Posts in Category: Community

mojoPortal 2.3.4.5 Released

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.4.5, available now from our download page.

What's New

  • New Bing Map Feature
  • New alternate site search features allow you to use Bing or Google for site search in addition to or instead of the internal Lucene search engine
  • Upgraded to the latest version of AjaxControlToolkit
  • Upgraded from TinyMCE .3.6 to 3.3.7
  • Upgraded from CKeditor 3.3 to 3.3.1
  • Added a required checkbox if a registration agreement is used
  • Updated Italian resources from Diego Mora
  • Fixed a bug introduced in version 2.3.4.4 where if you were using excerpts in the blog, the read more link was malformed
  • Fixed a bug introduced in version 2.3.4.4 where the FeedManager page size setting was ignored
  • Fixed some more places where we had not implemented the new TimeZone system and the old hard coded offsets were still being used
  • Fixed a bug where the google 404 enhancement gives a script error in IE, it is now disabled in IE
  • Fixed a bug in the pgsql data layer for the blog that caused an error on viewing blog categories
  • Other minor enhancements and fixes for things reported or requested in the forums since the last release

Bing Map Screen shot

There were also a few additions to CSS in included skins that you will need to add to custom skins, see this sticky thread for details.

Upgrades for Add On Products

Because of the upgrade to the latest version of AjaxControlToolkit, there are also corresponding compatibility updates for Event Calendar Pro and Form Wizard Pro because they must use the same version of AjaxControlToolkit as mojoPortal. Existing customers can download the updates from their purchase history. We have officially changed our upgrade policy, originally the policy was free upgrades for 1 year after purchasing our add on products, but now our policy is free upgrades for the life of the product and this is retro active to all existing customers. If you've never purchased our add on products now is a good time to consider adding them to your site, visit the store to learn more about our add on products for mojoPortal

Online User Group Meeting

Don't forget to sign up for our free online user group meeting coming up this Wednesday June 23, 2010 8 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Yamisee.

mojoportal user group ad

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

TRIAD Communications - Our Newest Consulting Partner

Just a quick post to welcome our newest consulting partner, TRIAD Comunications. TRIAD has already deployed 16 sites using mojoPortal and all of them are very nicely done.

akroncantonfoodbank.org soprema.us icanschools.org valmarksecurities.com supportourlibrary.com stpaulsakron.org streamlinemd.com prcmedical.com

generationscvnp.org stateroute8.info ohiofamilyrealty.com communityaidsnetwork.org hastingswaterworks.com ptaengineering.com canticlecommunications.com dunholt.com

My favorite is the site for Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I've been watching the Ken Burns DVD box set about the National Parks with my Dad over the last few weeks, so I was very pleased to see a National Park web site using mojoPortal.

I look forward to seeing more mojoPortal sites from TRIAD.

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

Anyone Still Using SQL 2000 with mojoPortal?

Hello mojoPortal community,

I would like to gather your feedback about something I am contemplating. Not long ago I implemented a new data layer for Sql Azure. I could have just made changes in the MS SQL data layer to make it compatible. The biggest change would be that ntext fields must be changed to nvarchar(max). There are a few other changes needed to support Sql Azure but that is the main issue as we are currently using ntext all over the place. The problem is that nvarchar(max) was introduced in SQL 2005, so doing this would be explicitly dropping support for SQL 2000 in mojoPortal. Doing this would be very beneficial to me because I could consolidate into 1 data layer that supports SQL 2005, 2008, and Azure and this would reduce maintenance by eliminating the need for an extra data layer for Sql Azure. 

So, what I'm trying to guage is how many of you are using SQL 2000?

It is 10 year old technology after all and at some point it seems like we should be able to drop support for it. If I were to drop support for it sometime soon how many of you would be chasing me with pitch forks?

Thanks,

Joe

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

Thanks to All Who Attended My First Yamisee Class

Huge Thanks to everyone who attended my first mojoPortal Developer Training Class on Yamisee last night! And extra special thanks to David Dean and Yamisee for making it possible!

mojoPortal Class on Yamisee

The class was yesterday evening at 6PM EST. I was going to blog about the event before hand, but the available seats sold out quickly and I was reluctant to blog about it once no-one else could sign up. We purposely limited the virtual room to 25 seats for this first session because it was a test also for the Yamisee service which is brand new and still in its early stages.

