Posts From April, 2005

Event Calendar is Working!

The new Event Calendar module in mojoportal is working on my server now.  I will probably release it this weekend but it will only work for those who are building mono from the latest svn sources at least until the next release of mono.

There was a bug in mono that I reported on sunday and now, thanks to Gonzalo Paniagua Javier, its already fixed by tuesday night. Man those mono guys are doing a great job!


Hazards of the Bleeding Edge

I was trying to solve a sorting bug in the RSS feed aggregator that only happens under mono. At first I thought it was in the DataView.Sort method but it turned out to be a difference in DateTime.Parse behaviour under mono than under windows.

Anyway I needed to rule out the mono version so I pulled the latest greatest mono code from svn as I've done about a dozen times in the past to see if it was fixed in svn.

Much to my dismay the latest mono code broke one of my web sites. 

Right now http://www.joeaudette.com is offline though it could just have easily been this site. Whenever I restart apache, whichever site gets a request first works and the others don't. So mojoportal got the first request and joeaudette.com is returning an error. 

I remember this was a bug in a previous version of mono.  I posted to the mono-devel list but so far no reply. Of course it is a beautiful weekend so maybe they're all out playing, I couldn't blame them.

I really don't want to have to try and revert to an older version but I also hate to have my site offline

UPDATE 4/17/2005 2:30PM CST
Big thanks to Atsushi Eno! Whatever was causing the problem is now fixed as of mono revision 41350
Now all my sites are working happily again. Thats what I call fast response from the community, within 24 hours of reporting the problem it is fixed.

Also thanks to Joseph Hill for telling me about a work around to the problem by running each site in its own instance of mono.  Good to know I could do that if it became neccessary but glad I didn't have to.

I guess the moral of the story is it would be good to have a staging server where I could test the latest svn with my sites prior to updating the production server. I do have an extra machine so I may do that soon, though its a wimpy p2 450 so it will be a slow build process working with that machine.

Version 20050409 enhanced menu

This is just a minor release. I had a request in the forums about not all the properties for skmMenu working. I just had not exposed them all as properties on SiteMenu which wraps around skmMenu and populates it from the db.

The only files that have changed since version 20040403 are the dll files in the bin folder. Backup your originals and replace the files. you may need to re-start apache.

The full set of properties with defaults for the menu are as follows:

SiteMenu id="SiteMenu1" runat="server" Direction="Vertical"
MenuGridLines="Both"
BorderColor="DarkRed"
BorderWidth="1"
MenuBorderStyle="Solid"
Opacity="100"
MenuFadeDelay="1"
ItemSpacing="0"
ItemPadding="2"
DefaultCssClass=""
CssClass="MainMenu"
SelectedItemCssClass="SelectedMenuItems"
OtherItemCssClass="OtherMenuItems"
DefaultMouseDownCssClass=""
DefaultMouseOverCssClass="MainMenuMouseOver"
DefaultMouseUpCssClass=""
SubMenuCssClass=""
HighlightTopMenu="True"
ClickToOpen="False"
ZIndex="100"


These can be set in the skin file.

Version 20050407 Bug Fix Release

I just released a new set of deployment binary packages. The only files that have changed are the dlls in the bin folder.  Its available now on the download page.

The following bugs were fixed.

RSS Feed module didn't work unless the date time format was in GMT

The Register Link was using https even when SSLIsAvailable was set to false.

In the MySQL version, there was a bug in the Gallery that would only effect Galleries not configured in  Compact Mode. This bug was introduced in the upgrade from ByteFX to the newer MySQL Connector.

I recommend you back up your current dlls then replace them with the new ones. You may need to restart apache.

Release 20050403 alpha is now available

A new release is now available on the Download page.

This release includes a new data layer for PostgreSQL thanks to Joseph Hill of GotMono.com.  Now mojoPortal supports MS SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL!  The demo sites are now using the PostgreSQL data layer.

Also with big thanks to Joseph, a new RSS Feed Aggregator Module is included.  It is based on the sample code that Joseph sent me from his GotMono blogs.  It is very configurable including settings for Cache Time, age of posts to include, number of  posts per feed, etc.  You can put one on as many pages as you like and show 1 or many feeds in each one.  You can configure whether to show or hide the Feed list and the RSS links. You can configure the Feed list links to go either to the web site associated with the feed or as a filter on the current display

The MySQL data layer has been upgraded from the ByteFX data provider to the newer  MySQL Connector for .NET

As always if you have any trouble please post in the forums.


I also updated Mono on my server to the latest build from svn