The mojoPortal community has been gradually growing along with the evolution of the project since late 2004. We have had quite a few contributors over the years such as Dean Brettle, who implemented NeatUpload, Joseph Hill, who implemented the initial version of Feed Manager (later improved by Walter Ferrari) as well as the initial data layers for PostgreSql and Sqlite, Rob Henry, who implemented the Survey, Christian Fredh, who implemented the Poll, and Kevin Needham who implemented the content workflow, and many others who contributed various little improvements over the years. You can find a list of contributors on our developer page for more detail. All the contributions and involvement have been pretty organic, we have never really organized project teams or a holistic strategy to grow and support the community. mojoPortal is now the 3rd most popular CMS on the ASP.NET stack and we are reaching a critical mass of popularity that I think requires us to get a little more organized. We are beginning to see more people helping out in the forums and more and more people are offering to help with development, but it is challenging for me to manage the community all by myself.

Today I would like to announce that Joe Davis will be stepping up to take on new responsibilities in the project as Community Manager. Joe has been a huge help to myself and the community already in the forums. He has helped a lot of people with skinning questions, installation and configuration questions, and lots of implementation tips and tricks to help others achieve their goals with mojoPortal. Joe mentioned to me a long time ago that one of the things that drew him toward mojoPortal was the friendly forums, we don't make people feel stupid for asking questions, there are no stupid questions. This is not to say that every question gets answered, most of them do but not all of them. Sometimes people ask questions for which we don't know the answer, or there isn't a good answer that comes to mind, or the amount of time required to answer it would be too much effort, or what I playfully would describe as "Wizard of Oz" questions. But by and large if people ask reasonable well articulated questions and we are able to help we do help. In his participation in the forums, Joe Davis has been exemplary in putting a friendly face on our forums and making people feel welcome. I mean just look at his mug shot, if you lookup "nice guy" in the dictionary there should be a mug shot of Joe Davis!

As Community Manager, Joe Davis will be able to help with forum moderation and logistics of managing the community, and he will collaborate with me on strategy to promote community engagement and how best to organize teams and contribution guidelines to facilitate development help offered by the community. As such we are in the beginning stages of working on the strategy and will be communicating more about that as our ideas begin to take shape. For now I just want to thank and congratulate Joe for stepping up to take on this role as a Core Team member and Community Manager.

Joe's company i7MEDIA provides high quality mojoPortal hosting and design services.

I also want to officially welcome Katherine Moss, who has joined our team as an Accessibility Advisor. Katherine will be instrumental in helping us keep mojoPortal accessible for users who use assistive technology such as screen readers. She will be helping with testing and feedback of various mojoPortal features in terms of their accessibility.

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.7.3, available now on the download page.

Important Upgrade Information

After upgrading to the new version, you will need to delete the following files from your /bin folder.

• PollFeature.UI.dll
• PollFeature.Business.dll
• PollFeature.Data.dll
• SurveyFeature.UI.dll
• SurveyFeature.Business.dll
• SurveyFeature.Data.dll

The reason these need to be deleted is because the Poll and Survey have been combined into these dlls:

• mojoPortal.Features.UI.dll
• mojoPortal.Features.Business.dll
• mojoPortal.Features.Data.dll

The good news is that the Poll and Survey now work for all the different databases, MS SQL, MySql, PostgreSql, Firebird Sql, and SQLite. Previously we only had support for MS SQL and MySql for those features.

Everyone who purchased Event Calendar Pro (and I mean both of you ;-D), will also need to upgrade to version  0.0.0.2-b (a free upgrade, just download the product again). There were changes in mojoPortal that required small changes in this feature, there are no functional changes to this feature right now.

Feature Improvements

• Blog - I added an Excerpt option due to popular demand in the forums. Improved support for Persian localization, thanks to Asad Samarian.
• RSS Feed Module - Walter Ferrari added options for showing and hiding various things, an Excerpt option, and Ajax paging.
• Forum - I added a captcha if anonymous posting is enabled to reduce spam.
• Image Gallery and Shared Files - I added some ajaxiness

New Multi Site Configuration Options

Its now possible to use different SMTP settings in each site of a multi site installation. To enable this, set this setting to true in your Web.config or user.config file:

<add key="EnableSiteSettingsSmtpSettings" value="false" />

after doing this a new Mail Settings tab will appear in Site Settings.

