I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.9.5, available now on our download page. This is a significant update with many improvements.

UPDATE 2013-02-14 We have found that our .NET 3.5 package for this release is broken under medium trust due to an error generated by Lucene.NET. We are looking into a solution to this but for now, those hosted under .NET 3.5 medium trust should not upgrade. The best solution is to move to .NET 4/4.5 hosting since we are approaching the end of support for .NET 3.5.

UPDATE 2013-02-14 We were able to use conditional compilation to make the .NET 3.5 builds use the older version of Lucene.NET and this fixed the medium trust error for the mojoportal-2-3-9-5-mssql-net35-deploymentfiles.zip package. So it is now safe to upgrade .NET 3.5 installations.

What's New?

Recent Content Feature

Lots of people have asked if there is a way to show recently created or updated content. The challenge with this has always been that features are self-contained and pages are just containers for feature instances so the don't have knowledge of the feature content so there was not an easy way to list new content except at the feature level. For example features like the blog and forums expose RSS feeds so one could pull recent content from those feeds into a feed manager instance, but there wasn't a good way to do it for the HTML Content feature which is the main content feature. However, we recently revamped our internal search index to keep track of created and modified dates so that searches could be filtered by date (also new in this release). Once that was completed we realized that one way to get recent content in a feature agnostic way is to retrieve it from the search index based on the created or modified date. This is exactly what the new Recent Content Feature does. You can set a maximum number of days old to include, which features to include and whether to use the created date or modified date. So this now works with all features that support search. The Recent Content feature can be placed on a page like any other feature and configured as you wish. There is also now a Recent Content RSS feed that can be enabled and then used with the Feed Manager feature to show recent content. I'll be documenting how to do that soon but the stand alone Recent Content feature is probably more user-friendly for most people.

Search Engine Improvements

As mentioned above the internal Lucene.NET search engine has been revamped. In addition to the created and modified dates it can also store the author name and this can be optionally shown in the search results for features that populate it. We also upgraded to the latest version of Lucene.NET (3.0.3). As a result of these changes, after upgrading it is recommended to rebuild the search index so it gets populated with the new fields. There were some breaking changes so developers who have implemented their own custom features that support search and use our internal search engine should see the notes in this forum thread.

There is also a corresponding update to our Event Calendar Pro product to be compatible with the search engine changes. This is a free update for customers who already purchased Event Calendar Pro.

Blog Improvements

Previously the map settings for the blog were at the feature instance level which meant that all maps in all posts had to use the same settings. These settings are now per post so you can get more creative with maps in your blog posts. There is also a new setting if you want to show a search input in the blog.

Forum Improvements

There is a new setting if you want to automatically close threads older than a certain number of days. Individual threads can now be left out of the google site map for the forums and/or marked with a NOINDEX meta tag if you don't feel that the thread has any content of value. There are also new settings to allow showing the CMS page side content on the forum detail pages which is useful for ad placement for example.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Content Style templates can now be imported and exported thanks to Joe Davis of i7MEDIA
• Upgraded to CKEditor 4.0.1
• There is a new menu control named FlexMenu included in this release. Unlike the ASP.NET Menu and Treeview controls it does not add any javascript so you can add your own if needed and not get any conflicts that those menus are prone to.
• Updated the CDN settings to use jQuery 1.9 and jQueryUI 1.10.0. Also updated included plugins to compatible versions. However, if you are using any custom plugins or javascript that is not compatible with the new version of jQuery we have a way to include a compatibility script. See the important skin changes article for details.
• Bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

I’m happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.9.4, available now on our download page.

Although it has only been a little more than a month since our last release, we’ve been very busy with more improvements some of which have been long standing requests.

What’s New?

Page Content Wizard

Most of you who are familiar with mojoPortal know how to add features to a page, but I've noticed on our demo site some people manage to create pages but then for some reason can't figure out how to add content by clicking the "Edit This Page" link. To make it more friendly for new users and for people trying mojoPortal for the first time on our demo site, we've added a simple widget for adding a content feature to a page. This widget is shown if user visiting the page has edit permission on the page and the page has no other content on it and is not configured to show the child page site map.

We’ve also added a new default profile field for AuthorBio. By default it is only available to Administrators, Content Administrators, Content Authors, and Content Publisher roles.

Forum Improvements

Reduced the number of Url parameters and added a site map for forum threads that can be submitted to search engines for greatly improved SEO in the forums feature. See the updated Site Map documentation for details.

