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!

If you've been involved in the open source content management world for while, you've probably come accross OpenSourceCMS.com before. For a long time they have hosted demos of all the popular open source PHP CMS and web applications. Its kind of a one stop shopping place where you can test drive a lot of different CMS and web applications without having to install them yourself. I've always wished mojoPortal could be on their list but since they were only doing PHP it wasn't possible. But now they are tackling ASP.NET demos to bring the same convenience for trying ASP.NET web applications without having to install it yourself. Happily, mojoPortal is now on there as well as quite a few other popular ASP.NET content management systems and blogs. I still encourage you to use our demo site but sometimes it can get a little out of whack with lots of people using it so its good having another alternative demo site available.

Congratulations to Scott Goodwin and Mark King on the launch of their new ASP.NET demo site, I hope it does as well as their PHP demos have.

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.

I'm happy to announce the release of Event Calendar Pro 0.0.1.0 a premium event publishing system for mojoPortal. This is a significant upgrade and is free to existing customers who have already purchased Event Calendar Pro. Just sign into the site and visit our Store, click the "Order History" link to get to your order history and you will be able to download the new version using the same page where you originally downloaded. For new customers pricing starts at $99 for a single installation license. You can also try it on our demo site at demo.mojoportal.com. This release requires mojoPortal 2.2.8.3, so you should upgrade to the latest mojoPortal before installing or upgrading to the new version of Event Calendar Pro.

Whats New?

• Ability to take registrations or sell tickets to a course or class. If you create a recurring event, for example a weekly course that runs every Tuesday for 6 weeks, you can specify that the ticket/registration includes the recurrences.
• If you have customers that pay by check or other means in person, you can enable a "Will Pay Later" button so users can register for the event but pay upon arrival. You can optionally limit the roles allowed to use this feature so for example you could create a role named "Trusted Customers" and add your trusted customers to that role and then limit use of the "Will Pay Later" button to members of that role.
• You can color code events differently on the Month View using our new color picker.
• You can customize the text on the ticket purchase/register link per event, so instead of the default "Register for this event", you could put "Register for this class" or whatever you like.
• There is a new setting to specify the default Country and State for ticket orders/registration to make it more convenient if most of your customers are local.
• Ability to specify the end date for recurrences.
• Location Alias in case you want the location label to be different than the location you use to get the google map to work.
• Meta keywords and description per event.
• Google Map settings are now per event rather than global.
• Addition of a Summary field so you can have a more brief description of the event on the List View and Ticket Purchase/Registration page.
• This version now supports all 5 databases that mojoPortal supports, including MS SQL, MySql, PostgreSql, Firebird Sql, and SQLite

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.8.3, available now on the download page.

In addition to bug fixes for things reported in the Forums since the last release, highlights of this release are as follows:

• Upgrade to FCKeditor 2.6.4 which includes a new spelling checker that works out of the box, a long wished for feature.
• A new set of translation files for Danish language thanks to Kurt Greve
• Blog improvements, an option whether to hide the URL input for comments and an option to require users to authenticate in order to post comments.
• New sorting levels for products and offers in WebStore to allow better control over sorting on the product list.
• A new CountryStateSetting control. I needed this for an improvement to Event Calendar Pro in order to specify a default country and state for ticket orders, but I built it into the core so it can be re-used in other features.

Note that the spell checker uses a free ad supported web service. Its very useful but you probably would not want to use this if your web page contains top secret content. It can be disabled from a configuration file for that kind of scenario but I think most users will be glad to have this. It is also possible to purchase a paid account with no ads or a version that can run on your own server, though I'm not sure what the integration steps are for those scenarios.