New Global Options

These settings are not site specific so they will affect all sites in a multi site installation.

There is a new config option to email site administrators if a new user registers. Set this to true if you need that functionality:
<add key="NotifyAdminsOnNewUserRegistration" value="false" />

The following config options were added based on a request in the forums to make it possible to show more information on the member list page for an intranet site:
<add key="ShowEmailInMemberList" value="false" />
<add key="ShowLoginNameInMemberList" value="false" />
<add key="ShowUserIDInMemberList" value="false" />

Accessibility and Usability Improvements

FCKeditor now works with Safari and Chrome, so we have enabled it for these browsers in mojoPortal.

All site management features should now work even if javascript is disabled. Previously most of the features could function even with javascript disabled but we went through and found a number of places where we were using <asp:LinkButton and replaced it with <asp:Button. We did this because the ASP.NET LinkButton is the only button type in ASP.NET that doesn't work if javascript is disabled. We added some new css to style the new buttons to look like links instead of buttons. Fortunately, other than the LinkButton, almost everything in ASP.NET is built to degrade gracefully but remain functional if javascript is disabled. So, with a little care its not difficult to build accessible applications and sites.

We replaced the use of ExtJs Tabs with YUI Tabs in Site Settings, Page Settings, and other places where we have settings grouped on tabs. This change was made partly because the YUI tabs are a bit more accessible, but also because we have been running into issues where the ExtJs tabs don't work right. I've hadd issues in Firefox 3 where if there was an FCKeditor on more than one tab, changing between the tabs doesn't show the correct editor. Others have reported interaction bugs with ExtJs tabs when using the new 3.5 Ajax Extensions. Since the ExtJs project changed their license to GPL, which is not compatible with mojoPortal, we can no longer get upgrades to ExtJs and can only use the old version under a compatible license. So, it seems better to switch to the YUI tabs. The only downside is that the ExtJs tabs had a few better looking skins for the tabs but YUI only has one. So some of you may not find the new YUI tabs to be as good looking as the old ExtJs tabs, but since the YUI tabs are also skinnable, we may be able to come up with better looking skins in the future.

New Extensability Point

There is a new plugin system for UserSignInHandlers that allows developers to plug in their own handlers that can fire after a user signs into the site. People have asked for this so that they could implement custom redirect logic depending on user roles and other criteria.

New Translation

Resource files have recently been translated into Spanish thanks to Manuel de la Pena

Seems like a lot has been accomplished since the last release only 33 days ago. Lots of exciting things going on in the pipeline that I will blog about later.

As always be sure and backup before upgrading and if you have any troubles post in the forums and we will try to help.

I just upadated the mojoPortal demo site with the latest code. I've been doing some more work on the ExtJs controls and using them in the Site Office feature. The idea of Site Office is that the core of it will be a UI framework for intranet style applications. Currently we have a plugin model for content management features used in the public side of the web site. Site Office will have its own plugin model that makes it easy to build features that plug in. A feature will have a section in the Menu and clicking the navigation links will open the feature page/control/view in a new tab in the center pane of the layout.

You can check it out here: http://demo.mojoportal.com/SiteOffice/Default.aspx and can login with admin@admin.com and password = admin.

I have some not yet working features setup that do open in the new tabs but the features don't yet work. I'm really just looking for feedback on the layout. Notice how you can hide panels and resize them. Feel free to click the links and see how it works. Especially cool is if you open a lot of tabs the tabs become scrollable. If you make the side panels wider it doesn't take as many tabs to be able to see the tab scrolling.

Currently the Welcome tab which is always present shows the home page of the site. I plan to make it configurable so you could have a special intranet home page that is the default page shown there. Note that you can navigate the site inside this tab.

Notice also that if javescript is disabled in your browser it still can show the feature views when you click a navigation link, its just not as rich an experience. Being able to work without javascript is just one accessibility requirement. I'm particularly interested in any other accessibility issues that can be identified and resolved so that the Site Office UI framework can be accessible from the beginning so if you have any expertise on accessibility and you see problems do let us know.

I think these ExtJs layout controls go a long way towards a rich user interface for office/intranet style applications. I'm still pondering what can go in the right side and bottom panels. Mabe help could go on the right side. Lots of possibilities really.