I've just updated this site to use a new skin designed by Joe Davis of http://i7media.net/i7MEDIA. I wasn't really dissatisfied with the previous design in general, it was pretty decent and in some ways it makes me a little sad to change from what had become so familiar to me. But the new design seems very clean and there is a lot of attention to detail that really looks professional and I think in some cases the new design improves the usability of the site.

The menu structure is very nice and one of the most striking elements of the design. But the usability improvements are the result of making things stand out more. For example people hardly seemed to notice the forum descriptions and posting guidelines in the old design. It is right there on the page but somehow it often goes un-noticed because it doesn't grab your attention, so the result is that people often post questions in the wrong forum or leave out information that is expected to be included. With the new design, the forum description/instructions really stand out and I anticipate it will be noticed better than with the old design. Notice also the nice attention to detail for the pager link styles.

New Design Forums

Old Design Forums

Similarly, on our search page there has always been a little help link that people could click to learn how to do more advanced searching, but in the old design hardly anyone ever noticed it. Whereas again in the new design it really jumps out and I anticipate more people will click the help link and will have better luck searching once they know the tips from the help.

New Design Search

Old Design Search

A huge thanks goes out to Joe Davis for his hard work on this design! Joe is also working on a variation on this design but with a different color scheme that we will ship with a future release of mojoPortal.

What do you think? Do you like the new design better than the old one?

Please also let us know if you notice any pages on this site that don't look right with the new design, we are still tweaking a few things here and there.

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Just a quick post to highlight a few mojoPortal sites that have come to my attention recently.

The City of Escondido California went live with their main site using mojoPortal back in December of 2010, but more recently they went live with a new site for their Police Department and for Recreation, and work is under way for a new site for their Fire Department.

Quoting Jamie Eubanks, a developer in the IT Department for the city:

"the PD site was pretty straightforward this time around (nothing custom). I can say that it's the great out-of-the-box flexibility of mojoPortal that allowed us to create a large and comprehensive site like this with no programming on our part. This is also our first site which was developed end-to-end by our webmaster with minimal technical support needed. She developed the site skin from scratch in Artisteer, and reused some of the layout.master tweaks we developed for the main site (like the Google Translate widget at the top of each page)."

Another recent site is the Solar Europa site designed by The Design Loft, one of our partners in the UK. They have done over 20 projects so far using mojoPortal.

We are continually adding new sites to our mojo Sites list. If you've designed a mojoPortal site that you are particularly proud of, let us know, we'd love to hear about it and maybe we will feature your site in a blog post.

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.6.5, available now on our download page.

This is not a major update but it does have some things to make it worth upgrading.

Editor Updates

Both CKeditor and TinyMCE put out new releases with bug fixes and updates, many of which are related to IE 9 and Firefox 4.
Upgrade to CKEditor 3.5.3
Upgrade to TinyMCE 3.4.2

There was an error happening under .NET 4 Medium Trust hosting related to our older FCKeditor. Nothing had changed in this editor for a long time so I'm surprised that we had never seen this error until recently. It makes me wonder if there was some behavior change that came with a recent Windows Update. In any case, the error is fixed in this release.

jQuery Updates

We had a bug report about our jQueryUI Date Picker where it was not formatting dates correctly for en-NZ. It turned out that support for en-NZ was only added to the jQueryUI Date Picker as of version 1.8.9, so the solution was to upgrade to a newer version. However, we had been holding off on upgrading jQueryUI because we knew there was an issue in the Time Picker extension that we were using where it did not work with newer versions of jQueryUI than 1.8.6. Fortunately, we found another Time Picker extension for the jQueryUI date picker and it seems to work with any version of jQueryUI.

So we updated to jQuery 1.5.2 and jQueryUI 1.8.11. Note that upgrading is really just changing 2 config settings since we load jQuery and jQueryUI from the google CDN. So if you are using any custom jQuery plugins and they don't work with the newer versions of jQuery or jQueryUI, you could override the version from user.config to keep using an older compatible version of jQuery or jQueryUI.

Support for Newsletter Throttling

It had been requested a while back to have a way to throttle the sending of the newsletter. Blasting out an email to a lot of users in a short time can make it look like spam to some receiving mail servers, especially if you are using a consumer email account or you don't have a well known reputable mail server. So it can be beneficial to limit the rate at which you send the email messages to your list. The mojoPortal newsletter subscriber list is getting pretty large and we had some trouble with our February newsletter due to sending the emails too fast. I got a few non-delivery notifications from @msn.com and others saying that we sent too many in a short period of time. So it was a priority to implement this before we sent the March newsletter. It really helped as we had no non-deliveries related to sending them too fast. 

There is a new setting that you can override in user.config:

<!-- you can throttle the sending of the newsletter 0 = unlimited/no throttling -->

<add key="NewsletterMaxToSendPerMinute" value="0" />

If you enter a number greater than zero it will sleep for one minute after each round of sending that many. So if you set it to 10, it will blast out 10 in a row and then sleep for a minute and the repeat until it sends to each subscriber in the list. I set it to 10 before sending the March mojoPortal newsletter. Of course the larger the list the longer it will take but you can calculate approximately how long it will take at any given rate and you can use a higher setting to send them faster if you need to. 

Miscellaneous

Support for custom regex and error message for email validation on the registration page, you can override our defaults with these settings:

 <add key="CustomEmailRegex" value=""/>

 <add key="CustomEmailRegexWarning" value=""/>

Support for more page settings when creating initial content from config files

Support for configuring the Thread UICulture separately from the Culture. The UICulture is only used for choosing the resource files, whereas the Culture is used for formatting numbers, currency, and dates.

This example uses German for the numbers and date formats and uses English for the resource files.

<add key="UseCultureOverride" value="true" />

<add key="site1culture" value="de-CH" />

<add key="site1uiculture" value="en-US" />

Fixed bug in the SQL CE data layer that prevented the Newsletter feature from working in our package for SQL CE.

Lots of updated translations thanks to our Translation Team

Other miscellaneous little tweaks and fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

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