I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.3.

This is a relatively minor upgrade. There are a few bug fixes for little things reported in the forums.

Upgrade to FCKeditor 2.6

Upgrade to ExtJs 2.0.2

The package for Mono has been tested and works on Mono 1.9

As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading and post in the forums if you have any trouble.

I've also created some new documentation to help with installation and upgrades.

Web.config Guide describes how to make upgrading easier by using a user.config file in conjunction with Web.config

Uploading Files to a Hosted Server gives a few tips for uploading files to your server.

Getting the most from your blog with Odiogo and Feedburner.

There is still time to help pick designs for new mojoPortal skins. I will be starting on the new skins after I get back from the MySql Conference and will probably blog again about some of the suggestions next week during the conference.

If you're going to the MySql Conference I hope to see you there. I'll be in Santa Clara all week. My first ever trip to Silicon Valley.

We've got a booth in the DotOrg Pavillion, so come by and see us. I'm also co-presenting with Joseph Hill of Novell for the session "Cross Platform .NET Development with Mono and MySQL". Its very exciting for me because support for Mono and MySql were my very first goals and milestones for mojoPortal when I began the project. The other interesting thing is that mojoPortal has projects and solutions for MonoDevelop in addition to those for Visual Studio, so its one of the few .NET projects with developers collaborating across Windows and *nix platforms.

Those of you who have been using mojoPortal on Mono will be excited to hear of an important milestone reached in the Mono project. Recently in Mono's svn repository (r100264 or newer) has landed support for ASP.NET CSS Control Adapters.

Thanks to the great work of Dean Brettle for implementing this in Mono! Dean has been involved with mojoPortal from the beginning and is also the author of 2 great projects, NeatUpload and NeatHtml, both of which are used in mojoPortal.

The need for Css Control Adapters arises from the fact that the original ASP.NET implementation of some important .NET controls like Menu and Treeview was less than ideal when first released by Microsoft. The problem was that these controls rendered as nested html tables instead of the more semantically correct nesting of ul and li elements. To solve this problem, Microsoft subesquently released the CSS Control Adapters. Since the Mono implementation of Menu and Treeview mirrored the original Microsoft implementation it also rendered as nested tables. Some plumbing was needed in Mono to support the control adapters and Dean stepped up and took on the task.

Because the mojoPortal css was designed to style nested ul and li elements and not html tables, up until now the menu in mojoPortal did not render or style correctly when running on Mono as shown in this screen shot of mojoPortal running on the current Mono 1.9 release:

and now with the latest Mono built from svn:

So I think the next release of Mono will be very exciting for anyone using mojoPortal on Mono.

Again, huge thanks to Dean Brettle, Marek Habersack, and anyone else who may have had a hand in getting this done!

Update 2008-04-10 1:46PM EST - Dean mentioned that: "Owen Brady (aka Ocean) deserves a lot of the credit.  I used his code to parse and process the *.browser files."

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.2.

New this release:

AddThis.com button added to blog and to skins to make it easy for others to bookmark and share your site pages using popular bookmarking services. See my previous post for more info.

Contact Form Improvements

The contact form now persists messages to the database so messages are not lost if smtp is not configured. A cool new UI for reviewing messages has been added. It uses ExtJs Window for which I implemented a new .NET WebControl.

The window and the panes are re-sizable by dragging. I also added a Web.config option that should help users who have been reporting problems with contact form messages not being encoded correctly for Russian and other languages.

<!-- leave this blank for ascii encoding -->
<add key="SmtpPreferredEncoding" value="" />
<!-- example for Russian encoding
<add key="SmtpPreferredEncoding" value="koi8-r" />
-->

New Skin - extjsViewport1

I also implemented a new skin based on the ExtJs complex layout example, its named extjsViewport1.

I'm really just scratching the surface so far, I think it will be possible to have feature instances collapse accordian style and the possiblity to drag and drop feature instances to re-arrange content on the page. So far just some foundation work is done, but it is usable.

As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading and if you have any troubles post in the forums and I will try to help.