Blog Improvements

Added support for showing an Author Bio at the bottom of blog posts.

Added support for a Sub Title per post, with theme.skin support to configure what element it renders as in the list an in the detail view.

Added support for multiple bloggers: A user in the edit roles for a blog can only edit their own posts unless the user is in the Administrators or Content Administrators roles. This can be disabled from user.config if you prefer the old behavior where any editor could edit any post.  See the updated blog documentation for details.

Added support for per category feeds. Now by default the feed icon on the category page has the category specific feed url.

Added support for post end dates. If an end date is specified, then the post will no longer be available to users not in an edit role. Other users who visit the post url will see a message saying the content has expired and the HTTP Status code 410 will be returned for search engines, and the post url will be removed from the google site map.

Fixed bug where the feed would return an error until a post was made from the UI.

Added options for showing the Author Photo/Avatar and/or an Author Bio at the bottom of Html Content instances.

Newsletter Improvements

Added support for some new token replacements that can be used to personalize the newsletter, with settings for fallback default values configurable on the newsletter definition. See the updated newsletter documentation for details. https://www.mojoportal.com/usingthenewsletter.aspx

Other Miscellaneous Improvements

Added a SkinID to registration page validators so they can be configured form theme.skin. Changed to dynamic display so that by default the error messages are shown inline next to the form fields.

Updated Italian translation from Diego Mora Updated the config settings to use the latest versions of jQuery and jQueryUI from the google CDN.Updated to the latest version of log4net.

Fixed bug where only admins could edit an html instance from within content manager (without the context of a page), and content admins were not allowed by mistake.

Fixed bug where Audio and Video features allowed upload media file types not actually supported in the features.

Fixed bug in internal comment system where site root was duplicated in the comment link in the notification email.
Fixed bug PayPal form element values should be attribute encoded not html encoded. Fixed bug in Image Gallery where Nivo slider did not work when the site was running in a sub folder rather than in the root directory.
Fixed a bug where if a user registered on the site after previously only signing up for the newsletter, duplicate newsletter subscriptions were not removed. This bug was introduced in version 2.3.9.3 when we added the newsletter opt in to the registration page.

The mojoPortal Team would like to wish our friends in the US a Happy Thanksgiving! We will be taking a few days off to enjoy time with our families and we are thankful to our community and customers who make what we do possible with your support and feedback.

We've just uploaded updates to several of the add-on products in the mojoPortal Store.

WorldPay Support

All of the eCommerce products: Site Membership Pro, Web Invoice Pro, and Event Calendar Pro now support WorldPay as a payment gateway in addition to the already existing support for Authorize.NET, PlugNPay, PayPal and Google Checkout. We've had quite a few requests for WorldPay support, so we're very excited to finally deliver this.

Other Updates

Form Wizard Pro has also been updated to include custom email template editing for the notification emails.

These are free upgrades for existing customers who have already purchased these products, the latest version can be downloaded from your order history by signing into this site as the user with the purchase history and clicking the "My Account" link at the top of the page. However, these updates do require the latest version of mojoPortal.

UPDATE: I made another small change to the Artisteer skin exporter plugin and uploaded a new version 2012-10-15. It fixed a problem with the menu layout in some designs.

UPDATE 2012-10-18 I've made another fix in the skin exporter plugin to solve a problem where Chrome browser was using responsive layout as if it were a phone.

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

We have supported Artisteer for several years now but there have always been a number of steps involved with converting an HTML export from Artisteer to a mojoPortal skin. But with version 4 Beta of Artisteer there is a new SDK that allowed us to develop a custom plugin to directly export a mojoPortal skin from Artisteer with 1 click.

mojoPortal Skin Exporter Plugin for Artisteer 4 Beta

We've decided for now to release this as a free plugin, but if you would like to support mojoPortal please consider buying me a few beers or coffee when completing your order for this free product. Artisteer has a very generous affiliate program so if you haven't yet purchased Artisteer or need to upgrade please click our ad first so that we get an affiliate commission on the purchase. As long as we continue to receive good commissions from Artisteer we will keep this plugin free.

See the mojoPortal Skin Exporter for Artisteer product page for system requirements, details and instructions.

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

I'm happy to announce the initial release of Site Membership Pro, available now in the mojoPortal Store. Site Membership Pro is an add on product for mojoPortal that makes it easy to monetize access to your premium site content.

See the product page for full details. As with our other products, customers who purchase Site Membership Pro get free upgrades for the life of the product.

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook