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.

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

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 Ð•Ñ€Ð¼Ð¾Ð»ÐµÐ½ÐºÐ¾ 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

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

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.3.6, available now on our download page.

This release fixes a few bugs reported in our forums since the last release, adds a few minor improvements to some features and lots of minor fit and finish improvements based on feedback from our community.

In the previous release I added a hideable toolbar for administration links in most of the included skins, this release I took a queue from Joe Davis and added icons to the toolbar. Also based on community feedback, I made it remember your preference for open/closed across pages. Previously if you closed it and went to a different page it would open again on the new page, now it remembers your preference.

Contact Form - added a setting for BCC email, added a setting in case you don't want to store messages in the database, added a setting allowing you to use the email address entered by the user as the from address in the form notification.

Shared Files - added a setting for the Default Sort, when shared files are returned as search results in the search page, the download link now opens a new window.

Upgrade to NeatUpload 1.3.21

Updated Translations

• Italian - thanks Diego Mora
• Greek - thanks Yioryos Moschovakis
• Russian - thanks Alexander (aka SkySandy)
• Turkish - thanks to Cenk Kumas
• Swedish - thanks to Par Rohlin
• Spanish - thanks to Matias Molleja

Your Opinion Requested

I am currently using CKeditor as my main editor and it is also now the default for new installations of mojoPortal. The only thing I like better about TinyMCE at the moment is the spell checker which works much nicer than the one in CKeditor or FCKeditor. Since CKeditor is the successor to FCKeditor and no new development is being done on FCKeditor, I'm considering not including FCKeditor in mojoPortal going forward to reduce our footprint on disk a little as each editor is a lot of javascript. We could reduce 3 or 4 MB of disk footprint leaving it out. I could still make it available as a separate download for anyone who wants to continue using it. So, if you have a strong opinion about whether we should or should not continue to package FCKeditor with mojoPortal, please post in the comments.

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.3.4, available now on our download page.

This is a major release packed with lots of improvements that I think you will like. 

New File Manager UI

We have a new File Manager based on QtFile. I could never have made anything pretty like that myself, if you see anything pretty in mojoPortal you can be fairly sure someone besides me deserves the credit for the prettiness. I'm very good at making things work and integrating things others have made pretty. Now the old File Manager is not gone, you can actually toggle between them. The new one in addition to being prettier than the old one also has a way to easily move files whereas the old one does not. I kept the old one because it has a couple of advantages of it's own that the new one does not have. For example, it has bulk file uploading, may be better able to handle large file uploads because it uses NeatUpload, and it can still be used with javascript completely disabled. In both our File Managers, where and whether the user can upload and delete files depends on their role permissions.

If you have a custom skin and are upgrading, you will need to add this to your style.config to bring in the css for the new file manager.

<file cssvpath="/Data/style/qtfile/default.css" imagebasevpath="/Data/style/qtfile/">none</file>

We also recently had some requests for an administration link so that users with permissions to upload and delete files could easily get to the file manager. Previously non admin users could only upload images for example by using the editor in a content instance. With the addition of this new link for File Manager in addition to our other administration links it seemed that the number of links we are showing was beginning to clutter the screen a bit, so I implemented this pretty toolbar in most of the included skins to contain the administration links, you can hide it with a click of the down arrows.

Now, as you can see it is kind of pretty so obviously someone else deserves credit for that. To explain the why and how this toolbar was integrated into the included skins, how you can use it if you want to in your custom skin, and to learn where it came from and who really deserves the credit see "Creating an Admin Toolbar".

