Posts in Category: Features

IOS 5 Finally Supports WYSIWYG Editors

More and more people are accessing the web using smart phones and tablets and while much progress has been made to provide a good web experience for those devices, until now one major shortcoming has been the lack of support for use of web based WYSIWYG editors like CKeditor and TinyMCE. The problem has been that while the WYSIWYG editors would display ok, they did not trigger the keyboard input so they were not usable because clicking/touching them did not put the focus in the editor and did not bring up the keyboard. The best solution we could come up with was to force the use of a plain old textarea which would trigger the keyboard but required entering raw html making it more tedious to use and requiring knowledge of html from the user. We tried to make it a little better by using MarkitUp to at least provide a toolbar with some helpful html elements as shown below in this screen shot from an old iPhone 3.

iPhone 3 editor

HTML 5 actually defines a contentEditable attribute which is intended for use in making web pages editable but it wasn't supported in previous versions of IOS/Mobile Safari until now with the recent release of IOS 5. Fortunately for us the makers of the popular open source WYSIWYG editors have been working on this using the beta versions of IOS 5 so that now since the official release both of these editors can work in iPhones and iPads that have IOS 5. Shown below is a screen shot of TinyMCE used in iPhone 4S.

TinyMCE in iPhone

We've modified mojoPortal to take advantage of this and not force the plain textarea if we detect an IOS 5 device. This change is already in our source code repository and will be in the next release of mojoPortal. You can also try it out on our demo site using your IOS 5 device. For other devices we still use the textarea approach but I suspect that over time we will be able to enable the WYSIWYG editors for even more devices.

I'm very excited that this major limitation has been overcome in IOS 5 and especially for iPad which is a great web browsing experience and now is even better since you can actually edit your content easily. Huge kudos to the developers of TinyMCE and CKeditor for their great work in supporting mobile devices.

 

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Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

Form Wizard Pro 2.6.0.4 Released

I've just uploaded a new release of Form Wizard Pro version 2.6.0.4. Like the previous version this release requires mojoPortal 2.3.7.0 or higher.

As always it is a free upgrade for existing customers who have purchased Form Wizard Pro (sign into this site as the user who purchased, then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page then "Order History").

Form Wizard Pro

For those who don't know, Form Wizard Pro makes it very easy for you to create custom forms and simple surveys on your site with drag and drop arrangement of the questions. It can be used for a variety of things such as custom contact forms, quote requests, job applications (it supports file uploads), simple surveys (multi page forms), etc. You can browse the submissions as a grid or page through them one at a time and you can export to Excel or Word. You can also import and export questions or even complete form definitions. Give it a try on our demo site.

What's New in This Release?

  • New setting to enable question aliases. Question aliases allow you to use a shorter question name in the grid views and data exports. This can be very helpful since long question text can be unwieldy as a column heading in a grid.
  • New setting to enable option aliases for list type questions (checkboxes, radio buttons, drop down list question types). Similar to question aliases, you may want to display a longer value to the user but use a shorter value as the actual result. For example you may show a list of stores and display the street address which is more understandable for the user who is submitting the form, but internally you may want to use store numbers as the actual submitted result.
  • A way to visually group questions. We added a new setting for "Flatten Pages as Groups", if chedcked then what would normally be a multi page form will have all the questions on a single page, but the questions will be grouped into divs with a CSS class="qgroup qgroup1" where the numeric part of the second class is based on the page number. This way you have a class that can be used to style groups consistently or style specific groups differently.
  • It is now possible to override the text on the "Submit" button.
  • Vertical layout instead of grid layout when exporting to Word.

The sales of our add-on products is what makes the continued development of mojoPortal possible. Why not make your site even better and support our work?

 

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Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

Going Mobile with mojoPortal

I'm very excited to announce that mojoPortal can now be optimized very well for major smart phones like iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

Actually I have 3 related things to announce.

  • mojoPortal 2.3.6.7 is now available on our download page.
  • We have a new product available now, named Mobile Kit Pro (requires mojoPortal 2.3.6.7), that includes a custom menu we implemented just for smart phones and a skin optimized for smart phones.
  • Updated versions of Form Wizard Pro and Event Calendar Pro with compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.7 and Mobile Kit Pro.

mojoPortal.com shown in Mobile Kit Pro mojoportal.com showing the menu in Mobile Kit Pro

See the Mobile Kit Pro product page for full details. You can also check out this site or our demo site using an iPhone, Android phone, or Windows Phone 7. My goal with Mobile Kit Pro is that you could just drop it in and set it as the mobile skin, and it would just work with most of your existing site content. In those few cases where you may have some content that doesn't work well even with Mobile Kit Pro applied, the new features in mojoPortal make it possible for you to make custom mobile specific versions of some content if you needed to or just leave some content out of the mobile experience. Of course this is the first release of Mobile Kit Pro and there will be free upgrades for future versions, so those who purchase it can provide feedback and impact the future of the product.

