Posts in Category: Features

mojoPortal 2.3.0.8 Released

I'm very happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.0.8, available now on our download page.

What's New?

Search Engine Improvements

The mojoPortal search engine now supports filtering results by feature and results highlighting, as well as support for Open Search with automatic discovery. A number of changes were made to what we store in the search index, so to take advantage of the new features requires changing some config settings and rebuilding the search index which may or may not be trivial depending on the size and activity level of your site. For backward compatibility we have kept the default settings such that the exisiting search index should continue to work as it has, but to take advantage of the new features you should put this in your user.config for a new installation before doing a search or for an existing site you can add these settings to user.config and then rebuild the search index.

<add key="DisableSearchFeatureFilters" value="false" />
<add key="SearchUseBackwardCompatibilityMode" value="false" />
<add key="EnableSearchResultsHighlighting" value="true" />

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Improvements

I did a lot of analysis using the new free IIS SEO Toolkit and made a number of small changes based on the results. Its now possible for you to control the default title format for pages and to use extensionless urls in IIS 7.

Content Template Editor

Now you can create and save custom content templates and they will show up in the FCKeditor.

Content Style Editor

Its now possible for you to create and save content style templates that appear in the Style dropdown list in FCKeditor.

Skin Improvements

We include about 30 good looking skins in mojoPortal, but a number of the skins were designed for 800x600 screen resolutions so even though they were good looking it seemed to me that some of them were not being used very much because they are too narrow. So I made most of the narrow skins wider. Also we needed good examples of suckerfish style menus. The mitchinson-earthy skin had something close but it did not work very well so I re-implemented it using the jQuery Superfish menu and I made the mitchinson-earthy-alt1 which uses a vertical superfish menu. So now I think we have a lot of skins that be can useful as a starting point for customization. There is also a new Preview/Browse link in the Administration Menu > Site Settings page to allow you to easily preview the available skins.

Other Updates

Upgraded to the newest version of NeatUpload and the newest version of the AjaxControlToolkit.

Upgrade Notes

Customers who have purchased Event Calendar Pro and/or Form Wizard Pro, will need to upgrade to new releases of those products which have corresponding changes partly due to the newer version of AjaxToolkit. You can download the latest version from your order history under the "My Account" link.

Be sure to read an understand the changes to the search index and consider rebuilding your search index. If you have a custom skin you will need to add a new css class that is used to highlight the search results, the included skins all have this new css class:

.searchterm { color:black; background-color:yellow; }

 

 

 

Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

mojoPortal 2.3.0.4 Released

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.0.4, available now on our download page.

Whats New?

RPX Instant Open ID Single Sign In Integration

Now you can allow users to easily register and sign in to your site with no new passwords using their existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft,  Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and more. For complete details, see the RPX documentation here.

screen shot of rpx sign in widget

We've had support built in to mojoPortal for Open ID for a long time but this is much more user friendly, the user doesn't have to know anything about Open ID to use it. We still have suppport for standard Open ID authentication for those who would rather use it as is. In fact we also upgraded to the newer DotNetOpenAuth from the older DotNetOpenId (same project but they changed the name of the dll), and now it can work in Medium Trust environments, where previously, you have to remove the DotNetOpenId dll for Medium Trust to work. Of course the new RPX service also works fine in Medium Trust.

New Content Templates in the FCKeditor

You can now easily use a few UI widgets like the jQuery Accordion, jQuery Tabs, and YUI tabs right in the editor. There is a new toolbar item in the editor for choosing content templates, and we have pre-defined a few templates for these widgets.

screen shot of jquery accordion

screen shot of jquery tabs

In the near future we will also add the ability for you to create and edit your own templates.

TextArea Editor

For anyone who would rather use a plain text area for editing content rather thanone of our WYSIWYG editors, we now have a TextArea editor, thanks to a sponsorship from Felix Schudel. Since the WYSIWYG is much more friendly for most people, the TextArea editor is disabled by default, but it can be easily enabled by un-commenting it in the mojoEditor.config file.

WebStore Improvements

It is now possible to checkout without registration or sign in, if the order has no download products. So now people can buy me a beer without registering on this site ;-). There are also improvements to the offer administration, we added a new product picker dialog, and there is a new product site map for submitting to google and other search engines located at /yoursiteroot/WebStore/ProductSiteMap.ashx.

