It seems like developing applications for the iPad is all the rage these days as it has become a very popular device.  I’ve thought about developing an iPad app for mojoPortal, it would be fun to learn how to develop apps for iPad and iPhone, but honestly my plate is pretty full just working on mojoPortal itself and add on products for it. So I got to wondering if there were any apps already in existence for the iPad that could work with mojoPortal similar to Windows Live Writer which is the best Windows desktop application for blogging. In case you missed it, in version 2.3.7.5 we improved our support for Windows Live Writer so that you can now edit CMS pages with Html content in addition to Blog posts. I thought it would be pretty cool if there is an iPad application that offers similar functionality as Windows Live Writer.

So I tried a few iPad applications including the WordPress app, BlogPress, and Blogsy. I found Blogsy to be the most feature rich user friendly one of the group. All of these apps support Wordpress and some of them support a few additional blogging platforms and since mojoPortal is much less known than the big blogging platforms I would not expect the developers of those apps to be interested in working on specific support for mojoPortal. So instead I decided to try to support more of the Wordpress API in mojoPortal so that these apps could be used with mojoPortal just as if they were using  Wordpress. I used all 3 of these apps in testing to make sure I was correctly implementing the Wordpress methods, but Blogsy is by far the best one that I could recommend to mojoPortal users who would like to blog from their iPad.

In Blogsy you configure mojoPortal the same as if it were a self hosted Wordpress site. So you enter the url to your Blog page (use https if you have SSL installed) and your login credentials.

Now Wordpress of course is a PHP application (not a .NET app) and the Url for the API is yoursiteroot/xmlrpc.php (you don't enter this url in Blogsy but that is the url it will use to talk to mojoPortal) so we have a handler mapping in our Web.config file that maps requests for xmlrpc.php to our metaweblogapi.ashx handler. This probably only works in IIS 7.x and it may not work if you have PHP installed and configured for your site, but it does work for me.  I don’t have PHP installed so not sure what would happen if it is, but in most hosting control panels you can disable PHP for your site even if it is installed on the server, so hopefully it will work for you.

<add name="WordpressXmlRpcHandler" verb="POST" path="*xmlrpc.php" type="mojoPortal.Web.BlogUI.metaweblogapi, mojoPortal.Features.UI" preCondition="integratedMode"/>

When I first began work on the additional API methods and testing with Blogsy I was getting a lot of crashes. Adding an image from the iPad photostream for example was causing a crash after it uploaded the image to the server. But I contacted the Blogsy guys and they both helped me with advice that the images needed to be named a certain way with a prefix, and they also fixed things in their app to make it more robust and reduce the crashing and now it is working pretty well. I have a first generation iPad and suspect these apps work even better with newer iPads that have more memory available, but it works well enough even on my older iPad.

You can create and edit posts, you can publish or post as draft. It supports inserting images from your Photostream, local storage, Fickr, Picasso, and even videos from YouTube. You can assign and edit categories. You can create and edit CMS pages with Html content in addition to Blog posts. The only missing feature is the ability to set the parent page of a CMS page so you can’t manage the site hierarchy the same as you can with Windows Live Writer, but who knows if enough people request it maybe they will add support for parent pages in a future update to Blogsy.

The additional support for the Wordpress API is included in mojoPortal 2.3.8.1 but I’m just now getting around to documenting it so that people know they can try it. If you have an iPad I hope you’ll give it a try. If you have any troubles with it or any feedback positive or negative let us know. In theory it should work with any Wordpress client. While Windows Live Writer is still the best Windows app for blogging, in the Mac world apps like MarsEdit should theoretically work though I haven’t actually tested it yet.

A quick shout of thanks out to the Blogsy guys for their help and support. I highly recommend you give their app a try if you have an iPad. Its very inexpensive ($5 if I recall correctly), I actually think they could get away with raising the price a bit because it is the best blogging tool currently available on iPad and they are very passionate about it and constantly improving it and listening to the feedback from their customers.

See also:

• Using Windows Live Writer with Your Blog
• Using Windows Live Writer to Create and Edit CMS Pages

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Our first site for this month's mojoPortal Sightings is Collins Language Pioneers in Dictionary Publishing Since 1819. Thanks to Vijay Karla for letting us know about this one.

 Our good friends at DM2 Creative Marketing Communications also submitted a nice site for Umbrella Collection.

We also received a nice testimonial from the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. We featured their site in a blog post back in December 2010, when they first launched their site on mojoPortal. Recently they took their site mobile using our add on product Mobile Kit Pro.

My name is Mike, I'm the web applications developer at the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST for short). We've been using MojoPortal at POST for over a year now. We recently bought and implemented a mobile site using your Mobile Kit Pro. Prior to this I had hand coded a JqueryMobile/HTML version of our mobile site with a small subset of the pages available on the full site. With MobileKitPro we now allow our users to access all the pages available on the main site on mobile devices. Over the past year and a half we have created custom modules for MojoPortal, I was very impressed that most of these modules worked with the new mobile site without much tweaking.

Thanks so much for your hard work on MobileKitPro.

