In our last newsletter I mentioned that I was working on a new add on product for mojoPortal named Site Membership Pro.

I've received quite a few emails expressing interest in this product and I'm happy to report that the first release is ready to ship and will be available soon in the mojoPortal store.

However, Site Membership Pro depends on a few small changes I've recently implemented in the core of mojoPortal, so I'll have to wait until after the next release of mojoPortal before I can make it available. My plan is to make a new release of mojoPortal soon, I'm going through our project tracker looking for small things I can complete to round out a new release to make it worthwhile upgrade.

In the mean time, I've created a demo site to show the public facing side of the feature at smpdemo.mojoportal.com.  You can also try out the back end administration of the feature on our main demo site where you can login as the administrator, but you'll need to add it to a page manually and then you will see the "Settings" and "Manage" links.

What Is Site Membership Pro?

Site Membership Pro provides additional functionality on top of mojoPortal to make it easy to monetize access to your premium site content.

mojoPortal already provides role based security so that you can use roles to protect your premium content. For example you could create a role named "Members Only" and you could set that role as the only allowed View Role on pages in your site that contain premium content. However, managing the roles assigned to a user is a manual process in mojoPortal that can be done by Administrators, Role Adminsitrators or Roles That Can Manage Users. So one would have to go to each user who should be given access to premium content and add the user to the "Members Only" role.

Site Membership Pro provides the missing pieces to make it easy to sell membership subscriptions and automatically grant the user the role or roles that provide access to the premium content on your site when they complete a subscription purchase.

You define Membsership Levels which have a name and one or more roles that are provided with this level of membership. You could keep it simple and just have one level for "Members Only", or you could have multiple tiers of access like Gold, Silver and Bronze each providing different roles that protect sections of your site content.

Then you define Membership Product(s) which grant the user one of the Membership Levels (and the associated roles) for a specified number of days for a specified price. Products can be enabled or disabled and they can have begin and end dates that determine when they are on sale. A grace period can also be specified on the product such that users are not removed from the granted role(s) until after a certain number days after the actual expiration date.

When a user pruchases a membership product they are immediately granted the roles provided by the membership level when the payment has cleared. The begin and end dates of the membership are set at the time of purchase and a background task handles removing roles from the user when the membership expires or the grace period is over (if the user has not renewed).

You can also configure notifications on the products so that users can recieve reminders when their membership is coming up for renewal. Reminders can be configured as a specific number of days before or after either the end date of a membership or the end of the grace period. You can create multiple reminders per product so that you have a series of them to encourage renewal.

You can also define reminder templates for plain text email messages. Templates support some token replacement and you must assign a template to a reminder in order to save it. So the reminder will send a plain text email replacing the tokens from the template at the scheduled time if the user has not renewed.

The same background task that manages removing users from roles if their membership expires also handles sending the reminder messages.

Note that the reminders are intended to provide a link back to your site so the user can renew his membership before it expires. To renew, users have to go through the checkout process. Site Membership Pro does not retain any credit card information and does not automatically charge cards to renew subscriptions. Possibly in the future we will look into available APIs from PayPal and others for recurring payments but we have no plans to retain credit card information in the future. The risks and liability potential involved with retaining credit card information without proper infrastructure and staff to secure the data far outweigh the fact that it would be nice to be able to do that.

Since users probably don't want to go through the checkout process every month it is recommended to structure your membership products with fairly long durations like 6 months or one year as opposed to a month at a time. Free products are also supported so you could have one product that provides a free trial of Premium Access for a limited number of days and a One Year Subscription for $120 for example. You can also mark a product as available only for new members, so that existing members can't get the free trial offer.

Supports Authorize.NET, PlugNPay, PayPal, Google Checkout - ie the same payment systems supported in all mojoPortal ecommerce products (WebStore, Event Calendar Pro, Web Invoice Pro). I'm also investigating adding support for WorldPay for all our ecommerce products in the near future.

The initial release will support MS SQL and MySql, other database platforms may be supported later depending ion demand.

What Site Membership Pro Does Not Do

Site Membership Pro is NOT a replacement for the site registration system. User's must register or sign in to purchase premium membership, so they need to go through the normal registration process first to get a free account, then once they complete the membership purchase they are immediately granted the roles provided by the membership.

Site Membership Pro is not involved in protecting your premiumm content, that is done by configuring roles that can view pages in your site and is built in functionality of mojoPortal.

Site Membership Pro does not retain any credit card information and cannot automatically charge cards when membership renewal is due.

Site Membership Pro does not prevent an Administrator, Role Administrator or Roles That Can Manage Users from adding or removing users from roles.

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I've just uploaded Event Calendar Pro 3.4.0.5 This is a minor upgrade with just a few little improvements that some customers have been asking for.

What's New?

Improvements to the event editor to get rid of some jumpiness that could happen when additional settings were shown or hidden based on checkbox selection. Previously this was done using UpdatePanel which was the cuase of the jumpiness. All UpdatePanels have been removed from the event editor page and the showing and hiding of things is done with jQuery making it much smoother.

Added settings to allow not requiring or showing address and phone fields on the registration form when the event is free.

Added a setting to use the Event Summary instead of Event Detail in the outbound feed. Often people consume the feed in the mojoPortal Feed Manager on their home page to show upcoming events but they don't want to show the full details.

Added a setting to control how far into the future events are included in the feed. Previously it was hard coded to 180 days, this is now just a default setting that can be changed.