What's New in mojoPortal 2.3.6.7?

A lot of the work to make Mobile Kit Pro possible went into mojoPortal itself. We went through most of the features and in cases where the markup didn't lend itself well to the small screen size, we implemented alternate markup and made it possible to configure the use of the alternate markup from the theme.skin file. We also made a lot of different things about the rendering configurable from the theme.skin file, in some cases it is possible to override specific feature instance settings from the theme.skin. Even things like posting in the Forums from your smart phone should be a reasonably good experience.

Support for mobile specific skins, there is a new drop down list in Site Settings where you can specify the Mobile Skin for the site.

Simple but configurable mobile user agent detection is used to apply the mobile skin, see the Mobile Kit Pro product page for details.

Any page and any content instance in mojoPortal can be marked as for WebOnly, MobileOnly or the default All so that you have the ability to make mobile specific versions of your content if needed or leave out specific content from the mobile view if it doesn't work well on small screens. You will see a new dropdown list for this in Page Settings and on the General Tab in Feature Settings.

Some work has been done to combine javascripts as much as possible for better performance.

  • Added support for the Google Plus Button in the Blog
  • Upgrade to CKeditor 3.6.1
  • Upgrade to TinyMCE 3.4.3.2
  • Updated the CDN versions of jQuery and jQueryUI to the latest versions.
  • Updated translations, thanks to all of our translators!
  • A few bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

I think this is probably one of the most exciting announcements I've made since the beginning of the mojoPortal project, at least I'm very excited about it. It is very in keeping with our slogan "Advanced Web Sites Made Easy". Now mojoPortal can be a framework for developing custom mobile web applications as well.

Updates for Form Wizard Pro and Event Calendar Pro

As mentioned above we also did some work in Form Wizard Pro and event Calendar Pro so that they could also be optimized for mobile. These updates also require mojoPortal 2.3.6.7. They are free upgrades for existing customers, just sign in to the site as the user who purchased the product(s), and then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page, and then click "Order History".

 

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Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

Small Updates for our Add On Products

Event Calendar Pro 3.4

Compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.6.
Added support for using Bing Maps as an alternate to Google Maps.

Event Calendar Pro

Form Wizard Pro 2.6.0.1

Compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.6.
Fixed bug in email notification where if more than one email address was configured for notification it failed to send the email. This bug was introduced in version 2.6.

Form Wizard Pro

Web Invoice Pro 1.7.0.1

Compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.6.
Added the ability to mark an invoice as paid in case payment came in through a different channel than online.
Fixed a bug where the payment due date was always 30 days after the invoice date even if you specified a different due date.

Web Invoice Pro

These are free upgrades for existing customers. If you previously purchased any of these products you can sign into this site (using the account that you used to purchase) and click the "My Account" link at the top and then "Order History". From there you can always download the latest version of the products you purchased.

Note that all of these updates require mojoPortal 2.3.6.6, so make sure you upgrade mojoPortal before updating or installing these add on products.

 

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Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

Form Wizard Pro 2.6 Released

I'm happy to announce the release of Form Wizard Pro 2.6, available now in the mojoPortal Store.

form wizard pro

This is a significant upgrade with major new features. For existing customers who have already purchased Form Wizard Pro, it is a free upgrade. You can always get the latest version of purchased products by signing in to the site using the account that you used to purchase, then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page and then click "Order History", from there you can download the latest version of any add on products you have purchased.

Form Wizard Pro is the most popular add on product for mojoPortal CMS (requires mojoPortal 2.3.6.4 or higher) and a great addition to any site. With Form Wizard Pro you can easily create custom forms and surveys on your site and this release adds a number of the most requested new features including:

  • Support for File Uploads, you can configure it to allow up to 4 files to be uploaded as part of the form submission. You can even have the files included as attachments in the notification email.
  • A new plugin system that allows developers to implement custom Form Submission Handlers to do additional custom processing on the submitted data.
  • Support for per question custom CSS classes to make it even easier to style your forms.
  • A new setting that allows you to leave the details out of the notification email in case sensitive data is being submitted that you would rather not include in email.
  • A new setting that allows leaving out unanswered questions when including the form details in the notification. This can be helpful in saving paper if you are printing the email notifications and have long forms with lots of optional questions.

You can also try Form Wizard Pro on our demo site to see how easy it really is. If you are getting a lot of value out of the free mojoPortal features why not purchase Form Wizard Pro for your site, it will make your site even better and the sales revenue supports the ongoing development of mojoPortal.

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Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.