About Yamisee

Yamisee.com, as you may notice runs on mojoPortal. David Dean, the master mind behind Yamisee has developed a number of custom features on top of mojoPortal to support the Yamisee service. What Yamisee offers is an easy way to schedule, manage, and conduct online classes and meetings.  One of the ideas behind Yamisee is that for various interest groups there may not always be enough interested people who live close enough together to hold classes or meetings in a specific local market, but there may be substantial numbers of interested people who are geographically dispersed. So Yamisee is striving to provide virtual class room and meeting environments and a service to allow these interest groups to self organize online classes or meetings. While the class I provided last night was free, Yamisee has full ecommerce integration so that knowledge experts can potentially charge for their online courses or classes. So all of the management and ecommerce functionality is built on mojoPortal while the actual virtual rooms are provisioned behind the scenes through various providers and partners of Yamisee. Our meeting for example used a virtual room provided through WebEx. I think the Yamisee service has a lot of potential and encourage others to give it try for classes, courses, or group meetings.

About Our First Yamisee Class

My goal for last night's session was to step by step show how developers can setup their own projects for custom development to keep their custom code separate from mojoPortal code while still working with the mojoPortal source code from our subversion code repository. It was unscripted and unrehearsed because I didn't want to gloss over any stumbling blocks that developers may commonly encounter, I wanted to encounter some and show how to overcome them. I did actually stumble a little more than planned due to making typos and being a little nervous about my first class and not really knowing what to expect. But I think these little stumbles and recoveries were actually helpful. I really wasn't sure how far I would get since it was not rehearsed, the class ended up going over time by about 30 minutes and I still would have liked to have got further along. Time flew for me, it was fun.

Of the 25 seats reserved a few people did not show up and a few others were on standby in case some did not show, we ended up with 20 people in the room and most of them stayed for the whole session, only 2 people left before the end and that was probably my fault since I did go over time by 30 minutes.  It has been quite a while since I have done any live presentations and this was my first one ever in an online virtual room. I was able to share my desktop and a video and audio stream. Looking back at the session I can think of lots of things I could have done better. As I got going on my talk I had the chat window and other windows on my other monitor but I had arranged them too far to the right and as result I wasn't noticing the chat window very much and I never noticed if anyone raised their hand. I apologize if anyone did raise their hand because I forgot about monitoring for that once I got going. Just a matter of getting more familiar and comfortable with the virtual room tools.

We did manage to cover setting up custom projects for web UI, Business, and Data layers, as well as how to configure custom projects to use the installation and upgrade system in mojoPortal. I also demonstrated some code generation using Codesmith to speed up development. At the end, the developers who attended were also interested in getting a .zip of the source code created during the session, so here is a link: abc_projects.zip. It was also asked if the session would be available to download as a video. I'm not sure about that, I'll have to check with David if he recorded it, but my guess is not since it would have been an hour and half long it would have been a very large file. It is possible to record so maybe we will do it next time, but I'm not sure where we can host very large video files for download.

Shall We Do It Again?

Those of you who attended, please share any feedback about what we did wrong or what we did right or whether you are interested in attending another class. If we do another session should I just continue where I left off or would you rather have a more ad hoc question and answer session? How soon should we schedule the next one? What do you think of the idea of having a virtual user group meeting on a regular monthly basis on Yamisee? Would anyone else be interested in presenting a topic about something cool you've done with mojoPortal or skinning/design techniques? Also don't forget that Yamisee is interested in your feedback about the Yamisee service as well, both positive and negative, especially any ideas you may have to improve the experience. Please post any feedback or suggestions in the comments.

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

mojoPortal Wins 3rd Place in 2009 CMS Awards

I'm very gratified to announce that mojoPortal has won 3rd place in the 2009 CMS Awards by Packt Publishing, in the Non-PHP category. It is particularly exciting that mojoPortal was the only .NET based CMS to place this year, nudging out DotNetNuke in the Best Other category.

CMS Award 2009

Plone, a Python based CMS retained their crown from last year, and dotCMS, a java based CMS took second place.

In 2007, the first year of the contest, mojoPortal actually won this category over the more established Plone, but we were the only .NET CMS among the contenders that year. In 2008 there were several other .NET projects in the mix and though we were a finalist in the Best Other category, DotNetNuke took 3rd place both in the Best Other and Best Overall Category. This year, after the nomination phase, DotNetNuke was a finalist again in both the Best Overall and Best Other categories and mojoPortal only made the finalists in the Best Other Category, so it seemed like they had already placed ahead of us again this year, but in the end we prevailed against the odds. 

It is a very competitive field and all the contending projects certainly deserve respect. While some have criticized the contest as being merely a popularity contest, I can't really say it seems that way to me. While mojoPortal's popularity is growing rapidly, we are still much less known than many of the projects in the competition. Certainly we were an underdog and no-where near as popular as Plone in 2007 when we won first place in the non-PHP category, and DotNetNuke clearly has a much larger user base, better brand recognition, and more marketing muscle backed by venture capital. So obviously there is more than vote counting going on. It would be nice if the judges post their individual analysis, at least one has already posted some notes about his impressions of the contenders and I know some of the other judges are planning to do the same.

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