I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.4.1, available now on our download page.

What's New?

New Time Zone System

Yes, a little late since we just did the whole spring forward thing and moved our clocks forward, but better late than never. I guess the best way to explain the new Time Zone System is to contrast it to the old one. Previously, we had a setting in Web.config for the site default preferred offset from GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and we had also an offset as a property of the user profile. So for example previously I had my offset set to -5 Eastern Time, because I live in the Eastern US Time Zone and the offset for Eastern US vs GMT is -5 hours. The problem with the old system is that what I just said is only true for part of the year. We just moved into Daylight Savings Time and during this part of the year Eastern US is only GTM -4 not GMT -5. So, with the old system we would have to change these offsets twice a year (possibly more in some time zones). In .NET 3.5, a new TimeZoneInfo class was introduced and this made it possible to keep track of user time zones by a Time Zone Id and then we could create a TimeZoneInfo object and it would be able to give us the correct GMT offset for any time of the year. The Time Zone setting looks much the same as it did before in the user profile page but under the hood it works much nicer. Also, we have a new Site Setting for setting the site time zone so it does not have to be a global setting in Web.config.

After you upgrade you should go to Site Settings and set your preferred Time Zone.

Forum Improvements

It is now possible after a thread or post has been created to edit it and make it a sticky thread or post which moves the sort of the thread or post to the top. It is also possible to lock threads so that no-one can reply to them except the editors. Only users with edit permissions on the page or forums instance can make sticky or locked threads.

We also added a new setting in case you want to link the user's Gravatar to the user profile page instead of to the Gravatar site. The only downside is that users may not discover about Gravatar and therefore less users may sign up for Gravatar and use it on your site.

We also changed the hard coded <img elements for folders in the forums to use CSS to set the images in order to make it possible to skin it more creatively. However, because of this change you will need to make some changes to your existing skins.

Skin Changes

Add these to your style.config file:

<file cssvpath="/ClientScript/greybox/gb_styles.css" imagebasevpath="/ClientScript/greybox/">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/forums/style.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/forums/">none</file>

Add this to your style.css:

ol.formlist { list-style:none; margin: 0px; }
li.settingrow { list-style:none; }
div.sitemap .AspNet-TreeView-Collapse
{background: url('collapse.gif') 0 0 no-repeat; width: 15px; margin-right: 5px;
  float:left; cursor: pointer; line-height: 15px;}
.AspNet-TreeView-Hide { display:none;}
div.sitemap a.AspNet-TreeView-Expand, div.sitemap a.AspNet-TreeView-Collapse { text-decoration: none; }

you may also want to look at skin notes for previous upgrades in this new sticky thread about skin changes.

There is a new feature setting for most features to allow you to add a custom CSS class name to the wrapper div for feature instances. This allows you to easily style a specific instance of a feature differently than others.

All the YUI tabs have bee replaced with jQueryUI tabs. There are a lot more themes for jQuery UI Tabs than for YUI and this reduces the number of javascipt and CSS files needed. Basically we are standardizing on jQuery UI.

WebStore Improvements

Added paging to the product list. Also added a confirmation email as soon as an order is received, in addition to the one we already had that is sent when the payment has cleared. Sometimes it takes a while for payment processing to complete at PayPal or Google and in those few cases where it takes more than a few minutes, the user might worry whether the order worked or not. So now we send an email right away to let the user know it is being processed, and then when payment clears we send the final confirmation email.

Miscellaneous

• Update from NeatUpload 1.3.21 to 1.3.22
• Update from TinyMCE 3.2.7 to 3.3.2
• Update from CKeditor 3.1 to 3.2
• Update to jQueryUI from 1.7.2 to 1.8.0
• Updated Italian resources thanks to Diego Mora
• Updated Russian resources thanks to Ермоленко А.С. (aka Alexander or SkySandy in the forums)
• Updated Croatian resources thanks to Slaven Brumec
• Updated Swedish resources thanks to Bert-Ola Persson
• fixed localization bug in RPX widget
• fixed date issues with some feeds in Feed Manager

Also I'm sure the community joins me in congratulating our friend Joe Davis of i7MEDIA on the birth of his daughter Ruthie!

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Just a quick post to welcome our newest consulting partner, TRIAD Comunications. TRIAD has already deployed 16 sites using mojoPortal and all of them are very nicely done.

My favorite is the site for Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I've been watching the Ken Burns DVD box set about the National Parks with my Dad over the last few weeks, so I was very pleased to see a National Park web site using mojoPortal.

I look forward to seeing more mojoPortal sites from TRIAD.

Hello mojoPortal community,

I would like to gather your feedback about something I am contemplating. Not long ago I implemented a new data layer for Sql Azure. I could have just made changes in the MS SQL data layer to make it compatible. The biggest change would be that ntext fields must be changed to nvarchar(max). There are a few other changes needed to support Sql Azure but that is the main issue as we are currently using ntext all over the place. The problem is that nvarchar(max) was introduced in SQL 2005, so doing this would be explicitly dropping support for SQL 2000 in mojoPortal. Doing this would be very beneficial to me because I could consolidate into 1 data layer that supports SQL 2005, 2008, and Azure and this would reduce maintenance by eliminating the need for an extra data layer for Sql Azure. 

So, what I'm trying to guage is how many of you are using SQL 2000?

It is 10 year old technology after all and at some point it seems like we should be able to drop support for it. If I were to drop support for it sometime soon how many of you would be chasing me with pitch forks?

Thanks,

Joe

Just a quick post to let people know about new training videos available. I am making it my focus for this month to produce a lot more tutorials to answer common questions and especially to help developers get started with custom development. I still have a ways to go with the developer tutorials, but thought I would go ahead an post links to videos I've completed so far.

Installation and Configuration

• Installing mojoPrtal in IIS 7.5 with MS SQL
• Hosting Multiple Sites Based on Host Names - with a primer on DNS resolution

Developer Series

I've begun a series of clips where I plan to implement a simple Guestbook feature as a way to cover important concepts. 

1. Getting the code from svn trunk
2. Introduction to the Source Code Part 1
3. Introduction to the Source Code Part 2
4. Creating a Custom Solution and Project
5. Hello Web Part 1
6. Hello Web Part 2
7. Guestbook first steps
8. Concepts Part 1
9. Concepts Part 2
10. Debugging in IIS
11. Create a Table in the db using the setup system
12. Create stored procedures with an upgrade script using the setup system
13. Generating a data access class
14. Generate the business layer
15. First Guestbook submission achieved
16. Form Layout 
17. Form Layout Part 2 and data binding

Just getting started so far, lots more clips to produce to complete the Guestbook tutorial. I'm planning to cover development of business and data access classes and how to add supporting pages to your feature as well as how to make your feature searchable. I'm working only from an outline not a script, so the videos are mostly improvised and I stumble on a few things here and there, but rather than edit them out, I think it is helpful since you may also stumble a little bit, so learning to work through the stumbles is part of the process.

Each clip will be less than 10 minutes in order to fit them on YouTube, but they are in high definition so the video quality should be pretty decent.

UPDATE 2010-03-08 -added items 8 - 17 to the list above.

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