MIGOZINO is a web based generator and editor. It is used to make a personalized magazine based on the feeds and content in your social media accounts. Whether it was a holiday, one of those special moments in life or just a day with friends or family, you can archive and relive those precious moments in your own magazine.
The original idea for Migozino arose when the founder Eric van der Loo created a magazine year book in Microsoft Word for his wife. He created a magazine by simply Copying & Pasting posts from her Facebook timeline. Then he combined all these posts in a Word document and asked a local printer to make a hard copy glossy magazine. Everyone was very enthusiastic about the final result. People asked founder to make a journal for them as well. For the reason that making the magazine took lots of time, and he couldn’t change the layout quickly, Eric had to say no. However he found a solution: founder came to to Xplicity and asked to make a fully functional application.
DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Xplicity designed the website and application with some help from outside designers. One of the main development criteria was keeping the magazine layout specifications outside of the application. We wanted to be able to define and roll-out new magazine layouts without the need to change the application code. That is why Xplicity designed the Migozino Definition Language (MDL). Which is basically a XML based way of describing magazine layouts. These external layouts can be defined by non-programmers, uploaded and published on the site separately.
While developing this project, we learned that we needed to integrate our product with different platforms, such as Mailchimp and Mandrill. We could of-course develop our own email services and functions, but it’s much better to integrate with platforms that are specialized in certain tasks. Both Mandrill and Mailchimp are market leaders and offer very good integration possibilities. So, we chose to integrate both platforms into all our e-mail communication. Both transactional (Mandrill) as well as campaign based (Mailchimp).
FINAL INTEGRATION WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook in particular is very precise and protective, when it comes to privacy protection and integration. Therefore, any application that wants to integrate with Facebook must be formally and thoroughly reviewed by Facebook. In essence, this means that we need to explain every piece of integration information and show how it benefits to consumers. But this wasn’t a huge issue. Facebook has a very good Developers and Review platform. It helps you to go through the process very efficiently. The review process took around 4-6 weeks to complete and the Migozino integration received formal approval to integrate with Facebook.