I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.6.5, available now on our download page.

This is not a major update but it does have some things to make it worth upgrading.

Editor Updates

Both CKeditor and TinyMCE put out new releases with bug fixes and updates, many of which are related to IE 9 and Firefox 4.
Upgrade to CKEditor 3.5.3
Upgrade to TinyMCE 3.4.2

There was an error happening under .NET 4 Medium Trust hosting related to our older FCKeditor. Nothing had changed in this editor for a long time so I'm surprised that we had never seen this error until recently. It makes me wonder if there was some behavior change that came with a recent Windows Update. In any case, the error is fixed in this release.

jQuery Updates

We had a bug report about our jQueryUI Date Picker where it was not formatting dates correctly for en-NZ. It turned out that support for en-NZ was only added to the jQueryUI Date Picker as of version 1.8.9, so the solution was to upgrade to a newer version. However, we had been holding off on upgrading jQueryUI because we knew there was an issue in the Time Picker extension that we were using where it did not work with newer versions of jQueryUI than 1.8.6. Fortunately, we found another Time Picker extension for the jQueryUI date picker and it seems to work with any version of jQueryUI.

So we updated to jQuery 1.5.2 and jQueryUI 1.8.11. Note that upgrading is really just changing 2 config settings since we load jQuery and jQueryUI from the google CDN. So if you are using any custom jQuery plugins and they don't work with the newer versions of jQuery or jQueryUI, you could override the version from user.config to keep using an older compatible version of jQuery or jQueryUI.

Support for Newsletter Throttling

It had been requested a while back to have a way to throttle the sending of the newsletter. Blasting out an email to a lot of users in a short time can make it look like spam to some receiving mail servers, especially if you are using a consumer email account or you don't have a well known reputable mail server. So it can be beneficial to limit the rate at which you send the email messages to your list. The mojoPortal newsletter subscriber list is getting pretty large and we had some trouble with our February newsletter due to sending the emails too fast. I got a few non-delivery notifications from @msn.com and others saying that we sent too many in a short period of time. So it was a priority to implement this before we sent the March newsletter. It really helped as we had no non-deliveries related to sending them too fast. 

There is a new setting that you can override in user.config:

<!-- you can throttle the sending of the newsletter 0 = unlimited/no throttling -->

<add key="NewsletterMaxToSendPerMinute" value="0" />

If you enter a number greater than zero it will sleep for one minute after each round of sending that many. So if you set it to 10, it will blast out 10 in a row and then sleep for a minute and the repeat until it sends to each subscriber in the list. I set it to 10 before sending the March mojoPortal newsletter. Of course the larger the list the longer it will take but you can calculate approximately how long it will take at any given rate and you can use a higher setting to send them faster if you need to. 

Miscellaneous

Support for custom regex and error message for email validation on the registration page, you can override our defaults with these settings:

 <add key="CustomEmailRegex" value=""/>

 <add key="CustomEmailRegexWarning" value=""/>

Support for more page settings when creating initial content from config files

Support for configuring the Thread UICulture separately from the Culture. The UICulture is only used for choosing the resource files, whereas the Culture is used for formatting numbers, currency, and dates.

This example uses German for the numbers and date formats and uses English for the resource files.

<add key="UseCultureOverride" value="true" />

<add key="site1culture" value="de-CH" />

<add key="site1uiculture" value="en-US" />

Fixed bug in the SQL CE data layer that prevented the Newsletter feature from working in our package for SQL CE.

Lots of updated translations thanks to our Translation Team

Other miscellaneous little tweaks and fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

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I'm happy to announce the initial release of Web Invoice Pro, available now in the mojoPortal Store.

Web Invoice Pro makes it easy to send invoices by email and let your customers pay the invoice online at your web site running on mojoPortal. It provides support for receiving payments via PayPal, Google Checkout, or Authorize.NET. A great way for freelance web designers and developers or any business to invoice their customers. You can test Web Invoice Pro on demo.mojoportal.com, so you can try it before you buy it, though of course you should only send test invoices to yourself from the demo site and the demo email messagess will have extra text in them to make it clear it came from a demo site.

Features at a Glance

• Attach a PDF Invoice generated from your accounting system and/or just type in the invoice information as part of the email message.
• Customers can pay the invoice online at your web site using Authorize.NET, PayPal, or Google Checkout.
• Customers do not need to be registered on your site to pay the invoice, but if they are then they can see their payment history in the user profile.
• Optional email notification when invoices are paid.
• Integrated with the mojoPortal Commerce Reports system so you get reporting and charts of your invoice revenue.
• Free upgrades to new versions of Web Invoice Pro for the life of the product! That's right, buy it once and any updates are free, we will never make you pay an upgrade fee for new versions of Web Invoice Pro!

