I'm happy to announce that the first release of In Site Analytics Pro is now on sale in the mojoPortal Store, starting at $99 for a single installation license.

In Site Analytics Pro provides reporting and charts from Google Analytics in your mojoPortal site and for supported databases also provides long term storage of analytics data. Google only promises to keep analytics data for up to 2 years, in practice it seems they keep it for about 3.5 years, so harvesting the data allows you to keep historic data that would otherwise be lost over time. While In Site Analytics Pro is ideal for tracking the traffic of your mojoPortal site because it integrates with mojoPortal and allows you to have traffic reports integrated in your site, it can be used to track any one of your Google Analytics Profiles, it does not have to track a mojoPortal site, but it does need to be installed in a mojoPortal site. you could for example setup a mojoPortal site with In Site Analytics Pro and use it to track the traffic of one of your other non-mojoPortal sites. While this would not provide reports integrated into your non-mojoPortal site, you would still get the benefit of long term data storage.

The charts and reports can work directly from the Google Analytics Data API or from the database. Only MS SQL 2005/2008/SqlAzure and MySql are supported for data capture, but installations of mojoPortal using other database platforms can still use the charts and reports directly from the API. It is also possible and preferable to use a separate database for the analytics data instead of keeping it in the same database as the site. It can be a large amount of data over time, much larger than the actual site data. You could also use any database platform for the site but still use MS SQL or MySql for In Site Analytics, it just requires you to manually run the database script(s) and change one configuration setting, see the System Requirements/Installation tab for more details.

The main charts and reporting plugs into the Administration menu and is protected by roles, but there are also 2 features that plug into the mojoPortal content system to allow you to publish a traffic chart and/or visitor map on public pages of your site as I have done on our Community page.

Below are some screen shots of the main features, you can also try it out live on demo.mojoportal.com, just login as admin@admin.com with the password admin, then click the Administration Link, the click Site Traffic Reports from the Administration menu.

Note that the map can be re-sized by dragging the bottom right corner.

Note that while In Site Analytics Pro does not use the main site skins, it is skinnable, and we include 2 skins and you can also create your own by copying and modifying one of the existing ones. You can set the skin from configuration settings. From the skin you can control the JQueryUI theme as well as colors of the charts and other style elements.

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Hello mojoPortal friends,

I've been working hard for the last few months to complete a new add on product for mojoPortal named In Site Analytics Pro. It is basically feature complete for what I envisioned for the first release and you can check it out on our demo site demo.mojoportal.com where you can login with the credentials admin@admin.com and the password is admin

I'm still doing a little work on the data management page, but that is a page I would lock down so you can't see it on the demo site anyway for security reasons. Once I complete that I still have to produce documentation for installation, configuration and use before I put it on sale in the mojoPortal store. For now I invite you to check it out on our demo site and let me know any feedback positive or negative.

The primary features are the ability to have traffic reports and charts from Google Analytics in your site and the ability to capture the data from Google Analytics into the database for long term storage. Google only promises keep the data for 2 years, in practice it seems they keep it about 3.5 years, so harvesting the data allows you to keep historic data that would otherwise be lost over time. 

The charts and reports can work directly from the Google Analytics Data API or from the database. Only MS SQL and MySql will be supported for data capture, but installations of mojoPortal using other database platforms can still use the charts and reports directly from the API. It is also possible and preferable to use a separate database for the analytics data instead of keeping it in the same db as the site. It can be a large amount of data over time, much larger than the actual site data. You could also use any db platform for the site but still use MS SQL or MySql for In Site Analytics, I will be producing documentation about how to do that.

The main charts and reporting plugs into the Administration menu and is protected by roles, but there are also 2 features that plug into the content system to allow you to publish a traffic chart and visitor map on public pages of your site as I have done on our Community page.

Below are some screen shots to give you an idea of the features, but it is best to check it out on our demo site.

note that the map can be re-sized by dragging the bottom right corner

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

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Please join us tomorrow night Tuesday September 28, 2010 at 8PM EDT for the mojoPortal online user group meeting.

David Dean will be giving us a presentation about using jQuery Validation.

There will also be the usual question and answer session, and I will be giving a brief preview demo of the next add on product that will be available for mojoPortal soon. There are a limited number of seats available so if you plan to attend please sign up today.

The new product will be named In Site Analytics Pro which provides reports and charts of site traffic right in your site. One of the key benefits is that it harvests your data from the google analytics data API into the database for long term tracking of site traffic statistics. Google only promises to keep your data for 2 years, in practice it seems they keep it for about 3 and a half years, so if you want to be able to keep track of long term data, you really need to harvest the data. If your site has been using google analytics for more than 3 and half years, you've already lost some data, but In Site Analytics can prevent further loss of data by saving it in your own database.

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

What's New?

Support for Artisteer 2.4!

Today Artisteer just made their 2.4 release final. For those who don't know, Artisteer is a web design tool that makes it easy to make nice web designs that can be used in mojoPortal. We have been using the release candidates to to support the new features in Artisteer such as support for vertical navigation menus. We introduced support for Artisteer 2.3 in the previous release of mojoPortal and it has been a big hit with our community and our Artisteer enthusiasts have kept after me to make sure we were ready for the release of Artisteer 2.4. So, I'm excited to be able to make a new release of mojoPortal on the same day as the new Artisteer release.

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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A few days ago mojoportal.com finally got accepted into the woopra beta program. If you haven't heard of woopra, you really should check it out. I've only been using it for a few days but I'm already addicted and I think anyone who has a web site that is important to them and particularly anyone with an e-commerce web site will find this tool to be awesome.

I'm using it in addition to google analytics. The big advantage it has over google analytics is the way they make it possible to see clearly how individual visitors are using your site in real time (or close enough to it). You can see a lot of information about each visitor, what country they are in, if they arrived at your site as the result of a search, you can see what they were searching on that led them to your site, you can see the sequence of pages the visitor has looked at. In short its just brilliant!

You add a little javascript to your site just like you do for google analytics, but you also install a desktop application (its a Java application) that gives you a rich user interface with a lot of different views. Its the live data that has me hooked.

I've always been addicted to keeping tabs on how many visitors are on my site at any given moment. I used to frequently check my community page, which gives a little chart showing how many people are online and who is logged into the site.

Woopra takes it to a whole new level for me, now I not only know how many people are on the site but also what they are looking for, have looked at, how they arrived. I have a secondary machine with a separate monitor and I pretty much keep the woopra running all day on that screen while I work. It gives me the feeling as if I were running a brick and mortar store. I can see the people walk in and look around and get a good idea of what they are looking for or interested in. In fact if I wanted to, woopra has a built in web chat feature (see the "start a conversation" links next to each user in the screen shot), so if someone is looking at a product page I could prompt them and ask if they have any questions, very much like a real store where people offer help. All of this is giving me better insights about how users interact with my site.

If you have an important web site you really ought to sign up for woopra, it may take a while before they accept your site as they are scaling up gradually but the sooner you get on the list the better.