FAQ

I used Visual Studio to Publish mojoPortal but its missing most of the features like the blog, forums and others, why?

Make sure you rebuild the entire solution in release mode before publishing, not just the main web project.

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

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 will be re-created as needed. If the files don't come back on their own, that is an indication 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.

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 Editors? 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 editors 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 customize the toolbars and put those font toolbar items back in, you can do it, see this article: Customizing the Editor Toolbars, 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 the English files are named like Resource.resx and BlogResources.resx whereas other languages are identified by a language code in the file name like Resource.it.resx for Italian.

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 get an error about Unrecognized configuration section system.web.extensions.

This is a very common problem and is due to a breaking change in .NET 4.0. In .NET 3.5 it was required to declare the section group in Web.config file but in .NET 4 the declaration is in machine.config so you are not supposed to declare this section in Web.config. Therefore what happens is people install the .NET 4 version of mojoPortal under .NET 3.5 they get this error because .NET 3.5 expects this declaration in Web.config but it is not supposed to be there for .NET 4. The solution is to make sure your site is configured for .NET 4 and using a .NET 4 application pool.

I get an error about There is a duplicate 'system.web.extensions/scripting/scriptResourceHandler' section defined

This error is the converse of the one above, it happens when you install the 3.5 .NET version of mojoPortal under .NET 4.0. The problem is a breaking change in .NET 4.0 where the declaration for this section was moved to machine.config so now if it is also declared in Web.config it causes this error under .NET 4.0. The best solution is to install the mojoPortal package for .NET 4. So we have these 2 common problems, one occurs when you install the 3.5 .NET version of mojoPortal into .NET 4 hosting and the other happens when you install the 4.0 .NET version of mojoPortal under .NET 3.5.

I get an error about The WebResource.axd handler must be registered

This error happens when there are wildcard mappings for handlers in IIS. The most common cause is when ColdFusion is installed on the same server with ASP.NET, ColdFusion creates these wildcard mappings that break the mappings for some things that should be handled by ASP.NET. See this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article for details solutions, and workarounds.

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.

Is it ok to remove the Designed by link from the skin?

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 judgment to avoid violating a license from the original designer.