Shared Files Improvements

• Now counts downloads of files
• If you rebuild your search index, files found in search results be be a download link instead of a link to the page containing the Shared Files instance.
• New description field. This field gets indexed in the search index, since we do not currently have support for indexing actual file contents for things like PDF files or Word docs, you can paste the full text of the document into the description and then get search results with files that have matching content. In this case you would keep the description column hidden since it would probably be ugly to show the full file contents as text in the page.
• New options for showing and hiding columns in the file grid

Blog Improvements

• Added paging to the blog list view by popular demand
• Added a dedicated Is Draft indicator so drafts can be created either by checking this or settings future publish date.
• Added a Save/Preview button so you can preview drafts as they will appear when published.
• New setting allowing you to specify the date/time format string for blog posts

Feed Manager Improvements

• Added a Calendar View, this goes well with our Event Calendar Pro feature which can expose Events as RSS. Now you could show a mini calendar on your home page for example that shows upcoming events and links to the event details in Event Calendar Pro.
• New setting allowing you to specify the date/time format string

Simple List/Links

What we previously called the Links Feature is now renamed to Simple List/Links. This was one of the first features in mojoPortal and in fact was a feature in the old IBuySpy Portal that mojoPortal was originally based on. It had not changed much over the years, we added a description which could be shown optionally with the link and this could be indexed into the search index, but other than that it was just a way to make a list of links, something one could easily do also in the plain old Html Content feature, so the Links feature was just an easier way to make a list of links. I've been using it for our mojo Sites list, but as the number of sites in the list is growing it seemed like a good idea to add paging, so I did that as you can see on the mojo Sites page. Once I had that done I got to thinking about our Consulting Partners List which was just using a plain Html Content feature and was beginning to get unwieldy to update.  I thought of the Links feature with it's new paging support and how handy it would be to have that same paging functionality on the consulting list but without the links since we link to the partner sites from the description. So I added a setting allowing you to show "Description Only" in the Links feature and then decided it needed to be renamed to Simple List/Links or others won't notice they can use it this way. I'm also thinking about using it to make a Skin Gallery where we can show the link to the zip file and have screen shots in the description, again paging is what makes this manageable as the list grows. So it is a nice little feature now to make a list of blocks of html content or links or both. You can move things around in the list based on their sort rank.

De-Coupled Settings For Open ID and RPX

This is important for you to notice, if you are using the RPX service and are upgrading you probably have "Enable OpenID" checked in Site Settings because previously it was required to have this checked to use RPX but then the normal Open ID login would not be shown if RPX was enabled. You may want to uncheck that now because if it is checked it will also show the normal Open ID sign in in addition to the RPX one. Previously it was not possible to show both but it seemed they should be de-coupled because they are completely separate implementations and nothing should stop you from using both if you wanted to. RPX is enabled simply by the presence of an RPX Now API key. Remove the key to disable it.

Moved the Url Location for CssHandler.ashx

We have always held the opinion that the /Data folder in mojoPortal (or writable folders in any ASP.NET application) should not require execute permissions because that is where users can upload files and it is just best security practice to not let the web process have both write and execute permissions on the same folder. You should not be able to upload dll files to the /bin folder from web code for example, it should require a more privileged ftp user for best security. A few versions back when we implemented the CssHandler to combine and minify the CSS files, we made the url for the handler be /theskinsfolder/csshandler.ashx because this made it easy to determine which files belonged to the skin. Note that there is no physical file named csshandler.ashx anywhere on disk but since the skin folder is one of the writable folders below /Data and we were making the url appear as if it was actually located there, setting the folder permissions to deny execute caused the csshandler to fail. So now we have changed the virtual url for the csshandler to be just in the root of the site so that the /Data folder and all it's child folders including skins can be marked as not executable without breaking the css handler.

Miscellaneous

• Added more noticeable links in the Forums to encourage users to subscribe to email notification
• New User Selector Dialog in Role Manager
• Updated Italian Resource files thanks to Diego Mora
• Updated Swedish Resources thanks to Par Rohlin
• Update Russian Resources thanks to SkySandy
• Updated French Resurces thanks to Thomas

One More Thing - A Query Tool For Developers

For this release I implemented a Query Tool that can be used to query the database on any of our supported database platforms. See the new documentation, you can even save queries and use them in quick and dirty custom features.

Thanks to all who provided feedback in the forums and especially thanks to those who are helping others in our forums.

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook