I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.1.5, available now on our download page.

Whats New?

Tiny MCE Editor Rises To The Top

For a long time now the FCKeditor has been the best editor available out of the box in mojoPortal. It was the only one with the ability to browse and upload images and files, it was the only one with integration for our Content Template System and Content Style System, and it was the only one with a spelling checker. Not anymore! I had not upgraded the Tiny MCE editor in a long time, I had tried to once and it broke and I was busy so I reverted to the working version. But recently we've been having some issues with FCKeditor so I decided to give the Tiny MCE upgrade another try. At did not work as before but I pursued it and debugged it and found how to make it work. Then I began looking closer at the documentation and found it was really good, it even described the basic steps to build your own image browser/uploader and integrate it. I also learned how to integrate our content templates and styles. Implementing the file browse and upload was both challenging and fun. I used the jQuery File Tree, which I then extended to be able to monitor folder selection in addition to file selection, and to pre expand to the current folder after a full postback/redirect which we do when uploading files or creating folders. Then I found that they actually provide .NET code in their library to implement spell checking against the google spelling checker services. The code was very easy to integrate and it works so much nicer than the spelling checker in FCKeditor. You basically click the spell checker button and it puts squiggly lines under suspect words, you right click it and it suggests a correction. So nice! I'm notorious for typos in my blog posts, this is going to help!

CKeditor 3.0

So where does this leave us with FCKeditor you might ask. Well, the makers of FCKeditor are moving forward with a revamped version named CKeditor and they just made the first release of CKeditor 3.0. It's also already integrated with mojoPortal and I've enabled it in the new release for you to check it out. It does not have image browse or upload and it is no integrated with our content templates or styles, but it does work. The biggest problem is there is not yet enough good documentation to figure out how to do those things, but it looks very promising and I'm sure the documentation will get there at some point.

New Permissions Tab In Site Settings

In polishing up the image browse and upload experience I decided to move some settings that were previously in Web.config into Site Settings to make it easier to manage. Specifically we now have a Roles That Can Browse and Upload setting. Users in the selected roles can browse and upload starting at the /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/media folder. This is appropriate for content authors. Admins and Content Admins can browse from the /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/ folder as before. There is also a separate Roles That Can Upload and Browse to a User Specific Location. This is appropriate for users who you don't want to be able to browse your media but can upload and broswe images and other files. For example you can allow forum users to upload files if they are in these roles. The allowed file extensions are controlled from Web.config. You will find these settings in a new tab named "Permissions" under the Site Settings > Security Tab.

NeatUpload 1.3.18 Upgrade

I also upgraded to the latest version of NeatUpload. But even better, I read the documentation again and noticed something I should have noticed a long time ago. Dean Brettle, the author of NeatUpload has built in an easy to use Multi-File upload, so I have integrated it into the File Manager, Shared Files, Image Gallery, and Folder Gallery features to allow you to batch upload files. If you have Flash 8 or higher you can even ctrl-select files all at once. Pretty sweet! NeatUpload is really the best upload component for ASP.NET and its free.

Changed The DOCTYPE to Html 5 for included skins

I was tempted to do this last release but after more experiments with Html 5 I decided to do it this release. If you don't agree its easy enough to change it back to Html 1.0 Transitional in the layout.master file of your skin. This only applies to the skins I ship, if you are upgrading and have an existing skin using Xhtml it will continue to be the same. Be aware that I'm aware that there are a few places where pages do not validate as Html 5 including the login and registration pages. If you have a problem with that then please just keep using Xhtml doctype. Html 5 is still just a draft so I'm not going to get too worried about a few places where it doesn't validate, the spec may change before it becomes a standard. It validates on most pages. The things that don't validate are iframes with frameborder and scrolling attributes. Making them validate would make the page ugly and it has zero impact on any user if the page doesn't validate there, it works in all known browsers.

Minor Blog Enhancement

Added a new setting for the default allowed comment days in a blog. Previously if comments were enabled it just defaulted to 90 days and if you wanted something different you had to edit the setting on each post. Now you can set your own default.

Removed Site Office

Site Office was a prototype UI and plug-in system that was disabled by default and included no real working features that plugged in just a few stubs to demonstrate the plug-in system. It was designed for more of an application style UI rather than public web site UI. I originally built it using ExtJs but they changed licenses and I could no longer get upgrades. I've done some preliminary work to re-implement it using YUI but its not finished. I decided to remove it because the ExtJs javascript was about 9MB on disk so this reduced the size of our download packages. Developers who still want to use it can still get it from svn and deploy it themselves.

New and Updated Translations

New Hebrew translation thanks to Daniel Szasz

New Polish translation thanks to Przemyslaw Luiewski

Updated German translation thanks to Jan Aengenvoort

Bug Fixes

There were a number of bug fixes, primarily issues with some features when used in folder based child sites. A few issues that only affected pgsql. Thanks to all who reported these issues!