Things are shaping up on the VS 2005/ASP.NET 2.0 branch of mojoPortal. I am shooting for a release of that branch this weekend to ring in the new year.

It seems to be working very well on Windows and on mono with a few tweaks. There is really not much holding us back from just going forward with the vs 2005/ASP.NET 2.0 version.

So now I'm trying to figure out at what point we fully transition to 2.0 and how long we keep making releases for the 1.1 framework.

Most Windows developers I know already have VS 2005 and of course those of us who have it would rather work with the new version than the old version. But I get a lot of downloads of the release files so I'm not sure its only developers I need to consider. I would love to hear feedback on that question if you have a point of view.

This decision I think will have to factor into my versioning scheme. If we are going to support 2 release branches for a while I might bump the version for the vs 2005 branch of mojoPortal to 2.0 to distinguish it clearly from the 1.x branch but if we are just going to drop development on the vs 2003/1.1 framework version I'd be more likely to version the next release 1.x and from thence forward its not for ASP.NET 1.1/vs 2003 but for vs 2005. Obviously the second choice requires less effort than maintaining 2 branches, but will anyone be left behind? Speak up if you will be negativley impacted by a quick transition to 2.0

Release 1.0 is now available on the download page.

I've also put up a new tutorial on my personal site about configuring multiple sites running on a single ip address using apache Virtual Hosts with mod_mono on Suse 10.

In the article I walk through the apache setup for 2 mojoportal instances with different host names. Then I create a 3rd site using the multiple sites feature in the second physical instance of mojoportal so that it has 2 sites using the same web folder and database but the content and users are completely independent.

Its been a couple of months since we had a release but I think things are coming into place for a new release to happen within the next week or so.

Highlights of the coming release will be

• Support for LDAP authentication thanks to code contributed by TJ Fontaine
• Option to use a User ID for login instead of email
• New Forum Notification Subscription features and ability to delete threads and forums contributed by Dean Brettle
• A new module that lets you include html fragments from external files in a page
• The DatePicker and SmartCombo controls have been split into a separate assembly mojoPortal.Web.Controls.dll so they can be used easily in other projects
• Features for the Admin to update user names and delete users or flag users as deleted
• Various bug fixes

I'm thinking of a new versioning scheme, the previous versions were in the date format 20050912 which makes it easy to tell if you have the newest version but gives no idea how mature the project is. I think since we have passed the 1 year of development mark it is good to be able to know that from the version so the next version will be 1.2005xxxx to indicate the date of release and the number of years since the first release. Each year this will increment.

I'd like to thank Jasmin Savard for the new graphic depicting mojoPortal as boxed software.

I've posted a few things of interest lately on my personal site. Here is some information on the difference between VS 2003 and VS 2005 Web Projects and here is a new tutorial for installing Suse 10. It is the first in a series, the next one will show how to build mono from source code and the one after that will show how to install mojoPortal and configure Virtual Hosts in apache for using mod_mono.

A new release is now available on the download page.
Highlights of this release are:

• better CSS organisation and 2 great looking new skins by Jasmin Savard
• improvements to forum administration and menu system by Dean Brettle
• improvements for blog category management
• Dutch Culture file by Jan Hussaarts
• a number of bug fixes

We are planning a new release this weekend to include

• All the new skinning work and CSS organization by Jasmin Savard, including 2 great looking new skins.
• Improvements to the menu to make it more crawler friendly and right clickable by Dean Brettle
• A new Admin feature for the forums allowing you to move a thread to a different forum and/or rename a thread topic, also thanks to Dean Brettle
• Miscellaneous bug fixes since the last release