A new release of mojoPortal is coming soon, either this Sunday or the following one if all goes well.

Hopefully we will release version 2.0.1 for Windows/2.0 .NET and version  1.0.1 for 1.1 .NET or Mono.

Most of my recent work has been in the 2.x branch. The 2.0 release of mojoPortal was just compiled against the 2.0 .NET framework, it did not use any of the 2.0 .NET features per se, but the upcoming 2.0.1 release will use a number of 2.0 .NET features.

Changes for the 2.0.1 version

• MasterPages, previously we were using Paul Wilson's MasterPages which made this an easy change
• Themes, using a custom VirtualPathProvider and VirtualFile, I am storing the theme.skin files in the same folder with the other skin elements like layout.master and style.css and images under ~/Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins/[skinname] instead of in the default App_Themes folder. Themes give you awesome control over the visual properties of all the built in server controls. I have stubbed out most of the server control properties in the skin.theme files with the default properties to make it easy for designers to know what properties are available.
• I implemented a custom SiteMapProvider and am now using the new ASP.NET Menu control for the menu instead of skmMenu. The skmMenu is still there if you want to use it there is a setting to allow that and you can also use the new TreeView control for the menu if you wish.
• I reduced the number of included skins but the ones I kept are all using css layout with no tables.
• I removed table layouts from most of the modules and supporting pages except where displaying tabular data
• The site is in general now XHTML compliant though it may still be possible in some cases that you could manage to get non compliant markup into the database. To get my sites compliant I had to do some cleanup of existing content in the db.

Changes for both 2.0.1 and 1.0.1 versions

• Update to the latest version of NeatUpload, the awesome upload control by Dean Brettle
• Dean Brettle is also working on a new Cross Site Scripting (XSS) prevention technique that will hopefully be in this release
• The last release added support for LDAP Authentication against OpenLDAP contributed by TJ Fontaine, this release we add support for Active Directory authentication as well as regular Windows NTLM authentication with help from Haluk Eryuksel, who also contributed the Turkish translation
• Joseph Hill added a whole new data layer for SQLite and also provided a feature to expose the forums as RSS
• I implemented a feature to automatically create initial site data for new installations and when creating new sites. Previously we had separate data creation scripts for each data layer and over time they had become inconsistent. This feature eliminates the need to maintain data creation scripts and makes the initial data consistent no matter which data layer is used. The initial data is retrieved from text files with a .config extension stored under Data/MessageTemplates and can be localized or customized

Numerous other little changes and fixes have also been done. If any of you think of anything major I've forgotten to mention let me know and I'll update this post.

For the current release, there will be no difference in the data schema between the 1.0.1 and the 2.0.1 versions but going forward the 2.x branch will begin to diverge as I add tables and columns to support the Personalization and Membership APIs and other plumbing to prepare for converting the modules into WebParts.

Its been several weeks since I have done any serious testing of the mono 2.0 stack. At my last test it was still broken in a number of places. I know they have been working hard on it though and I plan to get back on the testing and bug reporting after this release is shipped. Once the 2.0 mono stack is ready and stable we will drop the 1.x branch and get back to supporting just one version on all platforms.

Just thought I'd pass along a heads up from Paul at Novell to Novell Forge svn users. Accessing the mojoPortal svn repository might be a little bumpy on monday during the transition, but https access will be a little more firewall friendly so this transition will be a good thing. After the transition I'll update the instructions for svn access to mojoPortal

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Hello again,

Monday, 13 Mar 2006 we will be migrating all subversion projects to the new server.  This will cause intermittent outages during that afternoon MST.  The new server will continue to allow ssh access for users with commit access, but will no longer support anonymous ssh access.  There will also be https access for both anonymous users and user with commit rights.  If you desire, you will also be able to mount your repositories as a davs drive.

The website will be updated with the new information at the same time.

If you are using ssh keys to allow scripts you access your repository you will need to accept the new server fingerprint.   All of your public keys will be moved to the new server.

Please let me know if you see any problems and I will respond as quickly as I can.

Thank you,
Paul
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I did a little more tweaking and now This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.1!

Again you have to try it with the source from a browser like Firefox, if you just point the validator at this page it renders down level which is not compliant.



I should note that the FCKeditor is only XHTML 1.0 compliant so any page with an editor will not validate against XHTML 1.1 until that support is in place. In any case since browsers seem to be forgiving I think I can still go forward with the XHTML 1.1 DOCTYPE

Also I had to fix even more content in the db where I have historically had the bad habit of using target=_blank on links to external sites. target is no longer valid in XHTML 1.1

This site is also currently using much more CSS layout and most of the table layout has been removed. I'm still working on a few areas of this and still need to update more of the built in skins to work with the new model but I figured it was good to go ahead and do the skin for this site first so I can test it in the real world.

Thanks go out to Alexander Orlov for help and good advice in working toward XHTML compliance.

After a good bit of work, according to the Wc3 validator page, this page is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!

Now if you want to confirm this yourself I will say you can't just enter the url www.mojoportal.com and have it come up valid becuase when the validator pages makes a request it is rendered differently than when using a browser. In other words the .NET Server controls do their down level rendering when it can't detect the browser and apparently the downlevel rendering is not valid.

If you view this page with Firefox and then right click and view the page source then save this file as www.mojoportal.htm and upload it to the validator it gives it the nice approval.

Ultimately I would like to get to Strict compliance instead of Transitional but this is a step in the right direction.

Another factor that comes into play in a CMS like mojoPortal is whether the existing markup in the database that has been entered using the CMS features conforms. I think in general FCKeditor does produce valid markup, but I have found places where I edited stuff directly as source and I didn't do it with XHTML validation in mind at the time so I am cleaning things up in the content as well as in mojoportal code. For example using a valign attribute on a td is not valid for Transitional and moving forward toward Strict, links with a target attribute are not allowed so I am cleaning up things like that too.

I doubt if all the pages in this site are currently valid but I am making progress and eventually we will be able to proudly display the icon

Yahoo has released their Yahoo User Interface Library under the BSD license and has also shared their Design Patterns Library.

This is some very cool stuff and I will likely find some use for it in mojoPortal