I'm happy to announce the first major upgrade for my Form Wizard Pro product. 

New Features:

• Support for multi page forms aka surveys
• You can import and export complete form definitions
• You can import and export individual questions, so if you make a state list dropdown you don't have to type it again, just export it and then you can import it in a different form to re-use it.
• Support for additional instruction blocks arranged by drag and drop among the questions
• Support for regular expression validation
• and more

This release is a free upgrade for existing customers who bought Form Wizard Pro previously and starts at $99 for new customers. 

Note: This new release requires mojoPortal 2.3.3.6 which was just released a few days ago.

See how easy it is to create custom forms and surveys using mojoPortal and Form Wizard Pro

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.3.2, available now on our download page.

New Features

Custom Meta Data

We have a new custom meta data system allowing you to add custom meta data to your pages in addition to the standard keywords and description. Specifically the system was designed to support the use of Dublin Core Meta Data, but it can be used for any html meta data.

The new meta data system has been integrated into CMS pages, Blog Posts as well as Web Store Products and Offers.

Page Comments

While it still remains a to do item on our Road Map to implement an internal comment system that can be attached to pages and content features, in the mean time we have added support to allow you to attach IntenseDebate or Disqus comments to the bottom of any CMS page. The Blog of course already has the option to use it's own internal comment system or one of these services. Actually I recommend IntenseDebate because of bugs I encountered with Disqus. I have reported the issues and even identified the line of code in their javascript where the problems occur so hopefully they will fix it. There are new settings in Site Settings > API Keys to enable these services and a setting in Page Settings to enable it on a page.

Google Translate Integration

You can now easily add Google Translate widget to a page or to every page in your site. As you can see I've added it to all pages in this site. Not sure if I will always keep it there but we shall see what the user feedback on it is and whether people find it helpful or not.

A New IFrame Feature

It is already easy to add iframes to the Html content feature using the source view of the editor, but for less html saavy users having a feature to make it easy may be helpful. Eric Stoffers, a community member sent me on he had put together for his users and I made one based on his example but according to my own coding preferences.

Contact Form Improvement

Added an enhancement to the contact form so it can be configured to give the user a choice of who receives the email notification, so you can have different departments or user receive the submission depending on the user choice. See Using The Contact Form for more details.

Forum Improvement

Made it a little easier for users to notice the email notification subscriptions in the forums to encourage users to subscribe and participate in the forums. Users in edit roles will also see a link allowing them to review who is subscribed and unsubscribe users if needed. There is also a new setting if you want all users to be able to see the number of subscribers to the forums (but not the link to review them obviously).

Shared Files Improvement

Added a description to shared files, it is not currently surfaced in the UI except for the editing UI where descriptions can be edited. The main benefit of the description field is that it is indexed into the search engine. Previously you could only find search results based on the title of the file as we do not have an easy way to index Word Documents or PDF files. Now you can paste plain text of the content from these documents into the description in order to index the content of the documents and improve search matching.

Major CSS Re-organization

Back in version 2.3.1.7, based on community feedback we combined CSS from separate files where we previously had things separated too granularly in files like stylelayout.css, styleimages.css, styleborders.css, styletext.css. These were all combined into style.css for included skins. The problem is we used a CSSTidy script to do the combining and it produced a correct result without breaking any styles but it did not organize the CSS selectors into any groupings that make sense to people, they were just scattered kind of randomly on the style.css file. The result was that it did not have the intended result of making it easier to find what you are looking for. For this release I went through the included skins 1 by 1 and manually moved the CSS selectors around into logical groupings for layout, headings, form styling so that it really is easy to find what you are looking for. This was a very tedious manual task, I spent nearly 40 hours on this working as fast but as carefully as I could. In the end I was very glad to be finished but I feel it was a very important task to make the included skins more approachable as a starting point for customization.

I also went through the features and made more consistent use of styles on grids and tables. In many places we were using the YUI table javascript just for styling tables but this did not lend itself well to styling them according the skin design, it just made a very neutral looking table. I found some nice free GridView themes and put them in a common location under /Data/style and modified them a little according to my needs. I then chose the one that looked the best for each included skin and added it to the style.config file for combining. Those of you with custom skins or upgrading should add one of them to your style.config as well. Note we hve several to choose from and may add more later.

<file cssvpath="/Data/style/gridview/WhiteChromeGridView.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/gridview/">none</file>

<!--
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/gridview/ChromeBlackGridView.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/gridview/">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/gridview/ChromeGridView.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/gridview/">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/gridview/GlassBlackGridView.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/gridview/">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/gridview/SoftGreyGridView.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/gridview/">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/gridview/WhiteChromeGridView.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/gridview/">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/gridview/YahooGridView.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/gridview/">none</file>
-->

Other Miscellaneous Improvements

Because editing Html for email newsletters has such different requirements than normal site content, I added a new site setting so you can specify a different editor preference for the newsletter than for site content. I prefer TinyMCE for Newsletter editing because it has a little better preview feature, but I'm growing more fond of CKeditor for editing site content.

Upgraded to CKeditor 3.0.2 and managed to get our Content Template System and Content Style System integrated and working. I am still noticing a few little issues here and there with CKeditor but I think it has a lot of promise and look forward to it improving over time.

