Just a quick heads up to users of mojoPortal who may have custom features that use the mojoPortal.Controls.DatePicker

In order to make it possible to use different date pickers in mojoPortal I have now implemented a provider model and now the control is just a wrapper around a provider specific control.

I had to rename the control becuase of a namespace clash when I built the provider model under the namespace mojoPortal.Controls.DatePicker I got an error because you can't have a class named DatePicker and namespace named DatePicker.

Renaming the control is a breaking change but is easy to fix. The new control class name is DatePickerControl instead of DatePicker so anywhere you have used DatePicker you will need to change it to DatePickerControl.

For example <mp:DatePicker... becomes <mp:DatePickerControl...

I have fixed these in all the projects included in mojoportal-complete.sln and will be committing this change to trunk tonight.

Those of you who have custom projects using this control will need to change your code after you get this update. If you have any trouble post in the Developer Forum and I'll try to help.

We've used a .NET control that wraps the jsCalendar javscript date picker for a long time but there are other nice ones available now. Specifically I plan to implement one using the ExtJs toolkit but needed to get this provider model in place first.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've started implementing some .NET wrapper controls around the ExtJs javascript toolkit to make it easy to use in ASP.NET and especially in mojoPortal.

So far I've implemented ExtPanel, TabPanel, Tab, SplitPanel, and Viewport server controls. I just updated this site  with my latest code and created a ExtJs Complex Layout Demo page using my controls. I spent some hours thrashing before I got it working but its very fun implementing these widgets once you do get them working it seems like magic. The layout possibilities are just awesome. I love the way you can collapse any panel to hide it and can resize them by dragging the borders.

Of course I'm sure I will continue improving these controls and will undoubtedly find bugs when I start trying to use them for real applications but they will get polished up as I use them for real features. I'm just trying to get some useful baseline proof of concept implementations working now.

I found a .NET project for ExtJS this morning but it depends on the MS AJAX framework. Although we can use the MS AJAX framework in mojoPortal, I'm choosing to implement mine without that dependency. I'm also choosing not to embed the javascript in the dll but instead just have a setting to the base path for the ext javascript files. I do see the convenience of embedding but I also see that putting a lot of javascript inside a dll increases its size and dlls have to be loaded into memory on the server which is probably not a problem on beefy machines but in shared hosting with limited resources its more optimal in my opinion not to have it in the dll.

I'll be posting more demo pages as I complete the wrappers for more ExtJs widgets.

Those of you who subscribe to svn commit notification may have noticed the new Survey feature by Rob Henry landing in there recently. Rob has been working on this feature for a while and the feature is ready for some testing and feedback so that he can put the final polish on it. You can test using his demo site at http://www.justsome.net/surveydemo/

You can login using admin@admin.com and password admin

The feature allows creation of complex multi page surveys and supports a variety of question formats. Currently its only implemented in MS SQL but we plan to add the other data layers after its finished.

Those working with svn trunk can just do svn update, rebuild the mojoportal-survey.sln or mojoportal-complete.sln in VS and then visit the siteroot/Setup/Default.aspx page and the feature will install automatically.

Post any feedback in the Developer Forums

Thanks Rob for your work on this! It will be a valuable feature for the mojoPortal community.

I've been wanting to revamp the Site Settings UI in mojoPortal for a while now. On friday I started doing a little work in the WebStore UI trying to implement tabs for grouping settings. First I implemented a server control that wraps the dojo TabContainer but for some reason I could not get the FCKeditor to display in Firefox inside the dojo Tabs. So saturday morning I tried using the ExtJs project and wrapping a .NET server control around their Tabs and it worked much better.

So I decided to go ahead and use it in Site Settings.

Much better organization than the previous layout. I just updated demo.mojoportal.com with this for anyone who wants a closer look. It will also be in svn trunk by tonight.

I have to say the ExtJs project is very impressive and I think I will focus on using it instead of dojo. Nothing against the dojo project but ExtJs seems more mature, has better documentation and better demos.

Amazingly impressive is their WebDesktop demo. Very cool stuff.

I've updated several developer documents today, primarily the ones beneath

Extending mojoPortal 

I also added some new ones:

Setup and Upgrade for Custom Featues
Making Custom Features Searchable
Module Settings - A Developer Convenience
Adding Custom Items to The Administration Menu