Just a quick post to highlight an impressive new site running on mojoPortal. The Metro Transit site for the Minneapolis/St. Paul area is now running on mojoPortal. The site is very attractive and has a lot of custom features developed to support Metro Transit system needs.

John Sanborn, the developer of the site has done a great job with this site and because of all the existing functionality in the mojoPortal framework, was able to focus on developing his needed custom functionality. Quoting John:

I have to tell you, working with mojoPortal has been a joy. Your work is inspiring and all the documentation on the site and access to the forums have really made this whole project so much easier.

The marketing people that manage all the content and input the news and alerts and maintain all the content are pretty excited about all this.

It is great to hear the success stories from our community. If you've done something really impressive with mojoPortal, let us know and maybe we will feature your site in a blog post too!

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Just a quick post to welcome our newest consulting partner, TRIAD Comunications. TRIAD has already deployed 16 sites using mojoPortal and all of them are very nicely done.

My favorite is the site for Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I've been watching the Ken Burns DVD box set about the National Parks with my Dad over the last few weeks, so I was very pleased to see a National Park web site using mojoPortal.

I look forward to seeing more mojoPortal sites from TRIAD.

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.3.9, available now on our download page.

Feature Improvements

• Image Gallery now uses friendlier file names and you can optionally move existing Galleries below the /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/media folder to make it easy to browse gallery images from the editor. Just add this setting to your user.config file: <add key="ImageGalleryUseMediaFolder" value="true" />
• People often don't notice that the forums are integrated into site search, so we added a search box in the forums that redirects to site search and filters for forum content.
• Added a search feature in the Url Manager to make it easier to find a URL when you have lots of them.
• Upgraded FCKeditor from 2.6.5 to 2.6.6
• Updated config setting to use new jQuery 1.4.2
• Updated Russian resources files from Alexander aka SkySandy
• Updated Portuguese resources from Leonard Pedrini

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where re-sorting root pages in a multi-site installation caused root level pages in all sites to be re-sorted and with lots of sites and pages, this could result in it becoming impossible to sort pages in some cases.
• Fixed a bug where if you tabbed out of the page name in page settings or out of the blog title when updating a blog post, a new URL was being suggested when the name or title did not change which could lead to unintended URL changes.
• Fixed sitemap so that it uses https URLs if the page requires SSL to avoid an extra redirect
• Fixed bug in Image Gallery where portrait images were not creating correctly sized thumbnails or web images.
• Fixed issue where the content rating control did not work well in some cases

Thanks to all community members for providing bug reports and feedback, especially Alexander aka SkySandy for his work in diagnosing bugs and suggesting fixes.

Related Product Updates

Just as we had to make changes in mojoPortal to support Artisteer templates, we also made corresponding changes in our add-on products Event Calendar Pro and Form Wizard Pro. If you are an existing customer who already purchased these products, you should upgrade them at the same time as you upgrade mojoPortal. You can download the latest version by signing into this site as the same user who made the purchase, then visit the "My Account" link at the top of the page and look under the Order History tab where you will see links for your products

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.1.7, available now on our download page.

More Editor Improvements

The File Browser/Uploader that we implemented previously in TinyMCE is now also working in FCKeditor and CKeditor so that users have a common browse and upload experience in each of these editors. So we now have equivalent functionality in TinyMCE and FCKeditor but in CKeditor we do not yet have integration with our content template system or content style system.

New User Avatar System

We've had a lot of requests for an avatar system that allowed users to upload their own avatar. There is a new setting for Avatar System in Site Settings where you can choose User Upload or Gravatar. If user upload is enabled then an upload button will appear on the user profile page allowing them to upload an image. The image will be resized according settings in the Web.config file for AvatarMaxHeight and AvatarMaxWidth.

Image Gallery Improvements

We now have support for the Vertigo Slideshow which uses Silverlight to create a really nice slide show of images in the gallery. You can enable it from settings in the gallery. Since the Vertigo Slideshow can also consume images from your Flickr account, we also added a new Flickr Gallery  Feature which also uses the Vertigo Slideshow.