Get Web Invoice Pro and get paid!

The initial release supports MS SQL or MySql, but I'm considering adding support for other databases if I get feedback requesting it. I've been using this feature myself for invoicing my customers and it meets my needs pretty well right now but I think there will be lots of possibilities to evolve this feature further, and those who purchase it may help shape its future based on their feedback.

If you need a way to invoice your customers and let them pay online I hope you'll give it a try. The sales of these add on products is what sustains and funds the continuous improvements of the mojoPortal project, so it is a good way to get additional features and to support the project.

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.6.1, available now on our download page. We will submit this release to the Web App Gallery next week after we've had a chance to get any feedback from our early adopters.

New Security Options

• It is now possible to require approval of new users before they can sign in, a setting in Site Settings enables it and you can specify email addresses to receive notification of new users that need approval, and a new button will appear on the member list page to find users not approved yet if you enable this. This is not a recommended configuration if you are doing eCommerce since it creates more barriers to completing a purchase if the user must wait for approval before he can sign in.
• It is now possible to require any user to change their password from a setting in user management.
• From Site Settings, you can now configure it to require a user to change their password after password recovery or reset.
• There is now a custom error message you can configure in site settings if you are using a regular expression to validate password rules, you can provide an error message that explains the rules.

We also made the MS SQL packages of mojoPortal pre-configured for Medium Trust by default since this is the most common installation issue that people encounter. If you are hosted in Full Trust you can use the Web.fulltrust.config file.

Easier Content Re-Use

There is a new way to mark re-usable content as global content, which makes it available for page editors to add existing content to their pages. Joe Davis of i7MEDIA has made a nice video tutorial showing how to use this new feature, see the Global Content Section on this page.

Blog Improvements

• Someone asked for the ability to not create a 301 redirect when a post is renamed and the URL changes. By default, we believe this behavior is what should happen to automatically help with SEO when a URL changes, but if you don't want that behavior you can turn it off by adding this to your user.config file: 
  <add key="Blog:Create301OnPostRename" value="false" />
• It is now possible to use Bing Maps in the blog instead of Google Maps.
• There have been settings in the blog for a while to allow showing the right and left column content from the main blog page also on the blog post pages. Recently someone asked to be able to show upper and lower content when using skins that have 5 content panes, so we added these Web.config settings that you could add to user.config:
  <add key="Blog:ShowTopContent" value="true" />
<add key="Blog:ShowBottomContent" value="true" />
• Improved Feedburner integration. When using Feedburner, we now redirect to the FeedBurner feed instead of direct linking so that you can keep users subscribed to your original blog feed and not lose subscribers if you later decide to stop using Feedburner. See updated documentation Using Feedburner with your Blog.

Miscellaneous Little Improvements

• There is a new setting in Page Settings that allows you to control if pages appear in the child pages site map separately from if they appear in the menu
• added config setting to allow using a custom registration page URL
• added config option to not re-suggest URLs when renaming existing pages
• made it possible to exclude HTML content instances from search index for landing pages that one doesn't want to come up in search, this is in the feature instance settings for Html Content
• when moving items in pagelayout.aspx keep the item selected
• make it possible to move pages to the top or bottom of their page tree node in PageTree.aspx
• revamp of PageLayout.aspx thanks to Joe Davis - it required additional CSS so skins were all updated as well, see notes in this sticky thread for new CSS you need in your skin
• CSS and markup improvements in WebStore - thanks to Joe Davis
• when using excerpts in the feed manager make it possible to open the link in a new window
• added an instance setting in Image Gallery to control the background color used when resizing images
• update to a strong name signed version of NeatUpload so it can be installed in the GAC to make it work in Medium Trust hosting
• upgrade to CKEditor 3.5
• refactor system content templates and add new 2 column over 1 template from Jamie Eubanks
• make it possible to specify a different site map data source id for SiteMenu control
• when not combining CSS make URLs relative
• updated Italian resources from Diego Mora
• updated Persian resources from Asad Samarian
• updated German resources from Jan Aengenvoort

Bug Fixes

• restore possibility to edit HTML content instances that are loaded by modulewrapper
• make IE specific CSS and favicon respect page specific skins
• fix a bug in blog RSS when using folder based child sites it was incorrectly resolving URLs
• fix bug where the smiley base path was not resolving correctly if running in a virtual directory instead of root
• fix a bug in pgsql data layer for survey
• fix a bug in pgsql data layer for content catalog paging
• fix bug in sqlce data layer when adding features to child sites
• fix a bug in timepicker - thanks, David Dean
• fix an issue where export to CSV or word was not working correctly in IE 8 when SSL is enabled
• fix a bug in webstore - add abstract to offer edit page
• fix a bug in the forum where external images were handled differently on edit page than thread page
• fix bug - don't show host name tab in site settings until after new site is created

As always, it is a good idea to backup your site and database before upgrading.

