I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.9.5, available now on our download page. This is a significant update with many improvements.
UPDATE 2013-02-14 We have found that our .NET 3.5 package for this release is broken under medium trust due to an error generated by Lucene.NET. We are looking into a solution to this but for now those hosted under .NET 3.5 medium trust should not upgrade. The best solution is to move to .NET 4/4.5 hosting since we are approaching the end of support for .NET 3.5.
UPDATE 2013-02-14 We were able to use conditional compilation to make the .NET 3.5 builds use the older version of Lucene.NET and this fixed the medium trust error for the mojoportal-2-3-9-5-mssql-net35-deploymentfiles.zip package. So it is now safe to upgrade .NET 3.5 installations.
What's New?
This release adds support for Artisteer 4.1 (currently a release candidate) and there is a new update to our skin exporter plugin for Artisteer. All of the older skins have been moved into the extra-skins.zip download and a new set of skins created with Artisteer 4.1 is included in the mojoPortal packages. All the .artx files are also available in the ArtisteerFiles.zip.
Recent Content Feature
Lots of people have asked if there is a way to show recently created or updated content. The challenge with this has always been that features are self contained and pages are just containers for feature instances so the don't have knowledge of the feature content so there was not an easy way to list new content except at the feature level. For example features like the blog and forums expose RSS feeds so one could pull recent content from those feeds into a feed manager instance, but there wasn't a good way to do it for the HTML Content feature which is the main content feature. However we recently revamped our internal search index to keep track of created and modified dates so that searches could be filtered by date (also new in this release). Once that was completed we realized that one way to get recent content in a feature agnostic way is to retrieve it from the search index based on the created or modified date. This is exactly what the new Recent Content Feature does. You can set a maximum number of days old to include, which features to include and whether to use the created date or modified date. So this now works with all features that support search. The Recent Content feature can be placed on a page like any other feature and configured as you wish. There is also now a Recent Content RSS feed that can be enabled and then used with the Feed Manager feature to show recent content. I'll be documenting how to do that soon but the stand alone Recent Content feature is probably more user friendly for most people.
Search Engine Improvements
As mentioned above the internal Lucene.NET search engine has been revamped. In addition to the created and modified dates it can also store the author name and this can be optionally shown in the search results for features that populate it. We also upgraded to the latest version of Lucene.NET (3.0.3). As a result of these changes, after upgrading it is recommended to rebuild the search index so it gets populated with the new fields. There were some breaking changes so developers who have implemented their own custom features that support search and use our internal search engine should see the notes in this forum thread.
There is also a corresponding update to our Event Calendar Pro product to be compatible with the search engine changes. This is a free update for customers who already purchased Event Calendar Pro.
Blog Improvements
Previously the map settings for the blog were at the feature instance level which meant that all maps in all posts had to use the same settings. These settings are now per post so you can get more creative with maps in your blog posts. There is also a new setting if you want to show a search input in the blog.
Forum Improvements
There is a new setting if you want to automatically close threads older than a certain number of days. Individual threads can now be left out of the google site map for the forums and/or marked with a NOINDEX meta tag if you don't feel that the thread has any content of value. There are also new settings to allow showing the CMS page side content on the forum detail pages which is useful for ad placement for example.
Miscellaneous Improvements
- Content Style templates can now be imported and exported thanks to Joe Davis of i7MEDIA
- Upgraded to CKeditor 4.0.1
- There is a new menu control named FlexMenu included in this release. Unlike the ASP.NET Menu and Treeview controls it does not add any javascript so you can add your own if needed and not get any conflicts that those menus are prone to.
- Updated the CDN settings to use jQuery 1.9 and jQueryUI 1.10.0. Also updated included plugins to compatible versions. However if you are using any custom plugins or javascript that is not compatible with the new version of jQuery we ahve a way to include a compatibility script. See the important skin changes article for details, all Artisteer skins need this compatibility script for example.
- Bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.
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