Posts in Category: Releases

Event Calendar Pro 0.0.2.7 Released

I'm happy to announce the release of Event Calendar Pro 0.0.2.7. This is a free upgrade for existing customers, though you should first upgrade to mojoPortal 2.3.4.3. It "probably" works with mojoPortal 2.3.3.9 or higher but has only been tested with mojoPortal 2.3.4.3. Customers who already purchased Event Calendar Pro can download the new version by signing into the site and then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page, and then click the Order History tab.

Whats New?

  • Better support for time zones with automatic adjustment for Daylight Savings when creating future events.
  • It is now possible to accept will pay later ticket orders without configuring any ecommerce provider.
  • There is a new setting to allow ticket purchases/registration without having to register or sign into the site.
  • There is a new recurrence option for Bi-weekly (every 14 days) events.
  • When making recurring events that require registration, it is now possible to use the same begin date for ticket sales/registration for all recurrences.
  • Fixed a bug in the RSS feed where the urls for events were not correct if the site was hosted in a virtual directory sub folder.

Important: Since we removed the previous time zone offset setting and added a new Time Zone setting, after upgrading you should immediately go to the settings for any existing instances of the Event Calendar and set the time zone.

Event Calendar Pro Screen shot

 

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

follow us on twitter become a fan on facebook

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

mojoPortal 2.3.4.3 Released

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.4.3, available now on our download page. This is primarily a minor bug fix release for issues reported in the forums since the last release, but also introduces alternate Web.config files that allow hosting mojoPortal in ASP.NET 4.0.

Hosting in ASP.NET 4.0 and the Plan for Transitioning to 4.0

Although the current release of mojoPortal is compiled for the 3.5 SP1 .NET framework, it is compatible for hosting under .NET 4.0, but requires different Web.config settings. So basically we have 4 different Web.config files

  • Web.config is configured for .NET 3.5 full trust hosting
  • Web.mediumtrust.config is meant for .NET 3.5 medium trust hosting
  • Web.net4.config is for .NET 4 full trust hosting
  • Web.net4.mediumtrust.config is for .NET 4 medium trust hosting

Whichever file you use needs to be named Web.config, so for example to run in .NET 4 medium trust you should rename the Web.config to Web.net35.config and then rename the Web.net4.mediumtrust.config to Web.config

demo.mojoportal.com has been running under .NET 4 for several days now and seems to be working well. My recommendation would be for new installations to use .NET 4 hosting to be future proof. I might hold off a bit before migrating existing installations to .NET 4 but it is time to start thinking about migrating to .NET 4 at some point in the not too distant future.

UPDATE 2010-05-15 Several people have reported problems trying to get mojoPortal working in shared hosting under .NET 4. Therefore I recommend stay with 3.5 hosting until we put out a package compiled for .NET 4.

For developers

In the source code packages and in our svn source code repository, we currently have alternate project and solution files for Visual Studio 2008, but the main projects and solutions have already been converted to Visual Studio 2010. I recommend that everyone begin using Visual Studio 2010 as soon as possible. I will not be keeping the VS 2008 compatible files for long because it is more work to do so. You can also use the free Visual Web Developer Express 2010, so there should be no barrier to moving forward. After eliminating the VS 2008 project and solution files, I will then setup alternate project and solution files for .NET 3.5 and then the main projects and solution can be changed to target .NET 4. Once I do this, we will have to maintain separate release packages for 3.5 and 4.0 .NET and we will have to use conditional compilation to wrap any use of .NET 4 specific features so that we can continue to produce builds for 3.5 .NET. We went through a similar process with the transition from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 back in 2005. it will be more difficult for a while having to manage supporting both 3.5 and 4.0 .NET while beginning to use some of the 4.0 features. We will probably do this for about 1 year and then we will drop the effort to support 3.5 framework. Hopefully this will give most users enough time to migrate to 4.0 .NET hosting.

