either a UserID (a UUID) or a username. Click the button, and you’ll be immediately logged out of the admin, logged in as the requested user, and directed to the site’s home page.

You can now see the site exactly as that user would, even though you don’t know what their password is…

You can find the source code on the plugin’s github repository, and you can download the plugin here.

I’m curently toying with the idea of using GitHub Gists for all my code snippet rendering here on my site (and perhaps elsewhere).

However, I’m struggling to weigh up the pros and cons, so I’m throwing it open to people for comments.

Pros

1. The syntax is nicely coloured, in a multitude of languages
2. GitHub does all the heavy lifting of the colouring and provision of downloadable source
3. The code doesn’t get mangled by the blog’s HTML editor (in this case, TinyMCE)

Cons

1. It’s JavaScript-based, so Google won’t index the code
2. It’s JavaScript-based, so you won’t see the code without JS enabled
3. Until I find a workaround, page rendering is held up while the browser fetches the script to perform document.writes. And GitHub is not always the fastest at serving the gists

What are people’s thoughts? Are Gists the future, or is there a better solution?

I've just started playing with web fonts for a site redesign. I came across the following gotcha (thanks, Firebug, for alerting me to it!).

If you are running IIS 6 or higher on your web server, some of the fonts will be disabled by default.

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One of the great things about Mura - much like Mango - is its extensibility via its plugin architecture.

The basic user validation in Mura doesn't do much in the way of checking a username. It's required, and it cannot be the same as an existing username. That's as far as it goes.

If you have forums, or other public displays of usernames, you probably don't want users registering with a name containing "admin" or your company or product name. And one-letter usernames aren't great, either.

So, wanting a bit more, I set about writing a plugin - and just a few hours later, here it is, ready for release into the wild.

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A few weeks ago, I was landed with an emergency web project - due to a number of factors, I needed to design and build a fully functional product launch site with site membership, CMS facilities, integrated forums and a free trial signup process. In two and a half weeks.

I'd looked briefly at Mura CMS a while back, but didn't have a use for it at the time. This seemed the ideal project to implement Mura, if only the learning curve would be easy enough. So I took a day or two to install Mura, play with it, get to grips with the structure and conventions, and see if it fitted the task. A bit of a gamble, as if it wasn't a good fit then I'd have wasted two precious days, but well worth the effort.

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