Those of you working with the mojoPortal source code from svn who have helped with translating the Culture.config files I ask your help in another area of improving the localization.

While the Culture.config file has all the labels and button text and such for the site, there are also MessageTemplae.config files in the /Data/MessageTemplates folder that contains longer text and markup used for things like forum and blog post notification, registration agreement, etc.

Previously these were named like EditAccessDeniedMessage.config but now I have implemented and committed to svn a naming scheme like
culture + "-" + EditAccessDeniedMessage.config
and I have renamed the current templates like en-US-EditAccessDeniedMessage.config where en-US corresponds to the Culture setting in the Web.config
for the Italian translation for example you would name the file it-IT-EditAccessDeniedMessage.config

If no file is found corresponding to the Culture setting, it will fall back to en-US
This is the last part of mojoPortal that I know of that was not localizable until now and the naming convention will solve that. Or I should say, previously it was localizable but you had to overwrite the english files to do it whereas the new implementation allows me to include translations.

Please send me the translated files at joe_audette at yahoo dot com and I will commit them to svn

Big Thanks in Advance!

Joe

Update: 9/26/2005 We now have the Italian Message Template files in svn thanks to Francesco Astolfo
Update: 9/28/2005 Thank You Michael Sommer for the German translation
Update: 10/24/2005 Thank You Jan Hussaarts for the Dutch Translation. I applogize for not updating this sooner
Update: 10/24/20045 Thank You Juan Manuel Galicia Castillo for the Mexican/Spanish translation
 

mojoPortal has had the friendly url feature for quite a while but I just now got motivated to setup more friendly url mappings on this site. The great work Dean Brettle did in modifying skmMenu to have crawlable links instead of just javascript was the final ingredient that got me motivated.

If you'll notice mousing over the menu links shows the url in the status bar of the browser which it didn't until Dean worked his magic and now most of the links are friendly like http://www.mojoportal.com/download for the download page instead of http://www.mojoportal.com/Default.aspx?pageindex=1&pageid=8

It also makes my awstats reports show me which pages people visited more clearly because it didn't care about query string params so it thought every page was the same until I added the friendly urls

Update: I've commited the changes to svn and still testing and tweaking but as you can see I've updated this site with one of Jasmin's new skins.

I'll be committing major changes to svn today that affect the skinning system of mojoportal.  This will require a little re-work for those of you who already have your own custom skins. I have already done this re-work for all the included skins so if you are using one of those you don't have to do anything.

Jasmin Savard contributed a complete re-organization of the stylesheet classes that is much better than what we had before and allows for much more intricate styling, he also contributed 2 very nice skins that show what is possible with this new style organization.

I have changed the way skins are stored in the file system to make it easier to work with skins and create new ones. Now all skins will have their own folder and the name of the folder will be the skin name you see in the SiteSettings dropdown for skins. Inside this folder will be the skin file which must be named layout.ascx and the stylesheet which must be named style.css. Any supporting images can also be put in this folder.

To convert your existing custom skin just create a folder as mentioned above and put your files in it with the appropriate names. You will also need to re-visit the stylesheet and compare the classes in the new built in skins with the ones in your stylesheet and update your stylesheet with the new classes.

I will hopefully deploy the new model to this site later today after some additional testing and after I commit these changes to svn.

On another note, those of you using the latest release of mojoPortal on Windows should be aware of a bug in NeatUpload that was found to corrupt some file uploads. This does not affect users who are running on mono, only on Windows. The bug has been fixed in NeatUpload and will be included in the next release coming soon. In the meantime you can either comment out the upload module in your Web.config file or go get the updated NeatUpload code, compile and replace the Brettle.Web.NeatUpload.dll file in your bin folder beneath the web site root.

I just upgraded the source code in svn to use the new final release of FCKeditor. Those of you using the mojoPortal source code from svn can get it now. After I've had a chance to do some more testing I'll make a new release. I've upgraded this site to use it as well so I can test. So far so good.

Update:
I'm having a few issues with the new FCKeditor and trying to work through them. Its not allowing me to browse the server or upload files on mono. It works in IIS, I think there is a case sensitivty issue somewhere but haven't found it yet.

Also the css for the editor is displaying funky but appears ok when it renders outside the editor.

I'm making good progress implementing the site Search feature using DotLucene (not to be confused with Lucene.NET), big thanks to Martijn Boland for good advice and also for good code examples on using DotLucene in his Cuyahoga Web Site Framework.  His project is also a good reference for those who want to use NHibernate in ASP.NET.

The search is functional and working on this site, though it still needs some refinement before I make a release. The index for the search is maintened as content is created and updated so it will always stay in synch. Search results are filtered by role and the index is updated if view permissions for a page are updated so that the filtering is always correct.

Search is implemented in:
Html Content
Blogs
Forums
Event Calendar
Image Gallery
Links
Shared Files

The biggest challenge is getting good performance in building the index for an existing site which will be needed for users upgrading from older versions of mojoPortal. I've created a button to build the index for the whole site but the quandry I face is after the upgrade people should really never click it. Especially if the site gets really big say hundreds of pages or thousands of forum posts it would really be best to leave the indexes to manage themselves. But if the button is there, people will click it.

One option I suppose is to put the button in the page settings and make the user manually index each page in the site rather than the whole site. This would break it down to smaller chunks at a time but still would not be a good thing to do on the page that has the forums after you get a thousand posts as each post will be indexed.  I don't know of anyone currently using mojoPortal that has hundreds of pages or thousands of posts so maybe I shouldn't worry about it too much. Building the index will definitely be an Admin only feature.