Miscellaneous

  • Implemented option to allow users to choose which editor they prefer if enabled from site settings
  • Added setting to allow hiding the search box in forums per community request
  • made it possible to use a custom configuration file for the Vertigo Silverlight slideshow used in the Image Gallery and Flickr module, to be documented
  • upgrade from NeatUpload 1.3.22 to 1.3.24
  • updated Italian Translation from Diego Mora
  • added some Codesmith templates for VB.NET in source code package
  • some more refinements of TimeZone handling
  • previously we had added this to the layout.master file of skins to pre-zoom the screen for iPhone: 
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=670, initial-scale=0.45, minimum-scale=0.45"/>
    this has been removed from existing skins and I recommend you remove it from your layout.master if it is there after upgrading. The reason is that it also affects iPad, but we really don't want to pre-zoom the screen in iPad since the screen is much larger, so now we add this meta element from code only when the request is from iPhone, therefore it does not need to be in the layout.master file
  • fixed an issue where the wrong cart could be used if there were more than 1 WebStore in a site
  • other miscellaneous bug fixes for things reported in the forums

I'm still working on the series of developer training videos and you can expect to see more of them in May

 

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

follow us on twitter become a fan on facebook

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

mojoPortal 2.3.4.2 Released

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.4.2, available now on our download page. This is primarily a bug fix release, but also, this release marks the move to Visual Studio 2010.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug that prevented changing the password format.
  • Reverted from TinyMCE 3.3.2 back to version 3.2.7 due to some bugs in the paste as text and paste from word in the newer version.
  • Reverted from jQuery 1.4.2 back to 1.4.1 due to a minor bug where a script error would happen in IE if the javascript debugger was enabled such as when working in Visual Studio
  • other miscellaneous bug fixes

Miscellaneous

This release will probably be the last one to support MS SQL 2000. Users running on SQL 2000 should plan to upgrade to SQL 2005/2008 soon or use the free Express version of SQL 2008. This will enable us to make the main MS SQL data layer also work for SqlAzure so that we don't have to maintain a separate version just for Sql Azure. The main changes that will be made going forward involve changing from ntext to nvarchar(max) and a few syntax changes in some procedures. ntext is now considered a deprecated data type, it is not supported in Sql Azure. SQL 2000 on the other hand does not support nvarchar(max), thus to move forward we need to be willing to drop support for SQL 2000.

Upgrade from CKeditor 3.2 to 3.2.1

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0

Yesterday, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, bringing us to a transition point similar to when we changed from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005, and then to Visual Studio 2008. For developers like me who spend their day in Visual Studio, it is always exciting to get the new version. Microsoft really delivers great developer tools and there are always a lot of great improvements in new versions of Visual Studio.

With a project such as mojoPortal that is widely deployed we cannot expect everyone to upgrade their servers or hosting immediately to ASP.NET 4. Therefore we will continue targeting .NET 3.5 SP1 for possibly up to a year to give time for ASP.NET 4.0 hosting to become widely available and to allow time for people to plan migrating or upgrading their hosting environments to ASP.NET 4. However, on the developer side we can immediately begin using Visual Studio 2010. Of course, just as in previous Visual Studio upgrades the project and solution files get upgraded and then can no longer be opened in the older version.

Visual Studio Project upgrade wizard screen shot

Things are a lot better this time than in previous upgrades because there is a free version of Visual Web Developer Express, that can be used with mojoPortal, so there is nothing holding anyone back from working with the latest mojoPortal using the latest tools. I have created temporary project and solution files that can still be used in Visual Studio 2008. These are named with -vs2008.sln and can still be opened in VS 2008. However I don't plan to keep them around for more than a month or so at most because it is more work maintaining these solutions and projects. So I recommend get yourself the latest version of Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express as soon as you can. It is time to bid a fond farewell to our old friend Visual Studio 2008, it is now officially a legacy tool. Back when Visual Studio 2008 was first released, we had to maintain projects and solutions for Visual Studio 2005 much longer because the free version of Visual Web Developer Express 2008 did not support class library projects until SP1, so we really had no free option available to work with mojoPortal and had to wait for most people to upgrade to VS 2008.

Today is my first day working in Visual Studio 2010, having not tried the betas or release candidate. It definitely feels more modern and smooth than VS 2008. Haven't spent enough time with it yet but so far it seems really nice, I love the ability to peel off a screen and move it to a different monitor!

 

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

follow us on twitter become a fan on facebook

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

mojoPortal 2.3.4.1 Released

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.4.1, available now on our download page.

What's New?

New Time Zone System

Yes, a little late since we just did the whole spring forward thing and moved our clocks forward, but better late than never. I guess the best way to explain the new Time Zone System is to contrast it to the old one. Previously, we had a setting in Web.config for the site default preferred offset from GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and we had also an offset as a property of the user profile. So for example previously I had my offset set to -5 Eastern Time, because I live in the Eastern US Time Zone and the offset for Eastern US vs GMT is -5 hours. The problem with the old system is that what I just said is only true for part of the year. We just moved into Daylight Savings Time and during this part of the year Eastern US is only GTM -4 not GMT -5. So, with the old system we would have to change these offsets twice a year (possibly more in some time zones). In .NET 3.5, a new TimeZoneInfo class was introduced and this made it possible to keep track of user time zones by a Time Zone Id and then we could create a TimeZoneInfo object and it would be able to give us the correct GMT offset for any time of the year. The Time Zone setting looks much the same as it did before in the user profile page but under the hood it works much nicer. Also, we have a new Site Setting for setting the site time zone so it does not have to be a global setting in Web.config.