Added more css classes on the body element in edit/admin pages

Added config settings to allow hiding the start and end time on List View and event Detail view if the start and end time is configured to the same value.

Updated the article Event Calendar Pro Tips and Tricks to cover some of the new and previously undocumented config settings.

We've got lots of plans for future enhancements for Event Calendar Pro, but wanted to get this small update out for the folks who requested these minor improvements. As with the previous release of Event Calendar Pro, this release requires mojoPortal 2.3.8.1 or higher.

This is a free upgrade for existing customers who have already purchased Event Calendar Pro. To download the new version just sign into www.mojoportal.com as the user who made the purchase, then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page and go to Order History. You'll be able to download the latest version from your order details.

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It seems like developing applications for the iPad is all the rage these days as it has become a very popular device.  I’ve thought about developing an iPad app for mojoPortal, it would be fun to learn how to develop apps for iPad and iPhone, but honestly my plate is pretty full just working on mojoPortal itself and add on products for it. So I got to wondering if there were any apps already in existence for the iPad that could work with mojoPortal similar to Windows Live Writer which is the best Windows desktop application for blogging. In case you missed it, in version 2.3.7.5 we improved our support for Windows Live Writer so that you can now edit CMS pages with Html content in addition to Blog posts. I thought it would be pretty cool if there is an iPad application that offers similar functionality as Windows Live Writer.

So I tried a few iPad applications including the WordPress app, BlogPress, and Blogsy. I found Blogsy to be the most feature rich user friendly one of the group. All of these apps support Wordpress and some of them support a few additional blogging platforms and since mojoPortal is much less known than the big blogging platforms I would not expect the developers of those apps to be interested in working on specific support for mojoPortal. So instead I decided to try to support more of the Wordpress API in mojoPortal so that these apps could be used with mojoPortal just as if they were using  Wordpress. I used all 3 of these apps in testing to make sure I was correctly implementing the Wordpress methods, but Blogsy is by far the best one that I could recommend to mojoPortal users who would like to blog from their iPad.

In Blogsy you configure mojoPortal the same as if it were a self hosted Wordpress site. So you enter the url to your Blog page (use https if you have SSL installed) and your login credentials.

Now Wordpress of course is a PHP application (not a .NET app) and the Url for the API is yoursiteroot/xmlrpc.php (you don't enter this url in Blogsy but that is the url it will use to talk to mojoPortal) so we have a handler mapping in our Web.config file that maps requests for xmlrpc.php to our metaweblogapi.ashx handler. This probably only works in IIS 7.x and it may not work if you have PHP installed and configured for your site, but it does work for me.  I don’t have PHP installed so not sure what would happen if it is, but in most hosting control panels you can disable PHP for your site even if it is installed on the server, so hopefully it will work for you.

<add name="WordpressXmlRpcHandler" verb="POST" path="*xmlrpc.php" type="mojoPortal.Web.BlogUI.metaweblogapi, mojoPortal.Features.UI" preCondition="integratedMode"/>

When I first began work on the additional API methods and testing with Blogsy I was getting a lot of crashes. Adding an image from the iPad photostream for example was causing a crash after it uploaded the image to the server. But I contacted the Blogsy guys and they both helped me with advice that the images needed to be named a certain way with a prefix, and they also fixed things in their app to make it more robust and reduce the crashing and now it is working pretty well. I have a first generation iPad and suspect these apps work even better with newer iPads that have more memory available, but it works well enough even on my older iPad.

You can create and edit posts, you can publish or post as draft. It supports inserting images from your Photostream, local storage, Fickr, Picasso, and even videos from YouTube. You can assign and edit categories. You can create and edit CMS pages with Html content in addition to Blog posts. The only missing feature is the ability to set the parent page of a CMS page so you can’t manage the site hierarchy the same as you can with Windows Live Writer, but who knows if enough people request it maybe they will add support for parent pages in a future update to Blogsy.

The additional support for the Wordpress API is included in mojoPortal 2.3.8.1 but I’m just now getting around to documenting it so that people know they can try it. If you have an iPad I hope you’ll give it a try. If you have any troubles with it or any feedback positive or negative let us know. In theory it should work with any Wordpress client. While Windows Live Writer is still the best Windows app for blogging, in the Mac world apps like MarsEdit should theoretically work though I haven’t actually tested it yet.

A quick shout of thanks out to the Blogsy guys for their help and support. I highly recommend you give their app a try if you have an iPad. Its very inexpensive ($5 if I recall correctly), I actually think they could get away with raising the price a bit because it is the best blogging tool currently available on iPad and they are very passionate about it and constantly improving it and listening to the feedback from their customers.

See also:

• Using Windows Live Writer with Your Blog
• Using Windows Live Writer to Create and Edit CMS Pages

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.7.6, available now on our download page.

The major highlight of this release are the new Audio Player and Video Player features contributed by our newest team member Kerry Doan.

Audio and Video Players

The New Audio and Video features based on jPlayer are also an exciting addition to the built-in feature set.

Huge thanks to Kerry Doan for his hard work on these features.

There are also several smaller improvements and bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release, and there is a change in behavior when using SSL. We no longer redirect out of SSL on pages marked as not requiring it for reasons discussed in the new document Use SSL.

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Thanks to Kerry Doan for implementing and contributing support for jPlayer in mojoPortal, the next release will include an Audio Player and a Video Player feature.

You can see it in action now on our demo site. We should be shipping another new release of mojoPortal that includes these features by the end of the month.

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