Blog Improvements

We've added support for using IntenseDebate or Disqus for the comment system in the blog. For the moment I recommend IntenseDebate because there are some issues I encountered with Disqus. Specifically, I could not get it to work correctly n IE 8 though it works reasonably well in Firefox and Chrome. But even when using Firefox or Chrome it does not work correctly if you try to post a comment as an anonymous guest. The integration steps are trivial so I don't think I've done it wrong but believe the problem can be fixed on their end. I've let them know about it and hope they can resolve it. Give it a try if you like but be aware about these issues since at the time of this writing they are not resolved. I'm now using IntenseDebate in this blog. I implemented it such that if you have existing posts with comments in the internal comment system those posts will continue to use the internal comments but new posts will use the current setting.

Its now also possible to post future posts from Windows Live Writer. Previously it was ignoring the publish date passed in from Live Writer.

Its also now possible to require users to sign in to view the full blog post when using excerpts in the main blog page.

Re-Organized Css In Included Skins and a New Skin

Based on community feedback I've re-organised the css for included skins to make it easier to find what you are looking for. Previously we had things separated a little too cleverly with colors in one css, borders in another and text related settings in another. This made the css a little less approachable and less intuitive. I've combined those files into one style.css file and renamed some other css files so they sort together in the file system and are easier to find. You can of course organize the css files in a custom skin any way you like by listing which file to include in the style.config file. Ultimately they are all combined and minified into one request by our CSSHandler. The style config file for included skins now are including the following files:

<file csswebconfigkey="YUITabCss" imagebasewebconfigkey="YUISkinImagePath">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/ClientScript/oomph/oomph.css" imagebasevpath="/ClientScript/oomph/">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/cluetip/jquery.cluetip.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/cluetip/">none</file>
<file>style.css</file>
<file>stylemenu.css</file>
<file>styletreeview.css</file>
<file>styleblog.css</file>
<file>styleforum.css</file>
<file>stylefeedmanager.css</file>
<file>styleformwizard.css</file>
<file>stylewebstore.css</file>
<file>styleaspcalendar.css</file>
<file>styledatacalendar.css</file>

so we still have some separation but the main style.css has most of the common css.

We also have a nice new skin with a cool menu style thanks to Joe Davis of i7MEDIA

What Else?

Updated Polish Translation - thanks to Przemyslaw Luniewski.

Updated Italian Translation - thanks to Diego Mora.

A number of bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

Just a quick post to highlight a few cool mojPortal sites that have com to my attention recently.

12th Street Sports Bar - Tim Cartwright of US Interactive did a great job with this site for the show on Fox College Sports TV Channel.

b square, a site designed by TEAK. Notice that they implemented multiple languages and a cool language switcher and this was done with no changes to the core of mojoPortal.

Yamisee.com designed by David Dean, as David describes the site, "Yamisee.com is a new concept that allows anyone who is an expert in a field to easily post course descriptions, and deliver live content in unique virtual rooms. The site is not even at an alpha stage, but early adopters can register and launch instant meetings or schedule online meetings for free. It's a webex like experience (that part is not mojo), with enhanced meeting rooms that allow for visual, non-verbal feedback coming soon."

Antioch Community Church designed by Joe Davis of i7 Media. I really like the menu design with 2 levels of horizontal menus. Joe has even made a free skin available to the community with a menu design like this.

Adamson UAE, submitted to our Success Stories Forum just this morning has a very nice design.

cmstream.net is a site brought to my attention recently. The most interesting thing is that the site is running on Linux using Mono.

If you're doing cool things with mojoPortal let us know, we'd love to hear from you.

On a side note, this site is running the latest code testing new features for the coming release. As you'll notice for this blog post I'm now using IntenseDebate for the comments. I've also implemented support for Disqus so you will have a choice to use that as well though I'm currently finding some issues with Disqus that I'm hoping they can fix on their end or advise me on what I can do. I've added a new setting in the blog where you can choose the comment system with options Internal, IntenseDebate, and Disqus. I also implemented it such that if you have existing posts with comments already made using the internal comment system, those posts will continue to use the internal comment system but new posts will use the currently selected comment system. So this is my first post using IntenseDebate. I look forward to seeing if this increases the amount of comments or not.