Blog Improvements

There is now an option in the blog to format the category list as a tag cloud. To use it you just enable the setting in the feature instance settings and then clear your browser cache to get the new css for the tag cloud. Soon we will be implementing categories/tags as a core system feature so it can be re-used by any feature and then we will replace the existing blog categories with the new system. This new category/tag system will then be used to easily add categories to the WebStore, EventCalendar Pro, and possibly other features. Note that if you have a custom skin, you will need to add this css for the tag cloud:

.tag-cloud { list-style-type:none; margin: 15px 0px 3px -30px;}
.tag-cloud li { display: inline; list-style-type:none; }
.tagcount { font-size: x-small;}
.tag-cloud .weight1 { font-size: 90%; }
.tag-cloud .weight2 { font-size: 110%; }
.tag-cloud .weight3 { font-size: 120%; }
.tag-cloud .weight4 { font-size: 130%; }
.tag-cloud .weight5 { font-size: 140%; }
.tag-cloud .weight6 { font-size: 150%; }
.tag-cloud .weight7 { font-size: 160%; }
.tag-cloud .weight8 { font-size: 180%; }
.tag-cloud .weight9 { font-size: 200%; }
.tag-cloud .weight10 { font-size: 210%; }

 

There have also been a number of minor enhancements and of course bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

Updated Releases For Event Calendar Pro and Form Wizard Pro

New minor release updates are available for customers who have purchased these features.  There were small changes made in these feature to correspond with changes in the core of mojoPortal. The Form Wizard also now uses the full editor toolbar for editing the form instructions and thank you message. Customers can download the updated versions from their purchase history and install them after upgrading to mojoPortal 2.3.0.4.

 Update 2009-05-22

Just updated to version 2.3.0.4.b to fix an issue where the breadcrumbs wrapper div was rendering on pages even if breadcrumbs were not enabled and this extra div could affect layout in some skin designs.

Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

mojoPortal 2.3.0.1 Released

 I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.0.1, available now on our download page.

What's New?

Content Versioning

The Html Content and Blog features now support keeping a history of every edit (like a wiki). You can compare any historical version of the content to the current version and you can restore any version to the editor so that you can restore it as it is by saving it or modify it further then save it. Versioning can be enabled at the feature instance level or it can be enforced site wide from Site Settings or it can be enforced from Web.config. Site administrators and content administrators can delete history but no other roles are allowed to delete the history. The ContentHistory is built into the core so that it does not have to be re-implemented for each feature. Each feature does implement its own UI to show or restore the previous versions, but they leverage common business classes to store and retrieve their history. In the future we will implement versioning for product and offer descriptions in the WebStore, developers may also leverage this in their own features to keep version history for their own feature data. This is one more thing to mark off our Road Map as complete. Next up is a general Content Tagging/Category system that can be re-used across features, and a Content Comment system that can be re-used across features.

Web Chat using Windows Live Messenger

See my previous post for more information about the new Chat feature. This was not even on the roadmap but when I saw how easy it was to implement I decided to work on it. It was fun and it only took a few days. One of the things I like best about my job is that I can just decide to work on something for a few days because its fun.

New PlugNPay Payment Gateway in WebStore thanks to Voir Hillaire

New Skin - dcarter-bluedesert, based on dcarter-ticktockpro but modified and contributed by Sami Isamil Hassan

Various minor enhancements based on feedback and fixes for bugs reported in the forums since the last release.

More progress moving away from ExtJs by implementing some .NET controls for YUI to replace the ones I previously built for ExtJs

Some of you may have checked out my Site Office UI prototype in the past. Its a separate plug in system than the main content system designed more for a consistent application user interface rather than for creative design like we use for the public facing web site via our skins. You can see the Site Office layout on this site or the demo site if you login and click the "Site Office" link at the top of the page, or you can look at the origianl layout demo for ExtJs here. I still have not implemented any real features for Site Office, but the plug in system itself works and I've even received emails from developers who have implemented their own plug features using it. I got kind of side tracked off of the Site Office idea partly because I had spent quite a bit of time implementing .NET wrapper cntrols around the ExtJs javascript to make it easy to use and then the ExtJs project changed their license to GPL which is not compatible with our CPL license, so I could no longer get upgrades of ExtJs and include them with mojoPortal. Since then we've been stuck on version 2.0.2 of ExtJs which was the last version they shipped under the LGPL (which was compatible). I had also used a little ExtJs in the Contact Form for the messaage list page. For a long time I've been thinking I really need to build new .NET wrapper controls with similar functionality but using the YUI javascript instead of ExtJs.
 