You're welcome to come check out our site on your Android/iPhone at http://post.ca.gov

-Mike

We've had similar feedback from quite a few customers using Mobile Kit Pro, it really does make it very easy to deliver a good experience for iPhone, Android Phone, and Windows 7 Phone. Although we don't offically support Blackberry mainly because we don't have a device to test with, Mike also told us it is working well for their Blackberry users.

We'd love to hear about the sites you are bringing online with mojoPortal. If you have a high profile site or a design that you're particularly proud of, or a site showing custom features you've built on mojoPortal, let us know, maybe we'll feature your site(s) in a blog post.

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More and more people are accessing the web using smart phones and tablets and while much progress has been made to provide a good web experience for those devices, until now one major shortcoming has been the lack of support for use of web based WYSIWYG editors like CKeditor and TinyMCE. The problem has been that while the WYSIWYG editors would display ok, they did not trigger the keyboard input so they were not usable because clicking/touching them did not put the focus in the editor and did not bring up the keyboard. The best solution we could come up with was to force the use of a plain old textarea which would trigger the keyboard but required entering raw html making it more tedious to use and requiring knowledge of html from the user. We tried to make it a little better by using MarkitUp to at least provide a toolbar with some helpful html elements as shown below in this screen shot from an old iPhone 3.

HTML 5 actually defines a contentEditable attribute which is intended for use in making web pages editable but it wasn't supported in previous versions of IOS/Mobile Safari until now with the recent release of IOS 5. Fortunately for us the makers of the popular open source WYSIWYG editors have been working on this using the beta versions of IOS 5 so that now since the official release both of these editors can work in iPhones and iPads that have IOS 5. Shown below is a screen shot of TinyMCE used in iPhone 4S.

We've modified mojoPortal to take advantage of this and not force the plain textarea if we detect an IOS 5 device. This change is already in our source code repository and will be in the next release of mojoPortal. You can also try it out on our demo site using your IOS 5 device. For other devices we still use the textarea approach but I suspect that over time we will be able to enable the WYSIWYG editors for even more devices.

I'm very excited that this major limitation has been overcome in IOS 5 and especially for iPad which is a great web browsing experience and now is even better since you can actually edit your content easily. Huge kudos to the developers of TinyMCE and CKeditor for their great work in supporting mobile devices.

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I'm very excited to announce that mojoPortal can now be optimized very well for major smart phones like iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

Actually I have 3 related things to announce.

• mojoPortal 2.3.6.7 is now available on our download page.
• We have a new product available now, named Mobile Kit Pro (requires mojoPortal 2.3.6.7), that includes a custom menu we implemented just for smart phones and a skin optimized for smart phones.
• Updated versions of Form Wizard Pro and Event Calendar Pro with compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.7 and Mobile Kit Pro.

See the Mobile Kit Pro product page for full details. You can also check out this site or our demo site using an iPhone, Android phone, or Windows Phone 7. My goal with Mobile Kit Pro is that you could just drop it in and set it as the mobile skin, and it would just work with most of your existing site content. In those few cases where you may have some content that doesn't work well even with Mobile Kit Pro applied, the new features in mojoPortal make it possible for you to make custom mobile specific versions of some content if you needed to or just leave some content out of the mobile experience. Of course this is the first release of Mobile Kit Pro and there will be free upgrades for future versions, so those who purchase it can provide feedback and impact the future of the product.

What's New in mojoPortal 2.3.6.7?

A lot of the work to make Mobile Kit Pro possible went into mojoPortal itself. We went through most of the features and in cases where the markup didn't lend itself well to the small screen size, we implemented alternate markup and made it possible to configure the use of the alternate markup from the theme.skin file. We also made a lot of different things about the rendering configurable from the theme.skin file, in some cases it is possible to override specific feature instance settings from the theme.skin. Even things like posting in the Forums from your smart phone should be a reasonably good experience.

Support for mobile specific skins, there is a new drop down list in Site Settings where you can specify the Mobile Skin for the site.

Simple but configurable mobile user agent detection is used to apply the mobile skin, see the Mobile Kit Pro product page for details.

Any page and any content instance in mojoPortal can be marked as for WebOnly, MobileOnly or the default All so that you have the ability to make mobile specific versions of your content if needed or leave out specific content from the mobile view if it doesn't work well on small screens. You will see a new dropdown list for this in Page Settings and on the General Tab in Feature Settings.

Some work has been done to combine javascripts as much as possible for better performance.

• Added support for the Google Plus Button in the Blog
• Upgrade to CKeditor 3.6.1
• Upgrade to TinyMCE 3.4.3.2
• Updated the CDN versions of jQuery and jQueryUI to the latest versions.
• Updated translations, thanks to all of our translators!
• A few bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

I think this is probably one of the most exciting announcements I've made since the beginning of the mojoPortal project, at least I'm very excited about it. It is very in keeping with our slogan "Advanced Web Sites Made Easy". Now mojoPortal can be a framework for developing custom mobile web applications as well.

Updates for Form Wizard Pro and Event Calendar Pro

As mentioned above we also did some work in Form Wizard Pro and event Calendar Pro so that they could also be optimized for mobile. These updates also require mojoPortal 2.3.6.7. They are free upgrades for existing customers, just sign in to the site as the user who purchased the product(s), and then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page, and then click "Order History".

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