I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.6.5! Its been 2 months since our last release and a lot of good progress has been made.

What's New?

Upgrade to the newest version of MySql Connector
Upgrade to FCKeditor 2.6.2
Upgrade to the latest version of NeatHtml
Usability Improvements for google map enabled features and improvements to the search architecture as mentioned in this previous blog post.
A number of bug fixes as reported in the forums since the last release.
WebStore Improvements - the web store now supports selling download products using Authorize.NET, PaPal, and Google Checkout
A new plugin system for handling PageCreated events so developers can write their own handlers that execute after a page is created - not yet documented
A new plugin system for handling UserCreated events so developers can write their own handlers that execute after a nw user is created - not yet documented.

As always, be sure and backup your database and site before upgrading, and if you run into any problems post in the forums and we will try to help.

The Semi Grand Opening of the mojoPortal Store

I call it semi grand because no real products are available yet, all you can do in the store is buy me a beer at the moment. I expect to have my first product, Event Calendar Pro available by the end of July. You can see what I have so far for the Event Calendar Pro feature on the demo site http://demo.mojoportal.com/events. I decided to go ahead and open the store now because I thought it might interest others who want to use the mojoPortal WebStore to sell download products. The WebStore feature is very rudimentary now but it will be getting more love as I improve it to meet my own ecommerce needs. I will try to update some documentation on the WebStore soon. The one tip I will mention is you configure "Products" then you configure "Offers". Products are not sold directly, but by Offers. An Offer can have 1 or more products and price is set at the Offer level, not at the product level. The Product Catalog is very bare bones, we don't have categories yet so its really only good for a short list of products.

I've also opened up a store on CafePress to sell mojoPortal merchandise: http://www.cafepress.com/mojoportal.

A great way to support mojoPortal, each item purchased contributes $5 to the project.

I'll announce the real Grand Opening of the mojoPortal Store as soon as our first product is available.

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.8, its available now on the download page.

New This Release

Friendly urls for the blog as mentioned in my previous post.

The Folder Image Gallery now works in Medium Trust

Bug fixes for SQLite and pgsql and other various minor bugs as reported in the forums since the last release.

As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading, and report any problems in the Forums.

I'm very excited to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.4

Its available now on the download page.

The main focus of this release is making mojoPortal more attractive, with the addition of 21 good looking new skins for a total of 34 skins now included with mojoPortal. There were also a few minor bug fixes for things reported in the Forums since the last release.

Those of you upgrading should do a full upgrade, don't try to just upload the new skins as there were code changes needed to support some of these new designs. You should upload all the new files and restore your customizations to Web.config or user.config.

My goals in producing all these skins was to make mojoPortal more popular and also to prove just how skinnable mojoPortal is. You can have a site fully populated with content and dramatically change the look of it with one click by changing the skin. This shows that we really have achieved good separation of presentation from content in mojoPortal. Those of you following this blog have surely seen the screen shots over the last 20 days as I implemented these new skins. 21 skins in 20 days is not bad if I do say so myself. It says a lot about the quality of the rendered markup produced by mojoPortal that one can go and find nice standards based designs and create mojoPortal skins from them relatively easy at least if you have an understanding of html and css. All these included skins can be used as a starting point for further customization to make your own custom skins as well.

I'd like to extend a huge thanks to the great designers who have made their work available. All the new skins in this release are the work of only 7 designers, Andreas Viklund, FreeCssTemplates, Graformix, Denise Mitchinson, snop, styleshout, and arcsin.

As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading and if you have any trouble let us know in the forums.

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.3.

This is a relatively minor upgrade. There are a few bug fixes for little things reported in the forums.

Upgrade to FCKeditor 2.6

Upgrade to ExtJs 2.0.2

The package for Mono has been tested and works on Mono 1.9

As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading and post in the forums if you have any trouble.

I've also created some new documentation to help with installation and upgrades.

Web.config Guide describes how to make upgrading easier by using a user.config file in conjunction with Web.config

Uploading Files to a Hosted Server gives a few tips for uploading files to your server.

Getting the most from your blog with Odiogo and Feedburner.

There is still time to help pick designs for new mojoPortal skins. I will be starting on the new skins after I get back from the MySql Conference and will probably blog again about some of the suggestions next week during the conference.

If you're going to the MySql Conference I hope to see you there. I'll be in Santa Clara all week. My first ever trip to Silicon Valley.

We've got a booth in the DotOrg Pavillion, so come by and see us. I'm also co-presenting with Joseph Hill of Novell for the session "Cross Platform .NET Development with Mono and MySQL". Its very exciting for me because support for Mono and MySql were my very first goals and milestones for mojoPortal when I began the project. The other interesting thing is that mojoPortal has projects and solutions for MonoDevelop in addition to those for Visual Studio, so its one of the few .NET projects with developers collaborating across Windows and *nix platforms.

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.2.

New this release:

AddThis.com button added to blog and to skins to make it easy for others to bookmark and share your site pages using popular bookmarking services. See my previous post for more info.

Contact Form Improvements

The contact form now persists messages to the database so messages are not lost if smtp is not configured. A cool new UI for reviewing messages has been added. It uses ExtJs Window for which I implemented a new .NET WebControl.

The window and the panes are re-sizable by dragging. I also added a Web.config option that should help users who have been reporting problems with contact form messages not being encoded correctly for Russian and other languages.

<!-- leave this blank for ascii encoding -->
<add key="SmtpPreferredEncoding" value="" />
<!-- example for Russian encoding
<add key="SmtpPreferredEncoding" value="koi8-r" />
-->

New Skin - extjsViewport1

I also implemented a new skin based on the ExtJs complex layout example, its named extjsViewport1.

I'm really just scratching the surface so far, I think it will be possible to have feature instances collapse accordian style and the possiblity to drag and drop feature instances to re-arrange content on the page. So far just some foundation work is done, but it is usable.

As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading and if you have any troubles post in the forums and I will try to help.