Jospeh Hill recently added Sqlite support to mojoPortal mainly to make it easier to fit on the mono-live cd.

But Sqlite can also be embedded in a device and there seems to be a movement afoot to try and get mojoPortal running on the Nokia 770. The Nokia 770 is not a phone, I would be tempted to call it a PDA, but the branding used by Nokia calls it an Internet Tablet. Whatever you call it, it looks pretty cool to me!


I'll be following that story with interest!

Those of you playing with mojoPortal from the Subversion repository using TortoiseSVN, if you are using VS 2005 I recommend you get:

svn+ssh://anonymous@forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/mojoportal/branches/2.1
rather than /branches/2.0
2.0 was the intial build against the 2.0 .NET runtime but it did not use any of the new 2.0 features.

All the fun stuff is happening in the 2.1 branch.

So far I've

• Converted from Paul Wilson's MasterPages to the new intrinsic ASP.NET MasterPages. This was very easy thanks to Paul's version being very similar to the shipping 2.0 version from MS
• Came up with a way to store the theme.skin file for the new Theme feature in ASP.NET in the site specific skin folder along with the other elements like layout.Master, style.css, and supporting images. This keeps everything together and keeps things private between sites when running multiple sites from one mojoPortal installation. Themes allow you to set all the visual properties for the built in server controls. Now its a tedious task of moving markup off the controls in the pages and modules into the theme.skin file but it will be well worth it to gain complete control of control presentation from the skin. I predict more interesting looking skins after this!
• Implemented a SiteMapProvider, mojoSiteMapProvider on top of the mojoPortal SiteSettings object. This is used to bind to the new Menu or TreeView controls and also the new SiteMapPath control which provides Breadcrumbs and will probably replace our current breadcrumbs control soon.
• I setup the new Menu control and styled it in the theme.skin fairly close to how the older skmMenu is styled in the current skins. I also moved the style for the blog calendar and events calendar into the theme.skin file. I plan to make the menu have 3 options you can set in to enable either the new Menu, the new TreeView, or the skmMenu for the menu. I still need to style the treeview at least a little

I will be working on implementing the membship api and trying out conversion to WebParts in the near future after I get some more of the theme grunt work done.

Note: the 2.x branch of mojoportal is Windows only at this point, it will not run on mono until the mono 2.0 implementation catches up. It will probably be a while before this happens so mono users should stick with the 1.x branch aka trunk

My good friend and co-worker David Neal surprised me this morning by letting me know that he had converted his site, ChristianASP.NET to mojoPortal. Funny thing is he did such a good job making a skin that looked like his old site that if he hadn't told me I don't think I would have noticed except by the powered by mojoportal image at the bottom of the page.

David is a .NET guru I've learned lot from both at my current job and at a place we worked together a few years ago so I take it as a high complement for mojoPortal that he chose to convert his site.

I got mojoPortal loading its content using MasterPages on Mono tonight at http://dev.mojoportal.com
On Windows it was working with AutoEventWireup=true but it was not firing the events on mono so tonight I set it to false on Windows and hooked up the events manually and it worked both on Windows and when I deployed it on mono.

Sweet! I'll merge this into the 2.0 bnranch after I get the rest of the pages and skins converted.

So the current 2.0 runtime status of mojoPortal on mono (r54948 compiled 1/1/2006) is illustrated as follows:

http://demo.mojoportal.com = 1.1 framework version

http://demo2.mojoportal.com =  2.0 framework version not using any 2.0 features  with 1 outstanding mono bug

http://dev.mojoportal.com = 2.0 framework with main pages using MasterPages

progress...

Update 1/5/2006: After another evening of struggle trying to find a way to get other pages than the main Default.aspx page to load their content I have to say something is either broken or not implemented yet in mono that is preventing the other pages from loading their content inside the ContentPlaceHolder controls within the master pages. The Default.aspx page is the main CMS page and loads its controls all dynamically based on database settings but other supporting pages have controls nested within the markup of the place holders like this:

<asp:content runat="server" id="MPContent"contentplaceholderid="mainContent">  

<asp:panel runat="server" id="pnlLogin">  

Hello World

 </asp:panel>  </asp:content>  

on windows it works but on mono you don't see the controls nested within the Content regions and if you try to access them in code you get NullReferenceExceptions

Currently on http://dev.mojoportal.com the Register page is throwing the NullReferenceException and the login page is not showing the login controls due to this. I'm going to try and produce a small test case this weekend.

Update 1/10/2006: I was able to make a little test case this past weekend with this issue on mono. The null reference exception is occuring when trying to hookup button click events and such. If you set the MasterPage for the page programmatically in OnPreInit it somehow loses its reference to controls nested within the ContentRegions on the page.

I made some progress tonight converting from Paul Wilson's MasterPages to the built in ASP.NET 2.0 MasterPages. I got the Default.aspx page converted and working on Windows, it was pretty straightforward given that Paul modelled his version from early specs for the real thing. Now it will just be a machanical repetitious task to update the remaining pages and skins, but not tonight, I'm spent.  I tested on mono at demo2.mojoportal.com, it did load the MasterPage but something went wrong loading the rest of the page content as you can see. I'll follow up with that and see if I can pin down the problem.

I've been getting very excited learning about the Web Part framework. I know I said I would pace my changes with mono support but I think what I will do is keep a separate branch in step with mono support until the mono support catches up so I can move forward taking advantage of 2.0 ASP.NET features. Some of them are just too compelling to wait and besides it will take some time to make the changes and figure out exactly how I want to do it. Right now I'm thinking the Web Part model will replace the existing implementation for Feature Modules.

I definitely will try and help implement some of the missing mono features if I can, or at least provide testing and feedback for the guys who are doing it.