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 2.3.9.5, 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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We've just uploaded updates to several of the add on products in the mojoPortal Store.

All of the ecommerce products, Site Membership Pro, Web Invoice Pro, and Event Calendar Pro now support WorldPay as a payment gateway in addition to the already existing support for Authorize.NET, PlugNPay, PayPal and Google Checkout. We've had quite a few requests for WorldPay support, so we're very excited to finally deliver this.

Form Wizard Pro has also been updated to include custom email template editing for the notification emails.

These are free upgrades for existing customers who have already purchased these products, the latest version can be downloaded from your order history by signing into this site as the user with the purchase history and cloicking the "My Account" link at the top of the page. However, these updates do require the latest version of mojoPortal.

The free mojoPortal Skin Exporter for Artisteer 4 has also been updated for mojoPortal 2.3.9.3 and the final release of Artisteer 4.

UPDATE: I made another small change to the Artisteer skin exporter plugin and uploaded a new version 2012-10-15. It fixed a problem with the menu layout in some designs.

UPDATE 2012-10-18 I've made another fix in the skin exporter plugin to solve a problem where Chrome browser was using responsive layout as if it were a phone.

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I'm happy to announce the initial release of Site Membership Pro, available now in the mojoPortal Store. Site Membership Pro is an add on product for mojoPortal that makes it easy to monetize access to your premium site content.

See the product page for full details. As with our other products, customers who purchase Site Membership Pro get free upgrades for the life of the product.

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In our last newsletter I mentioned that I was working on a new add on product for mojoPortal named Site Membership Pro.

I've received quite a few emails expressing interest in this product and I'm happy to report that the first release is ready to ship and will be available soon in the mojoPortal store.

However, Site Membership Pro depends on a few small changes I've recently implemented in the core of mojoPortal, so I'll have to wait until after the next release of mojoPortal before I can make it available. My plan is to make a new release of mojoPortal soon, I'm going through our project tracker looking for small things I can complete to round out a new release to make it worthwhile upgrade.

In the mean time, I've created a demo site to show the public facing side of the feature at smpdemo.mojoportal.com.  You can also try out the back end administration of the feature on our main demo site where you can login as the administrator, but you'll need to add it to a page manually and then you will see the "Settings" and "Manage" links.

What Is Site Membership Pro?

Site Membership Pro provides additional functionality on top of mojoPortal to make it easy to monetize access to your premium site content.

mojoPortal already provides role based security so that you can use roles to protect your premium content. For example you could create a role named "Members Only" and you could set that role as the only allowed View Role on pages in your site that contain premium content. However, managing the roles assigned to a user is a manual process in mojoPortal that can be done by Administrators, Role Adminsitrators or Roles That Can Manage Users. So one would have to go to each user who should be given access to premium content and add the user to the "Members Only" role.

Site Membership Pro provides the missing pieces to make it easy to sell membership subscriptions and automatically grant the user the role or roles that provide access to the premium content on your site when they complete a subscription purchase.

You define Membsership Levels which have a name and one or more roles that are provided with this level of membership. You could keep it simple and just have one level for "Members Only", or you could have multiple tiers of access like Gold, Silver and Bronze each providing different roles that protect sections of your site content.

Then you define Membership Product(s) which grant the user one of the Membership Levels (and the associated roles) for a specified number of days for a specified price. Products can be enabled or disabled and they can have begin and end dates that determine when they are on sale. A grace period can also be specified on the product such that users are not removed from the granted role(s) until after a certain number days after the actual expiration date.

When a user pruchases a membership product they are immediately granted the roles provided by the membership level when the payment has cleared. The begin and end dates of the membership are set at the time of purchase and a background task handles removing roles from the user when the membership expires or the grace period is over (if the user has not renewed).

You can also configure notifications on the products so that users can recieve reminders when their membership is coming up for renewal. Reminders can be configured as a specific number of days before or after either the end date of a membership or the end of the grace period. You can create multiple reminders per product so that you have a series of them to encourage renewal.

You can also define reminder templates for plain text email messages. Templates support some token replacement and you must assign a template to a reminder in order to save it. So the reminder will send a plain text email replacing the tokens from the template at the scheduled time if the user has not renewed.

The same background task that manages removing users from roles if their membership expires also handles sending the reminder messages.

Note that the reminders are intended to provide a link back to your site so the user can renew his membership before it expires. To renew, users have to go through the checkout process. Site Membership Pro does not retain any credit card information and does not automatically charge cards to renew subscriptions. Possibly in the future we will look into available APIs from PayPal and others for recurring payments but we have no plans to retain credit card information in the future. The risks and liability potential involved with retaining credit card information without proper infrastructure and staff to secure the data far outweigh the fact that it would be nice to be able to do that.

Since users probably don't want to go through the checkout process every month it is recommended to structure your membership products with fairly long durations like 6 months or one year as opposed to a month at a time. Free products are also supported so you could have one product that provides a free trial of Premium Access for a limited number of days and a One Year Subscription for $120 for example. You can also mark a product as available only for new members, so that existing members can't get the free trial offer.

Supports Authorize.NET, PlugNPay, PayPal, Google Checkout - ie the same payment systems supported in all mojoPortal ecommerce products (WebStore, Event Calendar Pro, Web Invoice Pro). I'm also investigating adding support for WorldPay for all our ecommerce products in the near future.

The initial release will support MS SQL and MySql, other database platforms may be supported later depending ion demand.

What Site Membership Pro Does Not Do

Site Membership Pro is NOT a replacement for the site registration system. User's must register or sign in to purchase premium membership, so they need to go through the normal registration process first to get a free account, then once they complete the membership purchase they are immediately granted the roles provided by the membership.

Site Membership Pro is not involved in protecting your premiumm content, that is done by configuring roles that can view pages in your site and is built in functionality of mojoPortal.

Site Membership Pro does not retain any credit card information and cannot automatically charge cards when membership renewal is due.

Site Membership Pro does not prevent an Administrator, Role Administrator or Roles That Can Manage Users from adding or removing users from roles.

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