So again in the name of fun (because I like building .NET controls around javascript) I spent some time implementing some new controls with YUI to replace the ExtJs stuff I've been using. I have now removed the dependency on ExtJs from the Contact Form feature and I've got a good start on the layout framework to replace the current SiteOffice. I still have more work to do to finish, but the goal will be to eliminate all use of ExtJs in favor of YUI. The ExtJs javascript we include in mojoPortal is 6.36 MB, so it will reduce the size of our downloads once we no longer need to it. Anyway, you can see the work I've done so far on the YUI layout here, its very similar as you can see to the current Site Office layout with ExtJs. Once I get some more of the YUI things wrapped up so they are easy to use, I might even change the site administration area so that it uses this kind of layout instead of the site skin.

New Experimental CKEditor

Some of you may have noticed that the FCKeditor project has shifted gears from the next upgrade of FCKeditor to their next generation version named CKEditor. I think they are basically taking the good parts from the FCKeditor implementation but doing a new redesign of the implementation using things they have learned and new techniques that have emerged to improve the architecture. The CKEditor does not yet have image upload or server browsing so I have disabled it by default, but anyone who really wants to check it out can un-comment it in the mojoEditor.config file in the root of the web. It really looks just like the FCKeditor but does not have all the functionality yet, I just figured it was good to get started with it so we can be ready as they make imporvements.
 
So all of the above (other than the contributions from the community) is work I've done since the last release on March 24, less than 30 days ago, but in that time I've also made a substantial start on my next paid product Web Invoice Pro. It still has a ways to go before release though. Its one of those things where I started out with a very simple vision for it but it quickly changed to a more complex feature the more I thought about it after getting a few little pieces of it built. I needed to step away from it a little to think about it more and that is part of the reason I worked on some fun things as I got to a point where I was frustrated and needed to work on something that made me feel productive.
Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

Web Chat Using Live Messenger

Several people have asked about a chat feature for mojoPortal in the past and I've had my eye on a few ways to implement chat but have mainly been too busy working on other things to try and tackle it because I viewed it as a complex feature to implement. But recently I found out about the Live Messenger Web Toolkit and that seemed to lower the bar so that it was pretty mch low hanging fruit to implement chat. There are actually quite a few things developing in Microsoft Live Services that are very interesting. Much of it was announced at Mix 09, I still haven't watched all the videos but I plan to watch them soon and learn about tha various scenarios that can be implemented. But, so far I have implemented chat and it will be in the coming release of mojoPortal as a built in feature that can be enabled/disabled.

There will be a new "Live Messenger Chat" feature that you can put on a page, as a supplement to the contact form for example and your web visitors will be able to chat with you no matter whether they have a Live Messenger account or not. You will chat using your desktop Live Messenger and the web control will display your availability and if you are online it will allow web visitors to initiate a chat with you.

In addition to the new "Live Messenger Chat" feature that plugs into the content system, you can also enable your site users to have web chat controls on their profile page so that site users can initiate chat with one another. To receive chats a user will need the Live Messenger desktop software but chats can be initiated by web site visitors directly in the web page with no need for a Live account.

I invite you to try the chat here on mojoPortal.com to help iron out any kinks before the release (which I hope to make on Monday). To enable chat on your mojoPortal user profile, visit the "My Account" page using the link at the top (after you sign in), click the profile tab, then click the link that says "Acquire/Refresh a Live Messenger Permission Token" (ok its mispelled in the screen shot but I will fix that before the release)

aquire live messenger permission link screen shot

You'll note that te checkbox is disabled until you have the token. Once you have the token the checkbox becomes enabled and if you check it ans save, the chat will appear on your public profile page like this:

live messenger web control screenshot

You can see it on my profile here, there are links to member profiles also on the member list page and in the forums.

Now I'm not really big on using chat myself because I'm very busy and generally don't like things popping up and interupting me, so don't expect me to be generally available for chat. I built this feature mainly for others (who have requested it) to use. I'm not going to be using it for support, the forums are much better for that because they are searchable. But it would be great if people could test this out and give some feedback in the forums if you find any problems or have suggestions for improvements. I know lots of you out there use chat all the time whereas I hardly ever use it, so your feedback is important. For me its just a really cool feature that I'll hardly ever use ;-) so I'm not the best judge of it.

 

Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

mojoPortal 2.2.9.2 Released

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.9.2 available now on our download page.

Whats New?

