Posts From June, 2007

Getting to Know Google Gears

Just made a post in my personal blog that is probably of interest to mojoPortal fans.

It has a screen shot of the SiteOffice UI showing a little google gears client database admin tool I threw together.

UPDATE 2007-06-24:

I've updated this site with the latest code, so anyone logged in can try the google gears query tool. After you login, click the Site Office link at the top then go to My Stuff > SQL

You can create tables, insert, update delete, select etc. Pretty cool huh?

Site Office UI

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm back to focusing my efforts on a set of features that will fall under an umbrella concept called Site Office.

Those of you who are registered on this site can have a look at the UI protype by clicking the SiteOffice link at the top of the page (after logging in). I think the UI is looking pretty cool. Using dojo and Rico, I've got an Outlook like accordian navigation section as well as window resizing by dragging the divider. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Some of the features I plan under this umbrella are:

External email access

you will be able to check any pop3 mail accounts including Yahoo and Google. It could also work with your company email system if it exposes a pop3 entry point.

One of the things I'm thinking about with this external email feature is that I don't wan't to store any messages on the web server database since they are already stored in the mail server and since this would be huge amounts of data. But I do want to be able to keep messages available to the user without having to go get them again for every request. So this seems like an excellent opportunity to use google gears. The messages can be retained in a client side SQLite database. It should also even be possible for users to read messages that have already been retrieved even when offline.

Contacts

which I would like to store on the server and also using google gears to make them available offline to support travelling workers.

Site Mail

which will look and feel like email but just be for communication with users in the site.

More...

Personal File Storage
Email Newsletters and Campaigns
Project Management/Issue Tracking/Time Tracking

Most of these features are Intranet type features that I envision only making available to certain roles.

SiteOffice UI work in svn

Just  a quick post that will only be of interest to those building and running mojoPortal from svn.

I've been working on the UI for the Site Office feature. I started on this feature almost a year ago and got side tracked but am picking up where I left off.

I had done a UI prototype before using jsObjects, but wasn't entirely satisfied with it. It would not work right if the doctype was xhtml.

I've now started reworking a protoype that uses dojo for the resizable panels and Rico for the accordian panels. So the result is kind of like outlook.

If you're working with the VS Solution from svn/trunk, after you update and rebuild, set these to true in either Web.config or user.config:

<add key="UseSiteMailFeature" value="true" />
<add key="UseOfficeFeature" value="true" />
<add key="UseExternalMailFeature" value="true" />

Now when you login you'll see the Site Office link in the top nav. Click that to see the new UI protoype. To see the old one using jsObjects change the url from Office.aspx to Default.aspx

Let me know what you think.

Joe

ps: Sorry this is not in the MonoDevelop Solution yet, once it solidifies a little more I will add it in there.

mojoPortal 2.2.2.8 Released

I'm very happy to announce that I just released mojoPortal 2.2.2.8 on the download page. This is a significant new release with major improvements since the last release.

Mono support!

We are finally back to one version of mojoPortal for all platforms, though we do provide a separate build for Mono. Its the same code but with WebParts left out of the compilation. In svn the old 1.1 framework version has been moved to branches/1.x and the 2.0 .NET version is now moved into trunk. There may yet be bugs so consider this release experimental on Mono. Those who wish to upgrade existing sites running the 1.x version of mojoPortal on Mono may want to wait and see what kind of bug reports come in before attempting an upgrade. I would highly advise making a copy of your site and db and upgrade the copy. This way you can go back if things don't work out.

New Multi Sites Feature based on first folder after site root

http://www.mojoportal.com/multiplesitesbasedonfoldernames.aspx
This feature was sponsored by one of my customers as open source development.

New Feature for Visually Partitioning Sites

http://www.mojoportal.com/visualpartitioning.aspx
This feature was also sponsored by one of my customers as open source development.

New Editor Provider Model now supporting use of both FCKeditor and TinyMCE

With the provider model, it will be possible to implement providers for other editors as well.

Improved Markup Semantics and CSS Organization

See my previous post for more details on this. Since the rendered markup has changed, those upgrading from recent versions who have custom skins may need to tweak them to account for the different markup.

A Few New Skins

RightToLeft1, RightToLeft2 and samar, are all right to left oriented skins contributed by A.Samarian

I also implemented a new TreeView menu option and created 2 skins to illustrate, treeviewmenu1 and treeviewmenu2. I discussed this in a previous post, for large sites, the treeview menu can improve performance because the nodes load on demand.

Admin Section has moved

The admin pages have been moved out of the content system and into dedicated physical pages. The main Admin menu is now accessed by clicking the key icon at the top of the site.

As always, if you have any problems, post in the forums and I will try to help.

Before upgrading be sure and back up your site and your db. If possible upgrade a copy then cut over to it. More note to help with upgrading.

Huge thanks to Alexander Yushchenko for all his help in providing Quality Assurance testing and feedback. His help has been instrumental in improving the quality of mojoPortal.

Also thanks to the Mono Team for their continued support and making it possible to run mojoPortal on Linux.

mojoPortal on Mono and a new release coming soon!

I am very close to making a new release, probably tomorrow or Tuesday.

I think this release we will include a set of files for mojoPortal 2.x on Mono. We will be retiring the old 1.x version, it will still be in svn, but we will move it from trunk to a separate branch and then we will move the 2.x version into trunk since we are finally back to one version for all platforms.

The first mojoPortal 2.x site running on a public server that I know of, http://kyta.spb.ru/, was setup and skinned by Anton Kytmanov. Thanks for letting me know Anton!

His configuration is:
1. Mono and xsp2 v1.2.4 from binary installation package that they provide on their site.
2. mojoPortal 2.x from SVN, compiled with MonoDevelop.
3. Database -- MySQL. Version 5.0
4. OS -- KUbuntu v7.04

I have also been running mojoPortal 2.x on my local OpenSuse machines for a while now. I'm not saying there are no bugs but its ready for more people to start experimenting with it and most things are working pretty well. WebParts is still not implemented in Mono so that will be left out of the Mono build.

Stay tuned, more info when I make the release.