Corresponding Update For Form Wizard Pro

Users who have purchased  Form Wizard Pro should upgrade at the same time to the new version of Form Wizard Pro 0.0.2.3, released today for compatibility with mojoPortal 2.3.6.1. This was needed because we updated to a new version of NeatUpload and Form Wizard Pro must use the same version of NeatUpload as mojoPortal or it will result in errors.

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I'm happy to announce that the first release of In Site Analytics Pro is now on sale in the mojoPortal Store, starting at $99 for a single installation license.

In Site Analytics Pro provides reporting and charts from Google Analytics in your mojoPortal site and for supported databases also provides long term storage of analytics data. Google only promises to keep analytics data for up to 2 years, in practice it seems they keep it for about 3.5 years, so harvesting the data allows you to keep historic data that would otherwise be lost over time. While In Site Analytics Pro is ideal for tracking the traffic of your mojoPortal site because it integrates with mojoPortal and allows you to have traffic reports integrated in your site, it can be used to track any one of your Google Analytics Profiles, it does not have to track a mojoPortal site, but it does need to be installed in a mojoPortal site. you could for example setup a mojoPortal site with In Site Analytics Pro and use it to track the traffic of one of your other non-mojoPortal sites. While this would not provide reports integrated into your non-mojoPortal site, you would still get the benefit of long term data storage.

The charts and reports can work directly from the Google Analytics Data API or from the database. Only MS SQL 2005/2008/SqlAzure and MySql are supported for data capture, but installations of mojoPortal using other database platforms can still use the charts and reports directly from the API. It is also possible and preferable to use a separate database for the analytics data instead of keeping it in the same database as the site. It can be a large amount of data over time, much larger than the actual site data. You could also use any database platform for the site but still use MS SQL or MySql for In Site Analytics, it just requires you to manually run the database script(s) and change one configuration setting, see the System Requirements/Installation tab for more details.

The main charts and reporting plugs into the Administration menu and is protected by roles, but there are also 2 features that plug into the mojoPortal content system to allow you to publish a traffic chart and/or visitor map on public pages of your site as I have done on our Community page.

Below are some screen shots of the main features, you can also try it out live on demo.mojoportal.com, just login as admin@admin.com with the password admin, then click the Administration Link, the click Site Traffic Reports from the Administration menu.

Note that the map can be re-sized by dragging the bottom right corner.

Note that while In Site Analytics Pro does not use the main site skins, it is skinnable, and we include 2 skins and you can also create your own by copying and modifying one of the existing ones. You can set the skin from configuration settings. From the skin you can control the JQueryUI theme as well as colors of the charts and other style elements.

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Hello mojoPortal friends,

I've been working hard for the last few months to complete a new add on product for mojoPortal named In Site Analytics Pro. It is basically feature complete for what I envisioned for the first release and you can check it out on our demo site demo.mojoportal.com where you can login with the credentials admin@admin.com and the password is admin

I'm still doing a little work on the data management page, but that is a page I would lock down so you can't see it on the demo site anyway for security reasons. Once I complete that I still have to produce documentation for installation, configuration and use before I put it on sale in the mojoPortal store. For now I invite you to check it out on our demo site and let me know any feedback positive or negative.

The primary features are the ability to have traffic reports and charts from Google Analytics in your site and the ability to capture the data from Google Analytics into the database for long term storage. Google only promises keep the data for 2 years, in practice it seems they keep it about 3.5 years, so harvesting the data allows you to keep historic data that would otherwise be lost over time. 

The charts and reports can work directly from the Google Analytics Data API or from the database. Only MS SQL and MySql will be supported for data capture, but installations of mojoPortal using other database platforms can still use the charts and reports directly from the API. It is also possible and preferable to use a separate database for the analytics data instead of keeping it in the same db as the site. It can be a large amount of data over time, much larger than the actual site data. You could also use any db platform for the site but still use MS SQL or MySql for In Site Analytics, I will be producing documentation about how to do that.

The main charts and reporting plugs into the Administration menu and is protected by roles, but there are also 2 features that plug into the content system to allow you to publish a traffic chart and visitor map on public pages of your site as I have done on our Community page.

Below are some screen shots to give you an idea of the features, but it is best to check it out on our demo site.

note that the map can be re-sized by dragging the bottom right corner

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

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