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.

We finally got our mojoPortal e-commerce demo site back online at http://storedemo.mojoportal.com/

Not much work has happened with this project since our initial sponsor went out of business without ever using it. But there has been some interest in getting it moving again and at least some possibility for new sponsorship is in the winds so I thought it would be good to get the demo site running again so people can check it out and help with testing and feedback.

Currently it only supports download products but you can proceed all the way through checkout and you can download the products. It uses Authorize.NET for the payment gateway and is hooked into a test account so you can test it using the card number 4111111111111111 and it will go through. The products in the store are mp3 files of my orginal music which was the only thing I had handy to make download test products with.

More information about the project (though not so up to date) can be found here: http://www.mojoportal.com/e-commercesolution.aspx

and we have special forums for anyone who wants to discuss this project here:
http://www.mojoportal.com/e-commerceforum.aspx

Also don't forget, October 26, 2007 is the last day you can vote for mojoPortal in the PackT Publishing Open Source CMS Awards so if you haven't voted already please show your support and vote for mojoPortal.

For a while now I've held off on fully utilizing the MS AJAX framework in the core of mojoPortal because it was not yet supported in Mono but recently, at least in Mono built from svn head quite a bit of the System.Web.Extensions stuff is working. In the past I had an AJAX Extensions pak which could be used to add MS AJAX support for Windows in case developers wanted to use it in their custom features. It also allowed for making the WebPart drag and drop work in Firefox by using the Microsoft.Web.Preview namespace. The Microsoft.Web.Preview stuff is not working in Mono yet but since WebParts are also not working in Mono yet its not needed. However in svn trunk I've modified (or will have soon, merge is in process) the Solution so that these things are referenced and no extension pak is needed. Since some web.config settings are needed to use these things I made a custom Web.config for mono that comments out these things otherwise errors happen on Mono. So heads up to any Mono users who are working with mojoPortal from svn.

If you are working with Mono compiled yourself from svn, you'll need to replace the Web.config file in the Web folder with the one from the _mono_errata folder

If you are working with Mono 1.2.4 or 1.2.5 release versions you will need to either just use the current zip download or use svn/branches/2.2.3.6 because the System.Web.Extensions stuff is not yet available in these versions.

One of the changes to add more general support for MS AJAX was to add the ScriptManager to the layout.master file of each skin so if you are using a custom skin you will need to copy this from one of the included skins into your custom skin.

I may go ahead and make another release with this soon as I know some developers are anxious to start using MS AJAX in mojoPortal and this will make it easier. I used the UpdatePanel in the BlogEdit.aspx page so Categories can be added to a post nice and smooth with no full postback.

Another thing I did recently that is in svn is I implemented a ProviderModel pattern for the IndexBuilders used to build the Lucene.NET seach engine index. This will make it much easier for developers to make their own features participate in Search by implementing an IndexBuilderProvider (which only requires implementing 2 methods). I plan to write a tutorial on that soon but I think most developers could figure it out just by looking at the included providers for existing features.

I'm still a fan of some of the other AJAX frameworks included with mojoPortal, especially dojo which I plan to use more of but its nice to finally be able to use the MS AJAX stuff. UpdatePanel makes things very easy.

I've just updated this site with the very latest code and have enabled authentication with Open ID and also with Windows Live ID. It is now possible to register or sign in to this site using either of these services.

Tip: If you are already a registered user of the site and you want to associate your Open ID with your existing site account you can do so on the My Profile page after you login with your current credentials.

For those interested, a good place to get a free Open ID account is at MyOpenID.com.

I really think single sign on is a huge thing the web has needed for a long time. I hope it catches on so I can use the same password at most sites. Now mojoPortal makes it easy to setup sites that support these single sign on services.

The code has already landed in svn in my sandbox and I will be merging it to trunk in the next few hours. Any testing would be appreciated. I would like to make a new release with these features very soon.