Family Optical Centre, Inc. has officially launched their first ever online presence at www.familyopticalcentre.com. Family Optical Centre has been a part of the Rockford-area community for over forty-five years and currently operates three locations throughout the area. If you're in the market for some new frames and/or lenses, you might be interested in taking advantage of some of their Special Offers too.

The site is powered by Adobe® ColdFusion® and Microsoft® SQL Server with online content management provided via Mura CMS. Talented artist and designer Greg L. provided an elegant, yet simple design which I quickly and easily converted into HTML, CSS and Mura CMS templates.

Congratulations to the team at Family Optical Centre on your new online presence. Best wishes for continued success!

Designer: Greg L. | Developer: Steve Withington

I was finally able to finish up my MuraMediaPlayer plugin for Mura CMS. This plugin uses JW Player™, the Internet's most popular and flexible media player. It supports playback of any format the Adobe Flash Player can handle (FLV, MP4, MP3 and AAC). It also supports RTMP, HTTP, live streaming, a wide range of settings and more.

This plugin is available in the Mura CMS App Store under plugins. Since the primary guts of the plugin are driven by my cfMediaPlayer project hosted on RIAForge (a ColdFusion wrapper of the JW Player™), I'm posting a copy of the license here just so there's no confusion.

License

By using MuraMediaPlayer, you agree to the 'non-commercial' license found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. For corporate use or if you're planning to generate revenue from your site (e.g., by running advertisements on the page, selling anything, etc.) you will need to buy a license for JW Player™. To obtain a commercial license of the JW Player™, please visit https://longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/commercial-license/

Installation

Installing the plugin is pretty simple. I've created a brief video tutorial and also included an outline of some simple steps to follow:

1. Download the plugin from the Mura CMS App Store's plugins section
2. Note the location of the 'muramediaplayer.zip' file that you downloaded
3. Log in to your Mura CMS Admin area
4. Click 'Site Settings' found on the top-right portion of the screen on the yellow bar
5. Select the 'Plugins' tab
6. 'Browse' to the location of the 'muramediaplayer.zip' file and select it
7. Click 'Deploy' and the 'Plugin Settings' form should appear
8. If you want to change the 'Plugin Name,' feel free to do so
9. You can simply leave the 'Load Priority' alone or change it to anything you want to be if you have other plugins that require loading ahead of it
10. If you're Mura CMS install is using Amazon S3 for file storage and you've set up an Amazon CloudFront, you can enter the 'Cloud URL.' Otherwise, leave it blank.
11. If you're Mura CMS install is using Amazon S3 for file storage, you have an Amazon CloudFront set up and you've setup a Streaming Distribution to deliver content to end users in real time, you can enter the 'Streaming URL.' Otherwise, leave it blank.
12. Under 'Site Assignments,' select the site(s) you wish to enable the plugin to run on.
13. Click 'Update' when finished.
14. That's it! You're ready to create MuraMediaPlayer pages and/or use a new [mura] tag method that is now available to you.

Please visit Amazon for more information about their S3 and CloudFront services.

Usage/Instructions

Detailed instructions for using the plugin are available at https://www.getmura.com/index.cfm/app-store/plugins/muramediaplayer/documentation/. In addition, instructions can be found after you install the plugin simply by logging into the Admin area, click 'Plugins' (or go to 'Site Settings', then select 'Plugins' tab), then click the 'MuraMediaPlayer' link.

EBL Canopy Tours, launched their completely revamped online presence at www.ebl.org. Technically speaking, three (3) separate sites have been launched for EBL. The main site has become more of a "landing" page allowing visitors to choose the direction they wish to proceed: Canopy Zipline Adventures and Canopy Zipline Installations. The "adventures" site is geared towards those seeking zipline and canopy tour adventures, while the "installations" site is geared towards those seeking the "premier installer of Canopy Zipline Tours."

All of the sites are powered by Adobe® ColdFusion® and Microsoft® SQL Server with online content management provided via Mura CMS. Jaci M.'s fully customized designs were easily integrated into Mura CMS to allow our client the ability to add and edit content while maintaining the original design's integrity.

The sites feature a brand new Mura plugin I've developed called MuraMediaPlayer™ which will soon be released to the general public. MuraMediaPlayer allows our client to easily add media files to any page on their site. I also set up an Amazon S3 for storage of site assets and Amazon CloudFront account to allow for streaming video. In addition, the adventures and installations sites both feature a "weighted-randomized" header for the home pages. Using some Mura class extensions, I enabled the client to upload a header, location details, up to five (5) additional location images and also determine the "Weight for Randomness" for each canopy zipline tour location.

This was definitely a fun project to be a part of and hopefully one of these days, our client will invite us to one of his canopy zipline locations (hint hint!). Congratulations to everyone at EBL, and I look forward to working with you again soon.

Designer: Jaci M. | Developer: Stephen Withington | Content Management System: Mura CMS