Happy New Year mojoPortal Community!

To celebrate (boy I really know how to party!), I finally got around to making a video tutorial covering the basics of using mojoPortal.

mojoPortal User Guide Volume 1

One of my resolutions for the new year is to do more video tutorials.
Another is to make another batch of good looking skins. Using free designs I made 10 skins in 10 days several months ago. I still have a bunch of designs I dowloaded before that I didn't get to, I just need to find another week or 10 days to throw at them.

I'm also getting very close to making a release, I know I've been saying that for weeks but some things have gone slower than anticipated. Newsletter is a complex feature. If I don't finish it soon I'll just go ahead and make a release without it as there is lots of other good stuff available now in svn that needs to be set free. Of course anyone working with the source code is smart to be getting the code from svn trunk and not waiting for me to get around to making releases.

If there are particular topics you would like to see tutorials about please let me know. Also any feedback about this one is appreciated. It was just a quick improvised one. I actually did a better longer one first only to realize at the end it wasn't capturing audio. So when I did it again I kept it a little brief.

I am about finished implementing a quick google maps feature. I went ahead and updated this site with the code so I could show it off. You can see it in action here: http://www.mojoportal.com/googlemaps.aspx

It allows you to specify a location, map size, optional to show the map type control (Satellite,hybrid,map), option to show the zoom control, option to open a balloon with info about the location, option to show a local area google search, and a few other options.

I haven't finished implementing the get driving directions, will finish that tomorrow but its exciting enough I couldn't wait to blog about it. Its in my svn sandbox now and will be in svn trunk by later tonight.

It was really very easy, but visual stuff is always exciting and fun to work on.

Those working from the source code using svn trunk, it will be available in the next few hours. After you do svn update, rebuild the solution then visit yoursiteroot/Setup/Default.aspx to install it. Then it will show up like other features that you can put on any page.

Update: 2007-12-09

I got the driving directions working as you can see by clicking the link above. One thing to be aware of is that driving directions won't work on a local network or on localhost using the free google maps API key. As I understand it, if you buy an enterprise license it can work on local networks but the free one only works on public sites. The map seems to work just fine on localhost, its only the driving directions feature that doesn't work on localhost.

I just upadated the mojoPortal demo site with the latest code. I've been doing some more work on the ExtJs controls and using them in the Site Office feature. The idea of Site Office is that the core of it will be a UI framework for intranet style applications. Currently we have a plugin model for content management features used in the public side of the web site. Site Office will have its own plugin model that makes it easy to build features that plug in. A feature will have a section in the Menu and clicking the navigation links will open the feature page/control/view in a new tab in the center pane of the layout.

You can check it out here: http://demo.mojoportal.com/SiteOffice/Default.aspx and can login with admin@admin.com and password = admin.

I have some not yet working features setup that do open in the new tabs but the features don't yet work. I'm really just looking for feedback on the layout. Notice how you can hide panels and resize them. Feel free to click the links and see how it works. Especially cool is if you open a lot of tabs the tabs become scrollable. If you make the side panels wider it doesn't take as many tabs to be able to see the tab scrolling.

Currently the Welcome tab which is always present shows the home page of the site. I plan to make it configurable so you could have a special intranet home page that is the default page shown there. Note that you can navigate the site inside this tab.

Notice also that if javescript is disabled in your browser it still can show the feature views when you click a navigation link, its just not as rich an experience. Being able to work without javascript is just one accessibility requirement. I'm particularly interested in any other accessibility issues that can be identified and resolved so that the Site Office UI framework can be accessible from the beginning so if you have any expertise on accessibility and you see problems do let us know.

I think these ExtJs layout controls go a long way towards a rich user interface for office/intranet style applications. I'm still pondering what can go in the right side and bottom panels. Mabe help could go on the right side. Lots of possibilities really.