I'm happy to announce the release of Fund Raiser Pro, available now in the mojoPortal Store, or take a test drive on our demo site!

Fund Raiser Pro is an add on feature for mojoPortal content management system. It provides the tools you need to do fund raising/crowd funding on your own web site. It has similar functionality to sites like Kickstarter.com and indiegogo.com but you host it in your own site and control it yourself and collect payments via PayPal or any of the ecommerce gateways supported in mojoPortal.

You can also define contribution levels and/or allow users to contribute any amount they want (within lower and upper limits that you can define). Your fund raising campaign can have a target date for reaching a fund raising goal or it can be open ended with no end date, or you can change the end date if you need more time to achieve the fund raising goal.

You can show or hide progress toward your fund raising goal, you can show or hide contributor profiles. Contributors can control their own privacy settings for what is shown on the contributor profile and the administrative settings allow you to make things even more private. That is, you can hide information that users marked as not hidden, but you cannot show information that the user chose not to show. For example the contributor can show or not show their name, city, state, country and contribution amount for example. As administrator of the site you could choose not to show the city and state and country even if the contributor said it was ok to share that information. In some cases you may want to show the contribution amount, in other cases you may not or the contributor may not want to show that information. You can optionally allow users to edit their own contribution profile or change privacy settings. 

You can also allow people to post comments and you can post updates to keep people informed on the progress of the campaign or project. You could also use the mojoPortal Newsletter feature to keep in touch with your contributors and encourage additional contributions. If you have defined levels and are allowing users to contribute arbitrary amounts, then a subsequent contribution can move a contributor up to a higher level by aggregating with his or her previous contributions. There is also integrated social sharing using the add this widget to encourage sharing your campaign on social networks such as Facebook and twitter.

You can try it out on our demo site to test both the front end for contributing and the back end for managing the fund raising campaign.

We've just released a small update to Form Wizard Pro that adds support for grouping items in a dropdown list question.

The form editor also shows the grouping and allows assigning and editing groups on items.

Note that this release of Form Wizard Pro requires mojoPortal 2.3.9.9 (released yesterday) because the support for grouping items was implemented in the mojoDropDownList and mojoListBox controls which are part of mojoPortal. These controls extend the ASP.NET DropDownList and ListBox controls which don't provide any support for grouping.

As usual this is a free update for customers who already purchased Form Wizard Pro and can be downloaded from your purchase history by logging in as the user who made the purchase and clicking the "My Account" link at the top of the page, you'll find it under the "Order History" tab.

If you don't already have Form Wizard Pro, check out the product page, it is an essential add on product for easy custom forms and simple surveys in your web site powered by the free mojoPortal Content Management System.

There is a minor update to our free Skin Exporter plugin for Artisteer 4.1 now available. Customers who already downloaded it before can get the update from their purchase history by clicking the "My Account" link at the top of the page and then click Order History.

New customers can complete the free transaction by adding the Artisteer Skin Exporter product to the cart and proceeding to checkout. For those who don't know Artisteer is a design tool for web sites that doesn't require knowledge of HTML or CSS click the graphic above to learn more about Artisteer.

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.9.7 available now on our download page.

The main new item this release is an all new file uploader with support for drag and drop, multiple file selection and a progress bar in modern browsers.

For many years we've used NeatUpload for file uploads which also provided a progress bar and multi file selection. Dean Brettle, the author of NeatUpload stopped supporting it in May of 2010 and now it has become a bit long in the tooth. It depended on Flash for multi file selection in some browsers and it did not work in medium trust hosting and was beginning to have some problems in newer versions of Firefox. Specifically it depended on a really old version of swfupload (which itself is now also an abandoned project). NeatUpload has served us well over the years but many of the problems that is solved are no longer existing problems or are easier to solve in modern web browsers so we felt the time had come to replace it.

We previously needed to provide a separate web.config file which enabled NeatUpload in Full Trust hosting but we no longer need any separate configuration, all the included features of mojoPortal "just work" in Medium Trust with no special configuration needed. Some of the file uploader features such as drag and drop, multi file selection and upload progress bar do not work in older web browsers but it does degrade to normal one at a time file upload in those browsers while modern browsers get the best user experience. NeatUpload is no longer included with mojoPortal so as long as you don't have any custom features that depend on it you can safely remove the /NeatUpload folder from your eisting installation after upgrading and remove the file Brettle.Web.NeatUpload.dll from the /bin folder. Developers are encouraged to look at how we implemented the file upload in mojoPortal features and replace your own use of NeatUpload in custom features to be consistent.

New Version of AjaxControlToolkit

We upgraded to the Jan2013 version (from July2012 version) of AjaxControlToolkit. Since this is used also in our add on products Form Wizard Pro, Event Calendar Pro, and Web Invoice Pro, we have corresponding upgrades to those add on products for compatibility with this release of mojoPortal.

Other Stuff

• upgrade to CKeditor 4.0.3
• upgrade to jQuery 1.9.1 and jQueryUI 1.10.2
• upgrade from jPlayer 2.1.0 to 2.3.0
• various minor 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 2.3.9.6, available now on our download page.

This release includes a number of bug fixes and a few other improvements since the previous release. The most interesting new feature is support for inline editing in the Html Content feature when using CKEditor which has also been upgraded to version 4.0.2. With inline editing, users with edit permissions can just click into the content and the editor will appear as shown below in a screen shot from our demo site.

When you click out of the content if it has changed it is saved by an ajax post to a service url. There is a little lock icon that toggles enabling and disabling the inline editor. This was needed otherwise if a user had edit permission and wanted to click a link within the content, it would launch the editor instead of navigating to the link. The inline editor also works in iPhone and iPad. For now inline editing is only implemented in the Html Content feature but depending on feedback we may implement it in other features in the future. It can also be disabled in case you don't like it and the traditional edit link that goes to the edit page also still works. To disabled inline editing in an installation you would add this in user.config:

<add key="EnableInlineEditing" value="false" />

In the last release we introduced a new Recent Content feature as well as an RSS url that could retrieve recent content based on query string parameters that could limit the results to a specific feature. Since the Recent Content feature that plugs into CMS pages could be configured to show content from multiple features we decided it would be more user friendly to expose an RSS link directly in the feature that will use the settings from the feature so that the feed will include the same content as the feature on the page.

In the previous release we upgraded to the latest jQuery but we missed a few plugins that were not compatible which caused a few bugs in various places such as the image cropper and the file manager. These have been fixed. The jPlayer plugin used in our Audio and Video players also is still not yet compatible with the latest jQuery so we automatically load the jQuery Migrate plugin when it is loaded to provide compatibility until they come out with an update to the jPlayer plugin.

We also upgraded to the newest version of the NivoSlider jQuery plugin which is integrated in the Image Gallery feature. It now supports captions and the web size image will link to the full size image.

There was also a bug introduced in the last release for the forums where forum threads could be lost from the search index when other threads were updated. This has now been fixed and anyone using the forums should rebuild the search index again after upgrading to restore any missing forum items from the search index.

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