Last Updated 2010-07-08. This is the start of an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).
When I create new pages they don't immediately appear in the menu and when I delete pages they remain in the menu. Why?
This problem is caused by file system permissions. We use cache dependency files to clear the SiteMap cache (and other things that are cached), we need to be able to modify the dependency file in order to clear the cache. However if file system permissions are not correct the dependency files cannot be updated and therefore it fails to clear the cache. The dependency files are created beneath /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/systemfiles where [SiteID] is usually 1 unless you have a multi site installation. Since the entire /Data folder needs to be writable, under normal conditions there is no problem clearing the cache, but if for some reason file system permissions change, it can prevent clearing the cache. In some cases it can happen that your host moves your site from one server to another or from one drive to another and it may cause the permissions on the dependency files to be incorrect even if the folder permissions are correct. In that case you can try deleting all files from beneath /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/systemfiles. If folder permissions are correct the files wll be re-created as needed. If the files don't come back on their own then it indicates the folder permissions are not correct. The user that is the identity on the application pool is the user who needs file system permissions, this user should have full control over the /Data folder and /App_Data folder.
I'm getting the message "We're sorry but a server error has occurred while trying to process your request." What Do I Do?
The first step is to find out what the error is. See the article about Basic Troubleshooting to learn how to find the error details.
Is it ok to remove the "Powered by mojoPortal" link from the Skin?
Yes, you may remove it, there is no requirement to keep that link, though we do of course appreciate it when people keep that link because it helps spread the word about mojoPortal. Note however that the link to the designer site is required by the designers. They made their designs available mostly under the Creative Commons Attribution license and they typically do require you to keep the link. Some of them may give you permission to remove it if you contact them and make a small donation. If you customize a design sufficiently so that it is no longer the same design but a new original design, you may be able to remove the link but that is your own decision and you should use your own judgement to avoid violating a license from the original designer.
I am getting ""CS0101: The namespace 'Resources' already contains a definition for 'Resource' error.
The problem is that your system is not up to date so it doesn't recognize updated culture names as described in this blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2007/07/12/new-net-2-0-security-patch-changes-some-culture-names-on-windows-xp-2003-2000-justin-van-patten.aspx
If your system is not up to date it will not recognize the culture zh-hant and this will cause the error you are seeing.
So there are 2 possible ways to fix it, the best way is to update your system using Windows Update so it recognizes the new culture names. You need to get all the latest updates related to .NET.
If that fails you can delete the files in Web/App_GlobalResources/ that have a .zh-hant.resx or rename them to .zh-CHT.resx (which is the old name for the culture code)
UPDATE 2009-05-09
We seem to have come full circle with this culture name change. zh-CHT was the "old" name, later zh-Hant was added to replace zh-CHT according to changes in the ISO specs. But apparently this change resulted in some issues in the ASP.NET runtime. I do not have any details (I was told it is some significant performance issue), but I have been advised directly by the IIS Team at Microsoft who have been in consultation with the ASP.NET Team, and they have recommend using the old names instead of the new names. So, going forward I am changing the .zh-Hant.resx files to .zh-CHT.resx. If you have an existing installation of mojoPortal that includes files in the App_GlobalResources folder named with .zh-Hant.resx, I recommend you name them to .zh-CHT.resx, or if the zh-CHT.resx file already exists then just delete the .zh-Hant.resx file(s).
UPDATE 2009-05-28
This FAQ changed, originally it recommended using the "new" names like zh-Hant.resx over the old names, but unpatched systems did not recognize the new names.
From what I understand now though it was discovered some serious performance issue could occur in ASP.NET using the new names so my contacts at MS told me to rename back to the old names which I did a version or 2 ago and I updated the FAQ. It seems now with SP2 they have changed it so up to date systems no longer recognize zh-Hant. I think they did this to prevent performance problems and force app developers to go back to the old names.
So we really have come full circle, where once it was systems that were not up to date did not recognize the new culture names but now it is the up to date systems that no longer recognize those names and we are supposed to go back to using the old names. So as of Vista SP2, the presence of files in the App_GlobalResources folder that end with .zh-Hant.resx will cause this error as up to date systems no longer recognize zh-Hant as a valid culture name.
How can I delete sites?
If you delete a site there is no way to get it back unless you have a database backup and can restore the whole database. To prevent accidental deletion of sites we have hidden the delete button by default. You can enable it by setting this to true in Web.config or user.config:
<add key="AllowDeletingChildSites" value="true" />
Note that sites can only be deleted from the root site and the root site itself cannot be deleted. After you delete a site I recommend you disable the button again to avoid accidental deletion.
