Congrats to the Mono team on their release of Mono 2.4 and MonoDevelop 2.0!

Time to play with the latest bits and see how it works with mojoPortal!

Got a google alert this morning bringing my attention to this blog post by Jordi Massaguer Pla. Jordi is doing a lot of work making cool Linux appliances with Suse Studio and his latest one is a mojoPortal appliance. I've played around a little on Suse Studio myself but have been so busy I haven't finished any appliances yet, so I was glad to see the one Jordi has put together.

Its running mojoPortal 2.2.8.2 using SQLite. You can download it from Jordi's post, boot it up in VMWare player or server and login with user=tux and password = linux

Suse Studio is an amazing tool, it allows you to build a custom linux installation with just the features and applications you want to include and then target your build for a VMWare appliance, installation media or live CD. And you do it all from a web browser.

Thanks a lot to Jordi for putting together this appliance!

Big Congratulations to the Mono Team for shipping Mono 2.2!

We've seen growing interest in our support for running mojoPortal on Linux with Mono judging by the increasing forum posts related to it. We try to be very careful as we improve mojoPortal, not to break compatibility with Mono. My testing is usually using the latest Mono built from their svn repository but when a release of Mono comes out I try to also test with the release version since this is what most people are using. Things are progressing rapidly in the Mono project which allowed us not long ago to change our target to the 3.5 version of .NET so that we can begin to dabble in Silverlight, and RESTful web services. Enough of the 3.5 stuff is there in Mono that we can compile and things mostly work but with a few bugs here and there including some bugs in the 3.5 version of Mono's implementation of MS Ajax aka System.Web.Extensions.

Historically I've used my physical openSuse machine to run VMWare server and then I could run the  Mono release virtual machines from there, but after upgrading to openSuse 11.1 I couldn't get my VMWare server to open any virtual machines. So I installed the VMWare Player on my Vista machine this time to test.

The Mono 2.2 virtual machine already had mojoPortal 2.2.6.8 installed and it works well and I noticed the ajax stuff worked fine there but in testing mojoPortal 2.2.8.2-b the UpdatePanels were not being updated in the UI and were logging some errors so I figured if I change the references and use the 2.0 .NET version of Ajax aka System.Web.Extensions 1.0 (since thats what mojoPortal 2.2.6.8 uses) maybe I could get the latest mojoPortal working as well as 2.2.6.8 does. And sure enough, after making this change, the latest mojoPortal seems to work very well ajax and all.

So I've packaged up a new mojoPortal 2.2.8.2-c release to work smoothly with the latest Mono 2.2 release. You can even download the source zip and build it an run it using Mono 2.2, the only thing you'll need to do for that is to copy the contents of Web.mono.config into Web.config so it will have the correct references to System.Wen.Extensions 1.0. The mojoportal-2-2-8-2-c-pgsql-for-mono.zip file is pre-compiled and the web.config is already configured for Mono. You can swap out the data layer dlls if you want to use a different db.

I think this is a major milestone for the Mono Project. mojoPortal is a complex application, and the fact that it runs well on Mono 2.2 shows that the Mono 2.0 ASP.NET stack is pretty solid. The 3.5 stuff is coming along but your mileage may vary.

The Visual studio solution and the Windows release packages are still targeting .NET 3.5. Its very handy that we use a separate mojoportal.mds for MonoDevelop even though it could open the Visual Studio solution, it allows us to do things differently on Mono as needed.

In our svn repository, will be changing our MonoDevelop projects back to reference the 3.5 version of System.Web.Extensions so we can keep moving forward and report bugs so they can get fixed in the next version of Mono. So 2.2 Mono users who want to play with the source code should use the .zip download instead of svn, unless you are also working with Mono built from svn as I am.

Other minor changes in 2.2.8.2-c include a new color picker that I mentioned in my previous post and we upgraded from jquery 1.2.6 to 1.3.

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.7.9, available now on our download page.

