Five Things I Learned in Mura Admin/User Training

March 19, 2015

On Monday I attended the Mura Admin/User Training here in Sacramento. Normally I'm not given the title of "Site Administrator"; I typically build the site for a client and hand it over. But I wanted to get more familiar with Mura (and was unable to attend the Back-end Developer training this week due to a schedule conflict...boo), so I signed up. Besides, it never hurts to learn new things; and knowing more about the best practices for Administrators might help me in building future sites, optimizing my workflow, etc. Rather than giving a full-on review I thought I'd list a few of things things I found noteworthy during the course. (I kept a Google Doc of all my notes, but it's rather cluttered and wouldn't make much sense to post here out of context.)

First, I need to give props to the Mura guys. Due to some last-minute client issues, I wasn't able to sign up until literally the night before the class. Assuming everyone had left the office by then, I thought I'd just show up at the class and see if they had room (I'm local, so worst case: I'd have spent 10 minutes in the car for no reason, not a huge a deal). Blue River wrote me back minutes after seeing my RSVP and let me know I was signed up for the class...it must have been 10pm at night when this happened. Excellent customer service. Steve (the instructor) was great, answered everyone's questions, kept the class rolling at a good pace, and is a very engaging instructor. Being a trainer myself, I always appreciate when the instructor genuinely enjoys being there and teaching the material – it makes the experience -so- much better for everyone.

With that, I give you 5 (random) Things I Learned in Mura Admin/User Training...

  1. The "Escape-L front end editing" was used a lot in class, and streamlines the workflow a lot. Typically I build out Users / Groups for my clients so they can log into the Admin and get the same effect, but using the front-end editing really significantly speeds things up! When I was first told about this feature, it was described as a "quick way to log into the Admin", which isn't exactly correct. I've basically been ignoring it, but I think that will change now.
  2. Multi-Device Preview. How this skipped by me I have no idea. But it's going to save me some back-and-forth debugging on websites. Mura has a baked in feature that emulates the different "viewport" sizes so you can test what your site will look like on desktop, tablet, and mobile, all without leaving your desktop browser.
  3. Turn off "User Activity Session Tracking" in the Dashboard to make the sites run faster. Google Analytics can do everything this can do, and it's faster.
  4. Google reCAPTCHA is baked into Mura now. You just need to register for a key with Google and you can add that "I am not a robot" checkbox to your Form Builder pages quickly!
  5. The "Zoom" feature in Mura Admin. It's never seemed that useful to me before, I've found other ways / places to click and get what I need. However every once in a while there are spots where my browser (usually Firefox) just kind of freaks out and won't let me select certain items in Site Administrator. Using the "Zoom" tool fixed that in most (but not all) of the cases.
  6. (+1) Steve likes making references to NPR and Digital Underground during class. :)


A sign of a good training class (or user group meeting, or conference session) is when you leave feeling motivated and excited to work on a project using the new found knowledge. Mission accomplished!



-nolan