I'm planning another release by the end of the weekend with some new enhancements and fixes. I  enhanced the Html Content module to handle single items, articles, announcements etc. Improved the Links module by allowing you to configure whether to display an optional description for each link. Added an option to hide the title of any Module.   I've also made the site logo selectable from a dropdown on the Site Settings  admin page. There are some other improvements to the object hierarchy that are less visible but just as important and a few minor bug fixes.

As you may have noticed, I'm using an iterative development process with short release cycles.

This release includes the new Contact Form and the FCKeditor.  I tested it on monoForge and everything worked great this time.

Next on the development front is some improvements to the Html Module to make it support repeated items like articles and announcements.  After that I will consolidate the Links and Quick Links Modules since it never made sense to have 2 of them.  Then I will start on a new Documents Module for safe user file management with versioning.  The theme for now is putting a better fit and finish on the core features to accomplish common tasks.

I got the FCKeditor working in conjunction with the Image Gallery. You can browse the Images on the server and insert them into the Html document or in a blog. You can also upload images right in the editor. I've tested it in IE, Firefox, and Mozilla. It works in IE and Firefox but I found a major problem on linux using Mozilla 1.6. In Mozilla 1.6 when you click the insert image icon it opens a dialog box that just stays grey and Mozilla becomes totally hung. I restarted my machine and tried again and got the exact same result.  My guess is it will work correctly if I get a newer version of Mozilla. If I get a chance I'll install a newer version and post again.

On my demo site at monoforge, the FCKeditor displays correctly in Mozilla and Firefox but in IE it acts like a downscale browser was detected and renders as a plain textbox.  It behaves correctly on my Fedora Core 2 test machine running mono 1.0 in all browsers so I suspect the problem is in the mono 1.1.3 release. As I mentioned previously I also had worse problems on mono 1.1.3 with FreeTextBox. The mono team said FreeTextBox works for them but I suspect they are doing daily builds and have all the patches since 1.1.3 whereas monoForge has just the official 1.1.3 release. I'm starting to think that if we are going to use the developer branch on monoForge we should have frequent builds from SVN so that we don't report bugs that are fixed, otherwise we should probably stick with the stable releases.

I made the switch tonight to FCKeditor becuase it seems plenty good to me and its totally open source unlike FreeTextBox.  Besides I've been having errors on monoForge with the FreeTextBox as of mono 1.1.3 but it could be a configuration issue I suppose since the mono guys say it works for them. Weird thing is the same code has been running fine for a long time on previous versions of mono. Anyway this is my first post with the new editor. FCKeditor is mostly javascript with a very small .NET wrapper whereas the FreeTextBox dll is 136kb which is almost as big as the mojoPortal.Web.dll for my whole site which is at 200kb currently. Not that size matters that much but interesting differences.

Next up on the development front is a Contact Form module so people can send me e-mail without knowing my address. Thats the last piece I need before I can migrate my JoeAudette.com site to mojoPortal from Rainbow.

After that I've got an idea for a more safe version of the File Manager. I'm not getting rid of the current one by any means but its a true file manager and it is very risky to expose the file system so directly, it should only be available to server administrators and developers.  The one I'm developing for normal users will provide a very similar user experience but the folders and file names will be database driven and the actual files will be managed on disk by the system in a safe way with the ability to prevent un-authorised download of files posted by users.  I will store all the files on disk in one folder, but the files will not be stored with their original names. They will be named Guid.ToString() + ".config" and the file name will be stored in the db along with the original file name which will be displayed to the user. This will prevent the files from being downloaded directly via http requests without any special server configuration because the server is already configured not to serve .config files. There will be virtual folders with a FolderID, ParentID, Name structure and the files can be assigned a FolderID. This should be enough to present the user with a normal file system like experiance. This will be a replacement for the Documents module.

I'm shooting for another release this sunday evening with the contact form and new editor.