After you upgrade you should go to Site Settings and set your preferred Time Zone.

Forum Improvements

It is now possible after a thread or post has been created to edit it and make it a sticky thread or post which moves the sort of the thread or post to the top. It is also possible to lock threads so that no-one can reply to them except the editors. Only users with edit permissions on the page or forums instance can make sticky or locked threads.

We also added a new setting in case you want to link the user's Gravatar to the user profile page instead of to the Gravatar site. The only downside is that users may not discover about Gravatar and therefore less users may sign up for Gravatar and use it on your site.

We also changed the hard coded <img elements for folders in the forums to use CSS to set the images in order to make it possible to skin it more creatively. However, because of this change you will need to make some changes to your existing skins.

Skin Changes

Add these to your style.config file:

<file cssvpath="/ClientScript/greybox/gb_styles.css" imagebasevpath="/ClientScript/greybox/">none</file>
<file cssvpath="/Data/style/forums/style.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/forums/">none</file>

Add this to your style.css:

ol.formlist { list-style:none; margin: 0px; }
li.settingrow { list-style:none; }
div.sitemap .AspNet-TreeView-Collapse
{background: url('collapse.gif') 0 0 no-repeat; width: 15px; margin-right: 5px;
  float:left; cursor: pointer; line-height: 15px;}
.AspNet-TreeView-Hide { display:none;}
div.sitemap a.AspNet-TreeView-Expand, div.sitemap a.AspNet-TreeView-Collapse { text-decoration: none; }

you may also want to look at skin notes for previous upgrades in this new sticky thread about skin changes.

There is a new feature setting for most features to allow you to add a custom CSS class name to the wrapper div for feature instances. This allows you to easily style a specific instance of a feature differently than others.

All the YUI tabs have bee replaced with jQueryUI tabs. There are a lot more themes for jQuery UI Tabs than for YUI and this reduces the number of javascipt and CSS files needed. Basically we are standardizing on jQuery UI.

WebStore Improvements

Added paging to the product list. Also added a confirmation email as soon as an order is received, in addition to the one we already had that is sent when the payment has cleared. Sometimes it takes a while for payment processing to complete at PayPal or Google and in those few cases where it takes more than a few minutes, the user might worry whether the order worked or not. So now we send an email right away to let the user know it is being processed, and then when payment clears we send the final confirmation email.

Miscellaneous

  • Update from NeatUpload 1.3.21 to 1.3.22
  • Update from TinyMCE 3.2.7 to 3.3.2
  • Update from CKeditor 3.1 to 3.2
  • Update to jQueryUI from 1.7.2 to 1.8.0
  • Updated Italian resources thanks to Diego Mora
  • Updated Russian resources thanks to Ермоленко А.С. (aka Alexander or SkySandy in the forums)
  • Updated Croatian resources thanks to Slaven Brumec
  • Updated Swedish resources thanks to Bert-Ola Persson
  • fixed localization bug in RPX widget
  • fixed date issues with some feeds in Feed Manager

Also I'm sure the community joins me in congratulating our friend Joe Davis of i7MEDIA on the birth of his daughter Ruthie!

 

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

follow us on twitter become a fan on facebook

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

Form Wizard Pro 0.0.1.5 Released

I'm happy to announce the first major upgrade for my Form Wizard Pro product

New Features:

  • Support for multi page forms aka surveys
  • You can import and export complete form definitions
  • You can import and export individual questions, so if you make a state list dropdown you don't have to type it again, just export it and then you can import it in a different form to re-use it.
  • Support for additional instruction blocks arranged by drag and drop among the questions
  • Support for regular expression validation
  • and more

This release is a free upgrade for existing customers who bought Form Wizard Pro previously and starts at $99 for new customers. 

Note: This new release requires mojoPortal 2.3.3.6 which was just released a few days ago.

See how easy it is to create custom forms and surveys using mojoPortal and Form Wizard Pro

 

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

follow us on twitter become a fan on facebook

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