I’m happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.7.5, available now on our download page.

This is a significant release with lots of new goodness.

Improvements to Windows Live Writer support. A completely new implementation of metaweblog api with new support for Creating and Editing CMS pages in addition to Blog posts.

Support for Windows Azure AppFabric cache and new guidance for hosting mojoPortal on Windows Azure.

New option to close a site so that it can only be browsed by Administrators and Content Administrators.

New button in Add/Edit Pages (aka PageTree.aspx) to resort child pages of the selected page alphabetically.

Use of WYSIWYG editors CKeditor and TinyMCE is now possible in IOS 5 devices.

Upgraded to TinyMCE 3.4.7

AllowPersistentLogin setting has been promoted from a Web.config setting to a site setting.

Default roles for new root level pages has been promoted from a web,.config setting to site settings.

If you were using the Web.config settings for the 2 items above you will need to go into site settings and specify the settings there since the web.config settings are no longer used.

New permission for Roles That Are Allowed To Set Page Level Skins (when page level skins are enabled).

New feature to reset a guid parameter used in the URL for the csshandler, by resetting the guid you can force all users to re-load the CSS for the skin.

In permission settings, Administrators and Content Administrators roles are filtered out of role lists for permissions where they don't need to be added because they have intrinsic permission as special system roles.

File Dialog used in the editors now shows meaningful messages when a user's file system quotas prevent upload

Updated to jQuery 1.7.1 and jQueryUI 1.8.16 when using the Google

CDN

WebStore Improvements

There is a new provider model for OrderCompletedEventHandlers that allows developers to plugin custom code that will be executed after payment clears on an order.

It is now possible to checkout in webstore with a zero

balance

ForumImprovements

New setting to copy the posting user on the notifications.
New setting to suppress email notifications when a user edits an existing post.
New setting to limit the timespan in which a user may edit his post.

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.7.0, available now on our download page.

Since the last release, the focus of our work has been on improved web farm support. We've completed abstraction layers for the file system and for caching, and we've implemented a log4net appender that can log to the database. We are still working on various providers that can plug into the new abstraction layers and other improvements, so our work on web farm support will continue into October. We've almost completed our support and guidance documentation for Windows Azure, we have some of the web farm documentation online now, but we will be completing that work and making an announcement about it soon. After that we will turn our efforts to more traditional types of web farms using the Amazon EC2 cloud, and the Microsoft Web Farm Framework.

So, for now much of the web farm improvements are just architectural changes that won't be things users will notice. Other highlights of this release include:

• Implemented an option to log errors and informational logging to the database instead of the file system
• Upgraded to TinyMCE 3.4.5
• Upgraded to CKeditor 3.6.2
• Upgraded to the latest AjaxControlToolkit
• Updated to latest version of Recaptcha library
• Updated the google maps to use the new v3 API, thanks to Jamie Eubanks for his work on this
• Added Whois ip address lookup dialog in most places where ip addresses are displayed

Updated Add On Products

The update to AjaxControlToolkit required us to also make new releases of Event Calendar Pro, Form Wizard Pro, and Web Invoice Pro, because these features use the AjaxControlToolkit and they need to use the same version of the AjaxControlToolit as mojoPortal. So you'll need to upgrade these products at the same time as you upgrade mojoPortal. 

Event Calendar Pro 3.4.0.2 includes new links to allow users to easily add events to Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Windows Live Calendar, and Outlook/iCalendar. We also added a new text area that can be shown during event registration to capture additional information from users who register or purchase tickets for events. You can provide instructions that will be shown above the text area to let your users know what additional information is needed. As mentioned above this version was also updated to use the latest version of AjaxControlToolkit to keep it compatible with the latest version of mojoPortal.

Form Wizard Pro 2.6.0.3 includes a minor improvement to allow file uploads to be configured as optional instead of required. It also was updated to use the latest AjaxControlToolkit for compatibility with mojoPortal 2.3.7.0.

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.6.6, available now on our download page.

I know it might seem unusual to make a new release on a Sunday on a holiday weekend, but it just worked out that the new release was ready today and since it has some updates that community members have been waiting for I thought I should make it available as soon as possible.

What's New?

• Added a new prompt in edit screens to prevent accidently leaving the page if there are unsaved changes in the editor. I know I have experienced occasions myself where I was working on a long blog post or article, and by some strange combination of keystrokes it canceled out of the editor and jumped back a page and lost my work. The new prompt will prevent that.
• Made it possible to browse and preview skins from page settings and/or user profile when per page skins or per user skins are enabled.
• Users in roles that can manage skins can also have access to user specific skins even if it is not enabled for users in general. This makes it possible to work on skin changes or new skins more easily before assigning the skin to the site in general.
• Added support for the new google analytics feature that allows Tracking Page Load time, this is now enabled by default. Once you start capturing this data it is available in a new Site Speed report in the new version of Google Analytics.
• Our homemade tweet this link stopped working recently after some changes at twitter, so we updated to the official widget. This works much nicer now because twitter now has their own URL shortening service to automatically shorten URLs when using their widget.
• Upgrade to CKEditor 3.6
• Added unit sales to some commerce reports.
• Miscellaneous minor bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.
• Updated translations thanks to our awesome translation team!