Easy Woopra Integration

I mentioned Woopra in this previous post, its an awesome web analytics and real time traffic monitoring tool. Now its easy to use Woopra with your mojoPortal site. Just sign up for woopra and install their software on your home or office computer. Once they approve your site, you enable the script in mojoPortal from the Site Settings page as shown in this screen shot:

screen shot of woopra setitng in mojoportal

If you are using a custom skin, then you also need to add the woopra control to the layout.master file in your skin, just before the closing </form> tag like this:

<portal:Woopra ID="woopra11" runat="server" />
</form>

All the included skins in mojoPortal already have this. There was a long waiting period when I first signed up for woopra but lately people have been telling me they are getting approved within a few days of signing up for woopra. Its agreat service, I highly recommend it.

WebStore Improvements

We've added the ability to set the quantity when adding items to the cart from the product detail page and we've made it possible to update quantities directly on the cart. So previously if you wanted to buy me more than one beer, you had to add the beers to the cart one at a time, but now its very easy to be generous :-).

Last release we moved reporting out of WebStore and created a common set of reporting tables in the core so that the same reporting system can be used across ecommerce features. Since then we've begun fleshing out more reports, there are a number of new reports this release and even more to come later.

Miscellaneous

Japanese resource files thanks to Suzuki Teku, this brings us p to 18 languages!

A new setting in Page Settings for "Inlcude In Site Map", this was requested recently by a community member, we already had a setting for "Include In Menu" but that setting also excluded the page from the site map, so this new setting allows creating pages that don't appear in the menu but do appear in the site map.

Canonical Urls in the meta data, this is a new thing agreed upon by the big search engines so that if a page is available from more than one url the preferred url can be specified by a meta link with rel=canonical. This helps make sure the urls that is shown in search results is the correct one. In mojoPortal we haven't really had problems with this for content system pages because they generally only have one url, but in the past I would see some dupplicate warnings in google webmaster tools about my forum pages because the same page could be seen with query string paramters in different sequence and google would think they were duplicated pages when it was really the same page with just a variation in the sequence of parameters in the url. So the forums now specify the preferred url with the preferred sequence of parameters. We also add cononical urls to the main content pages but its really probably not much impact there since there hasn't been problems with duplicated pages with different urls.

One customer recently asked about being able to use separate read/write connection strings with MySql so they could use MySql replicatin as a scaling strategy. I don't know much about using this approach, it seems it could be problematic unless the replication is instantaneous. Nevertheless, I did the grunt work of going through all the MySql data classes and making it possible to use different connection strings for read and write operations. Bascially I made all the read methods get the read connection string and all the write methos use the write connection string. If you don't specify a write connection string in Web.config/user.config then it just uses the read connection string, so the logic is like this:

private static String GetReadConnectionString()
{
return ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["MySqlConnectionString"];

}

private static String GetWriteConnectionString()
{
if (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["MySqlWriteConnectionString"] != null)
{
return ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["MySqlWriteConnectionString"];
}

return ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["MySqlConnectionString"];
}

So, if you want to use a different connection string for write operations just add a connection strng setting with the key MySqlWriteConnectionString. I'd be interested to hear back from anyone who does use this approach with MySql. I don't know if the same scaling strategy is commonly used for MS SQL, Postgre SQL or Firebird, but I could make the same changes for those data layers if people tell me it would be helpful.

Event Calendar Pro 0.0.1.3 Released

Coinciding with this new release of mojoPortal is a new release of Event Calendar Pro. It now uses the new commerce reporting system so ticket sales are reflected in commerce reports and user purchase history is consolidated in the My Account/User Profile page. Note also that previously there was a module setting for currency but this now uses the currency setting from Site Settings. Also fixed a bug on the event detail page where the correct currency was not always displayed. Existing customers can download the new version from their Order History under My Account. Because Event Calendar Pro depends on the new reporting system you must upgrade to mojoPortal 2.2.9.2 before upgrading to the new version of Event Calendar Pro.

Form Wizard Pro 0.0.0.4 Released

This is just a minor bug fix release of Form Wizard Pro. There was a bug in the data export where the submission date for the forms was not correct, all the rows were suing the submit date of the first row. This is now fixed. Existing customers can download the new version from their Order History under My Account.

Upgrade Notes for mojoPortal

If you are upgrading from mojoPortal 2.2.8.6, then you can skip uploading the /ClientScript folder as nothing in that folder has changed. Its a large folder so leaving it out can save a lot of upload time.

 

Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.