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.2.9, available now on our download page.

Newsletter Improvements

The primary focus of this release is improvements to our newsletter.  We have had a lot of consistent feedback from the community asking for Newsletter improvements and we were long overdue to complete this. The improvements made are as follows:

• Users can subscribe to Newsletters without registering on the site
• A Newsletter Sign Up feature has been implemented so that you can put it on any page(s) you like and configure it with various settings to control what is displayed. Since you can have as many newsletters as you like, the sign up can be configured to show a list where users can choose which newsletters they would like to receive, or you can not show the list and it just subscribes to the default newsletter, which is the first one in the list. If the user is not authenticated then a confirmation email is sent to confirm ownership of the email address.
• Each newsletter can be configured whether to opt in by default when a user registers on the site.
• Each newsletter can be configured whether to allow viewing previous editions as a web page. If your newsletter has compelling content, browsing previous newsletters may encourage more subscriptions.
• A progress bar so you can monitor progress as the newsletter is sent to the list.

Editor Updates

Upgrade to TinyMCE 3.2.7
Upgrade to FCKeditor 2.6.5
Upgrade to CKeditor 3.0.1

Added more options to our TinyMCE configuration file, including setting for configuring the default language for the spelling checker.  Added a new toolbar for the Newsletter editor since it has different needs than web page content. Fixed an issue where TinyMCE would remove iframes entered in html view.

SEO Improvements

Added an option in page settings for overriding the canonical url. This is mainly for use on your home page. Since it is the default page of the site it is visible using the url http://yoursiteroot/, http://yoursiteroot/Default.aspx, and http://yoursiteroot/home.aspx, by default it would make the canonical url use the generated friendly url for the page, in this example it would use http:/yoursiteroot/home.aspx, but you may prefer to have http://yoursiteroot/ a the canonical url so this override setting allows you to do that.

Added a separate setting in page settings for including a page in the search engine site map. Previously we used the same setting for the search engine site map as for the main user site map. For example you could create a page and then point it to http://www.gogle.com and it would be listed in the menu and site map the same as any other page, however, for the search engine site map, google webmaster tools would find this as an error in your site map. So we added a separate setting so you can easily exclude pages from the search engine site map if they are just pointers to external pages.

Updated Translations

Updated Italian resource files form Diego Mora

Updated Persian resource files from Asad Samarian

New, French-Canadian resources thanks to Benoit Houle

Miscellaneous

Added a new setting under Site Settings > Permissions for "Users that can create root level pages".

Made it possible to disable the default database authentication if you want to use only Windows Live and/or OpenID

Added a config setting to exclude specific admin email addresses from site registration notifications and work flow notifications.

Other miscellaneous tweaks and bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.1.9, available now on our download page.

Whats' New

Easy content animation/slide shows

Our Html Content feature now has content animation built in. You can enable it in the settings of an Html Content instance and it will create a slide show based on the content using cool transitions that you can also configure in the settings. The animation uses the jQuery Cycle Plugin. It can rotate images paragraphs or any html content. People often ask how to rotate images in their custom skins, so I've also added image rotation in the andreasvicklund-02-alt2 skin to give an example how to do this.

Integrated Image Cropping

We now have easy to use image cropping built into the image browser/uploader in our editors. We also have image cropping integrated into the user uploaded avatar system so users can upload a larger image then crop it to create their avatar. We used the jQuery jCrop plugin to implement the user interface for cropping.

Integrated Twitter Widgets

We now have built in widgets that can be used to show your tweets or twitter search results.

New Configuration file for TinyMCE

Due to community requests to have more control over which plugins and toolbar items are displayed, I've implemented an xml config file that gives you control over these items. The file mojoTinyMCE.config located in the root is used by default. To customize it you should copy and rename this file then change the setting in Web.config to point to your custom file.

Bulk Image Upload in the Image Gallery

We added bulk upload to the Folder Gallery in the last release and users have been asking for the same thing in the other Image Gallery so we have added it there as well.

Usability Improvements

Also due to community feedback and my own observation from support questions, the use of the gear icon for feature instance settings was changed to use a text link by default. Those who prefer the icons can add this to their user.config file to override the new default.
<add key="UseTextLinksForFeatureSettings" value="false" />
I wanted to make the same default change to use text links also for the main administration links but I found that forcing it globally could affect the layout of existing custom skins, so I kept the default to use the icons but added an option that can be specified on the StyleSheetCombiner control in the layout.master file of a skin to specify whether to use icons or text links:
<portal:StyleSheetCombiner id="StyleSheetCombiner" runat="server" UseIconsForAdminLinks="false" />
The default setting is to use icons, but for most of the included skins I changed it to use text links and updated the skin layout so that the text links could render without affecting the layout. Note that if you are upgrading and want to use the latest versions of the skins you will need to copy them from /Data/skins to /Data/Sites/1/skins after upgrading because we only update the skins in the library not in individual sites.

Miscellaneous

Updated Italian resources thanks to Diego Mora

Updated Spanish resources thanks to Matias Molleja

Various bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

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.