I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.8.5, available now on our download page.

What's New?

A new Control for Nivo Slider

Thanks to Matt Wilkinson who contributed a control that makes it easy to use Nivo Slider, a jQuery widget that does fancy slide show transistions. This control can be used in layout.master or in custom features. You basically add the control and point it to a folder that has images for the slide show. The images in the folder must all be the same size, and you must specify the width of the images on the control, so example usage is like this:

<portal:NivoSlider ID="NivoSlider1" runat="server" ImageFolder='~/Data/Sites/1/nivoimages' ImageWidth='618px' />

Then you also need to add one of these included skins for Nivo Slider to the style.config file of your skin:

<file cssvpath="/Data/style/nivoslider/default/default.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/nivoslider/default/">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/nivoslider/orman/orman.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/nivoslider/orman/">none</file>

or you can copy and rename one of those and modify it as you like.

A new QRCodeImage control

QR Codes are often used in printed materials to encode an url for a web page. There are apps for most smart phones and tablets that can scan the QR Code and navigate to the web page. We've added this control in the "PrinterFriendly" skin so that if people print a page on your site using the printer friendly view a QR Code will be included at the bottom automatically.

Since we don't update the skins in the site specific folders during upgrades you may want to copy the new version of the printerfirendly skin from /Data/skins to /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins or you can add it directly to the layout.master of your copy like this:

<portal:QRCodeImage id="qr1" runat="server" AutoDetectPageUrl="true" />

You could also use this control in custom features, you can encode any text value, if you set AutoDetectUrl to false and add the attribute TextToEncode="Any text you want to encode as a QR Code" you could use it for other purposes. The control uses the google charts api to generate the QR code image so it can't work if you are offline or your site is on a private intranet with no access to the internet.

Lots of Little Improvements

There is a new section in Site Settings for Company Info as well as some convenience controls to make it easy to show company info in the footer of your site by embedding some new convenience controls in your layout.master file that will automatically pull in the compnay info from site settings. Examples:

<portal:OrganizationControl id="oc1" runat="server" /> will include the company info marked up with Schema.org Organization markup. There are also a few literal controls that can be used separately:
<portal:CompanyPhoneLiteral id="litPhone" runat="server" />
<portal:CompanyFaxLiteral id="litFax" runat="server" />
<portal:PublicEmail id="litEmail" runat="server" />

There is a new Site Created Event Handler Provider system (usage is yet to be documented), contributed by Joe Davis that allows you to plugin custom code that can execute when additional sites are created.

Blog Category list and Archive list views now use the same settings as the main post list so that they show full posts or excerpts in a paged list instead of just titles.

There is a new setting in Image Gallery to automatically start the colorbox slide show when the page loads.

In the html content feature users with full edit permission can now publish a draft without submitting it through the approval process.

Improved usability for user role management on manage user page.

Made role permissions UI in page settings consistent with module settings where the links are under the security tab for improved usability

Added support for content on the login page.

Added count of members to role list in role manager page

When using LDAP Authentication with fallback to database authentication it is now possible to allow the users with database accounts to login with their email address in addition to the loginname.

Added config settings to make it possible to control the cache duration for 301 redirects or to disable caching.

Restored previously removed support to use cache dependency files based on a config setting to support small web clusters with a shared drive, where dependency files are the easiest way to clear the cache on all the nodes that share the drive without having to use a distrubuted cache.

Added rel="next" and rel="prev" meta links on paged Forums and Lists features to improve the SEO of those features.

Added support for checkboxlist questions in custom user profile with example in comments in mojoProfile.config.

Upgraded from CKeditor 3.6.2 to 3.6.3

Upgraded from TinyMCE 3.4.7 to 3.4.9

Updated to newest version of jcarousel

Update to newer version of google data libraries

Added custom body css class on closed page to make it easier to style the closed page.

Removed un-needed css class from artisteer theme.skin files, was causing a problem in webstore layout where it did not use the full page width.

Bug Fixes

• fixed login, password recovery and registration issues when user exists but is flagged as deleted
• fixed bug in profileview.aspx where custom profile boolean properties were not showing the images for true or false
• fixed bug in PermissionEdit.aspx where All Users was not checked even if it was saved correctly in the database
• fixed incorrect parameter type for compiledmeta field in MySql data layer
• fixed bug in MySql data layer for database logging, incorrect parameter type
• fixed a bug in the blog where an auto-generated excerpt was being used in the post list even when explicitely created in the editor
• fixed bug in blog where detail view did not use the blogauthor override setting
• fixed bug in blog - option to show side pane content and top and bottom content should work in all blog supporting pages
• fixed bug where new user notification did not work in child sites when using related sites mode
• fixed a bug in the editors where the unsaved changes warning from spanish resources was causing CKeditor to not work at all and causing unsaved changes prompt to not work in TinyMCE
• fixed bug in SiteStatisiticsModule where it was hard coded to use 1 for the site id
• fixed bug in newsletter administration where paging did not work
• fixed bug in Flickr Gallery - don't specify a default size in flickr gallery script so it will not reduce image quality
• fixed bug - check for null on all paypal IPN paramaters in webstore
• fixed bug in webstore where media player was shown on offer detail page even when no teaser file was present

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Thanks to Kerry Doan for implementing and contributing support for jPlayer in mojoPortal, the next release will include an Audio Player and a Video Player feature.

You can see it in action now on our demo site. We should be shipping another new release of mojoPortal that includes these features by the end of the month.

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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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Back in August we tried out what was then a fairly new service, Amanuens, that makes it easy to crowd source translation. We tried it with several translators, but at the time it seemed confusing and difficult to use so we stopped using it for a while. Since then Amanuens has made a lot of improvements to the usability and now we have used it successfully with a small group of translators and it seems very much easier. So if you are interested in translating mojoPortal into a new language or updating an existing translation, let us know on this forum thread and we can see about setting up an account for you to help with translation. The Amanuens service makes it easy to translate the .resx files used for all labels and buttons, and these are the most important files to translate, but there are also message templates and help files that are just plain text files. These files are not supported by Amanuens so we still work by having you send those in a .zip if you translate them.

mojoPortal is currently translated at least partially in 24 languages, though many of them have not been kept up to date over time. The English resources are always the most up to date, and Italian is also kept very up to date by Diego Mora. Most other languages are only partially complete so we could use some help in getting them updated. Translated files in Amanuens are automatically synced and committed to our source code repository each morning, so it is a very efficient process.

Amanuens provides this excellent service free for open source projects and it is really working out well for us so far, so I thought I should give them a shout of thanks with this blog post. It isn't just a service for .NET applications, they support all kinds of technologies and they integrate with all kinds of source control systems. You can even hire translations directly through their service. Anyone who is working on a project that needs localization should take a look at Amanuens.

Thanks especially to our translators who volunteer their time to keep our translations updated!

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The holiday season is upon us and Thanksgiving has come and gone but it is still a good time to reflect on the things we are thankful for. I am thankful for so many things, good health, good friends, and being blessed to have a career that is also a creative outlet for me such that I look forward to each day working on mojoPortal which is truly a labor of love for me. While my work has certinly not made me rich (yet), I feel like one of the luckiest people because I know that so many people go to work everyday dreading their job and the time they spend there. I've had a long and diverse work history and have also spent many years doing work that did not make me happy and was not enjoyable, so I know how difficult it is to find one's niche in the world and how lucky I am at this point in my life.