New Related Sites Mode

mojoPortal has for a long time had the multiple sites feature which enables you to host multiple sites on a single installation using a single database. The feature was carefully designed to keep the sites and users completely independent so that each site is isolated from the others from a security perspective. But for some scenarios its desirable to host multiple sites but use the same users and roles in all of them. For example, maybe you want to have different versions of your site for different languages bu you want the same users in all of the sites. Or maybe a university wants to create separate sites for different departments but they want the students to have the same sign in credentials in all of them. This is now possible with simple configuration settings as indicated in the documentation. Multiple sites can be configured either based on host names or by folders beneath the root site. With the folder based sites, since they share a common cookie, once the user is signed into any of the sites he is signed into all of them.

New 301 Redirect Manager

When you create pages in mojoPortal, the page gets a friendly url based on its title, like /fun-stuff.aspx would be the url for a page named Fun Stuff. Now if you change the name of the page later it will get a different url, so for example if I change the name to Really Fun Stuff, its going to get a new url /really-fun-stuff.aspx.

Now from an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point of view, its not a good idea to be changing your urls willy nilly. If someone bookmarked your old url you don't want it to be broken, or if its already popular in search results, you don't want it to be a broken link. So ideally, you need to have the old page do a 301 redirect to the new page. The 301 status code tells the browser that the page moved permanently. Now mojoPortal will create the 301 redirect for you automatically when you re-name a page or blog post. However, its still not a great idea to be renaming your pages frequently, you should avoid it generally but if you need to its ok to do it. You can also see the 301 redirect mappings and manually manage them from Administration Menu > Advanced Tools > 301 Redirect Manager. You need to be very careful with this feature, you do not want to create circular redirects where 2 urls redirect to each other.

This is the last Release Targeting ASP.NET 2.0

This release as previous ones targets the 2.0 ASP.NET runtime. I requested feedback in my previous post about changing to target the 3.5 ASP.NET runtime and everyone who responded was in favor. I've already changed it in my svn sandbox and will change it in trunk soon. I find that on a machine with VS 2005 I am still able to build and run the solution as long as .NET 3.5 is installed. Using the Mono 2.0 release I could still get it working if I swaped out the Web.config so it used 2.0 version of System.Web.Extensions. Using the latest Mono built from svn I see that the Mono version of System.Web.Extensions has changed to 3.5, but I'm getting an error running it and will have to investigate further.

So the next release will target .NET 3.5. If someone needs a 2.0 build it will be possible for them to change the build target back to 2.0 (in Visual Studio 2008) and rebuild, because I'm not really planning to use 3.5 specific features in the core projects for a while yet. I just need to use the 3.5 version of ScriptManager to support features like Silverlight that I will use in external projects. Just like our other features, the external projects will copy the needed files up to the main Web project so it can work at runtime. This allows us to move forward and take advantage of new things in 3.5 while keeping general compatibility with Mono and 2.0 .NET. Changing the target to 3.5 NET on the core projects only changes the Web.config file and the .csproj file

I'm very excited to start working with Silverlight 2 and RESTful web services using the REST toolkit. I'm just beginning to do exploratory prototyping now but I'm seeing some very cool possibilities.

Congrats to the Mono Team on shipping Mono 2.0!

I'm eager to try it myself and am interested to hear from people using mojoPortal on Mono. So if you try it with our latest release package for Mono, let us know how it works for you.

I generally test Mono with a virtual machine where I build Mono from svn to stay up with the latest changes and then I keep another VM for testing the releases. So I downloaded the new VMWare image with openSuse 11 and Mono 2.0, but apparently this vmware image isn't compatible with the older version of VMWare server I have running, so I've got some upgrading to do before I can try it. I have a physical machine running openSuse 10.3 with VMWare server and then I run the testing virtual machines inside it. I also got a new video card I need to install in this machine so I'm installing that first and then upgrading my vmware host machine to openSuse 11 and then I'll install the newer release of VMWare server, and then finally I will be ready to play with the new Mono release.

2.0 is a big milestone for the Mono project so I'm really looking forward to it. Hope you will try it too and share your experiences. If you are a developer and you have MonoDevelop, we include a MonoDevelop solution with the mojoPortal source code, so you can checkout mojoportal from our Subversion repository and compile it with MonoDevelop. So not ony can you run mojoPortal on Mono, you can also do mojoPortal development on Linux with MonoDevelop.