I used Visual Studio to Publish mojoPortal but its missing most of the features like the blog, forums and others, why?
The problem is that the Visual Studio Publish feature determines which files to package based on their project membership, so its only publishing files for the core web site. We use post build events to copy the needed files from other projects up to the Web folder, but since these files don't belong to the project according to the .csproj file, the VS Publish feature does not package those files. I recommend you package files for deployment the same way I do, using the free tool UnLeashIt which packages files based only on file extension, so it leavesout C# source code and only packages the needed files. Since it doesn't care about project membership, it correctly packages all the needed files.
I am getting Security Exception Description: The application attempted to perform an operation not allowed by the security policy.To grant this application the required permission please contact your system administrator or change the application's trust level in the configuration file.
This means you are running in a Medium Trust or Partial Trust environment. See this document for steps to configure mojoPortal for this environment.
http://www.mojoportal.com/mediumtrust.aspx
After a new install it seems like there are no skins, the page shows but it has no style.
When the setup page runs and it creates the first site, all the skin files are copied from
/Data/skins
to
/Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins
So typically it will copy them from /Data/skins to /Data/Sites/1/skins. It will only do this if the /Data/Sites/1/skins folder does not exist. Sometimes during installation it may copy some of the files but not all of them and the result will be that your site has no style. If you manually copy the /Data/skins folder to /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins and then touch your Web.config file (ie download it an upload it again or type a space in it and save it) to clear the server cache and then also clear your browser cache it will fix the problem. Typically, SiteID will be 1 in a single site installation.
When I enter an address for a google map, I get "location not found", but when I use google maps directly it works, why?
The reason is because the google maps web page works differently than the google maps API. For the API to work it must find an exact match, but the google maps page is different, it is like a search engine, if it can't find the exact location it brings back a list of approximate matches. These matches may contain the correct location but they will have the address listed correctly/differently than you entered it in mojoPortal, you can copy the address format from the google maps search result and use that as the location and then it should work.
What happened to the font toolbars in the FCKeditor? Why aren't they included? How can I include them?
The reason we don't include the font face, font-size, and text color/background color toolbar items in the editor is because it is contrary to the notion of having a skinnable site. If you use those toolbar items you are hard coding fonts, sizes and colors into your content making them un-skinnable. You may pick fonts and colors that look good with your current skin but a year from now when you decide to re-design the look of the site those fonts and colors you hard coded into the content using these toolbars may look ugly and now you have a big job to do to clean that up to make it look right with your new skin design. So, its a bad practice to use those toolbar items that hard code any kind of style into your content. It is much wiser to use only css classes and let the fonts and colors be decided in the css files. If you do want to customise the toolbars and put those font toolbar items back in, you can do it, see this article: http://www.mojoportal.com/customizing-the-fckeditor-toolbars.aspx but I think later you will regret it. We removed these items to make it more difficult for you to follow bad practices.
mojoPortal is fairly large on disk, are there any files I can delete to make it smaller?
There are several things you can do to reduce the size of the installation.
1. You can remove skins that you are not using.
2. You can remove setup and upgrade scripts for databases you are not using. mojoPortal supports 5 different database platforms and we include setup and upgrade scripts for all of them in the deployment package so that you could switch platforms just by changing the dlls for the data layer. The majority of mojoPortal users are using MS SQL, so you could delete the scripts for MySql, Firebird, pgsql, and SQLite. The scripts are located at:
/Setup/applications/[applicationname]/SchemaInstallScripts/[dbplatform]
and at
/Setup/applications/[applicationname]/SchemaUpgradeScripts/[dbplatform]
so you can delete the ones that do not correspond to your db platform.
3. You can also safely delete the /ClientScript/ext-2.0.2 folder in most cases. It is used in our prototype Site Office feature, but that feature is not yet officially released and the plan is to re-write it using YUI instead of ExtJs. I liked ExtJs but they changed their license from LGPL to GPL after version 2.0.2, so I can no longer upgrade it and therefore no longer plan to use it going forward. This will free up like 9-13 MB of space as its a lot of javascript files.
4. If you don't care about supporting languages other than English you could also delete translation files for other languages. There are localized files in the /Data/HelpFiles folder and in the /Data/MessageTemplates folder. There are also file in the App_GlobalResources folder. Note that tyhe English files are named like Resource.resx and BlogResources.resx whereas other languages are identified by a language code inthe file name like Resource.it.resx for Italian.