Posts From December, 2004

FCK Editor

I'm thinking of switching from FreeTextBox to FCKEditor for the Html WYSIWYG used in this project.  FreeTextBox is great but its not as free as I'd like it to be for this project.  FCKEditor is licensed under the GNU Lesser Public License and most importantly includes the source code.  It also looks plenty feature rich, I let you know how it goes with a trial.

New Release Now Available 12/12/2004

As promised a new release is now available on the download page including the new Image Gallery and File Manager features.  The File Manager feature allows you to manage the file system subject to the permissions that the .NET worker process has. For my installation on monoForge, I had the staff make my Data folder and all its children writable, you may wish to do the same if you want to be able to upload files and also images for the Image Gallery and you are hosting a site there.

I tested the installation process much more carefully for this release, but as always if you run into problems please post a message in the forums.

I had to comment out the use of the HttpUpload module (SlickUpload) because I'm so far unable to get it to work under mono. This feature allows large uploads and has a progress bar. You can use it if your site is installed on a windows machine by setting the web.config entry UseUploadModule to true and uncommenting the HttpModule entry.  I think the problem is in mono, not in the module code but I'm having a hard time figuring out just what to report for a bug since I haven't yet pinned down why it doesn't work.  I posted the error and the code in the Bugs Forum if you want to try and help.

File Manager almost ready!

I'm almost finished with a new File Manager module based on the free open source SeekDotNet File Manager  Its pretty sweet and was easy to integrate.

I'm also using a free and open source HttpModule for file uploads written by Chris Hynes. Its called SlickUpload and it can handle very large files and supports a progress bar easily.  It also integrated easily with just a few lines of code and a little javascript.  I've been looking for something like this for a long time and am really glad to have found it. I've used the ABCUpload control and its pretty nice too but I needed a free one for this project since this project is free and open source.

For those of you who had troubles with the last release I promise to test the installation process more carefully, there was some bad data in the initial data creation scripts. I don't have an upgrade procedure in place yet but thats one of the reasons I'm still calling the releases alpha. I think you can upgrade though by replacing all the files and then carefully comparing the table and data scripts to your database and modify your db where needed. At some point I will have an automatic upgrade process but thats my best advice for now. I'm shooting for a new release by Sunday evening hopefully with both the new Image Gallery and File Manager modules.

I'm also happy to report that the performance improvements in mono for ASP.NET are very evident since they upgraded the servers at monoForge to the newer mono 1.1 branch.

Exciting times at mojoPortal!