I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.9.7 available now on our download page.

The main new item this release is an all new file uploader with support for drag and drop, multiple file selection and a progress bar in modern browsers.

For many years we've used NeatUpload for file uploads which also provided a progress bar and multi file selection. Dean Brettle, the author of NeatUpload stopped supporting it in May of 2010 and now it has become a bit long in the tooth. It depended on Flash for multi file selection in some browsers and it did not work in medium trust hosting and was beginning to have some problems in newer versions of Firefox. Specifically it depended on a really old version of swfupload (which itself is now also an abandoned project). NeatUpload has served us well over the years but many of the problems that is solved are no longer existing problems or are easier to solve in modern web browsers so we felt the time had come to replace it.

We previously needed to provide a separate web.config file which enabled NeatUpload in Full Trust hosting but we no longer need any separate configuration, all the included features of mojoPortal "just work" in Medium Trust with no special configuration needed. Some of the file uploader features such as drag and drop, multi file selection and upload progress bar do not work in older web browsers but it does degrade to normal one at a time file upload in those browsers while modern browsers get the best user experience. NeatUpload is no longer included with mojoPortal so as long as you don't have any custom features that depend on it you can safely remove the /NeatUpload folder from your eisting installation after upgrading and remove the file Brettle.Web.NeatUpload.dll from the /bin folder. Developers are encouraged to look at how we implemented the file upload in mojoPortal features and replace your own use of NeatUpload in custom features to be consistent.

New Version of AjaxControlToolkit

We upgraded to the Jan2013 version (from July2012 version) of AjaxControlToolkit. Since this is used also in our add on products Form Wizard Pro, Event Calendar Pro, and Web Invoice Pro, we have corresponding upgrades to those add on products for compatibility with this release of mojoPortal.

Other Stuff

• upgrade to CKeditor 4.0.3
• upgrade to jQuery 1.9.1 and jQueryUI 1.10.2
• upgrade from jPlayer 2.1.0 to 2.3.0
• various minor bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.9.6, available now on our download page.

This release includes a number of bug fixes and a few other improvements since the previous release. The most interesting new feature is support for inline editing in the Html Content feature when using CKEditor which has also been upgraded to version 4.0.2. With inline editing, users with edit permissions can just click into the content and the editor will appear as shown below in a screen shot from our demo site.

When you click out of the content if it has changed it is saved by an ajax post to a service url. There is a little lock icon that toggles enabling and disabling the inline editor. This was needed otherwise if a user had edit permission and wanted to click a link within the content, it would launch the editor instead of navigating to the link. The inline editor also works in iPhone and iPad. For now inline editing is only implemented in the Html Content feature but depending on feedback we may implement it in other features in the future. It can also be disabled in case you don't like it and the traditional edit link that goes to the edit page also still works. To disabled inline editing in an installation you would add this in user.config:

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

In the last release we introduced a new Recent Content feature as well as an RSS url that could retrieve recent content based on query string parameters that could limit the results to a specific feature. Since the Recent Content feature that plugs into CMS pages could be configured to show content from multiple features we decided it would be more user friendly to expose an RSS link directly in the feature that will use the settings from the feature so that the feed will include the same content as the feature on the page.

In the previous release we upgraded to the latest jQuery but we missed a few plugins that were not compatible which caused a few bugs in various places such as the image cropper and the file manager. These have been fixed. The jPlayer plugin used in our Audio and Video players also is still not yet compatible with the latest jQuery so we automatically load the jQuery Migrate plugin when it is loaded to provide compatibility until they come out with an update to the jPlayer plugin.

We also upgraded to the newest version of the NivoSlider jQuery plugin which is integrated in the Image Gallery feature. It now supports captions and the web size image will link to the full size image.

There was also a bug introduced in the last release for the forums where forum threads could be lost from the search index when other threads were updated. This has now been fixed and anyone using the forums should rebuild the search index again after upgrading to restore any missing forum items from the search index.

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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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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 calcualte 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. 

Updates for Artisteer 3 Release Candidate

Many of us in the mojoPortal community are avid fans of Artisteer. We've been working on supporting their new 3.0 version since it was in Beta, and recently it has become a Release Candidate. So we've put some final touches on our work and are now including example skins for use in making mojoPortal skins from Artisteer 3 Html template exports. We still continue to support older Artisteer versions since 2.3, but some of the older example skins have been moved into the extra-skins.zip download that we ship with each mojoPortal release to make room for the newer Artisteer 3.0 versions of the same designs.

We now have updated documentation for Creating mojoPortal Skins from Artisteer 3 Html Exports. 

Miscellaneous

Support for custom regex and error message for email validation on 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, curreny, 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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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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