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I'm happy to announce the release of Form Wizard Pro 2.6, available now in the mojoPortal Store.

This is a significant upgrade with major new features. For existing customers who have already purchased Form Wizard Pro, it is a free upgrade. You can always get the latest version of purchased products by signing in to the site using the account that you used to purchase, then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page and then click "Order History", from there you can download the latest version of any add on products you have purchased.

Form Wizard Pro is the most popular add on product for mojoPortal CMS (requires mojoPortal 2.3.6.4 or higher) and a great addition to any site. With Form Wizard Pro you can easily create custom forms and surveys on your site and this release adds a number of the most requested new features including:

• Support for File Uploads, you can configure it to allow up to 4 files to be uploaded as part of the form submission. You can even have the files included as attachments in the notification email.
• A new plugin system that allows developers to implement custom Form Submission Handlers to do additional custom processing on the submitted data.
• Support for per question custom CSS classes to make it even easier to style your forms.
• A new setting that allows you to leave the details out of the notification email in case sensitive data is being submitted that you would rather not include in email.
• A new setting that allows leaving out unanswered questions when including the form details in the notification. This can be helpful in saving paper if you are printing the email notifications and have long forms with lots of optional questions.

You can also try Form Wizard Pro on our demo site to see how easy it really is. If you are getting a lot of value out of the free mojoPortal features why not purchase Form Wizard Pro for your site, it will make your site even better and the sales revenue supports the ongoing development of mojoPortal.

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.6.5, available now on our download page.

This is not a major update but it does have some things to make it worth upgrading.

Editor Updates

Both CKeditor and TinyMCE put out new releases with bug fixes and updates, many of which are related to IE 9 and Firefox 4.
Upgrade to CKEditor 3.5.3
Upgrade to TinyMCE 3.4.2

There was an error happening under .NET 4 Medium Trust hosting related to our older FCKeditor. Nothing had changed in this editor for a long time so I'm surprised that we had never seen this error until recently. It makes me wonder if there was some behavior change that came with a recent Windows Update. In any case, the error is fixed in this release.

jQuery Updates

We had a bug report about our jQueryUI Date Picker where it was not formatting dates correctly for en-NZ. It turned out that support for en-NZ was only added to the jQueryUI Date Picker as of version 1.8.9, so the solution was to upgrade to a newer version. However, we had been holding off on upgrading jQueryUI because we knew there was an issue in the Time Picker extension that we were using where it did not work with newer versions of jQueryUI than 1.8.6. Fortunately, we found another Time Picker extension for the jQueryUI date picker and it seems to work with any version of jQueryUI.

So we updated to jQuery 1.5.2 and jQueryUI 1.8.11. Note that upgrading is really just changing 2 config settings since we load jQuery and jQueryUI from the google CDN. So if you are using any custom jQuery plugins and they don't work with the newer versions of jQuery or jQueryUI, you could override the version from user.config to keep using an older compatible version of jQuery or jQueryUI.

Support for Newsletter Throttling

It had been requested a while back to have a way to throttle the sending of the newsletter. Blasting out an email to a lot of users in a short time can make it look like spam to some receiving mail servers, especially if you are using a consumer email account or you don't have a well known reputable mail server. So it can be beneficial to limit the rate at which you send the email messages to your list. The mojoPortal newsletter subscriber list is getting pretty large and we had some trouble with our February newsletter due to sending the emails too fast. I got a few non-delivery notifications from @msn.com and others saying that we sent too many in a short period of time. So it was a priority to implement this before we sent the March newsletter. It really helped as we had no non-deliveries related to sending them too fast. 

There is a new setting that you can override in user.config:

<!-- you can throttle the sending of the newsletter 0 = unlimited/no throttling -->

<add key="NewsletterMaxToSendPerMinute" value="0" />

If you enter a number greater than zero it will sleep for one minute after each round of sending that many. So if you set it to 10, it will blast out 10 in a row and then sleep for a minute and the repeat until it sends to each subscriber in the list. I set it to 10 before sending the March mojoPortal newsletter. Of course the larger the list the longer it will take but you can calculate approximately how long it will take at any given rate and you can use a higher setting to send them faster if you need to. 

Miscellaneous

Support for custom regex and error message for email validation on the registration page, you can override our defaults with these settings:

 <add key="CustomEmailRegex" value=""/>

 <add key="CustomEmailRegexWarning" value=""/>

Support for more page settings when creating initial content from config files

Support for configuring the Thread UICulture separately from the Culture. The UICulture is only used for choosing the resource files, whereas the Culture is used for formatting numbers, currency, and dates.

This example uses German for the numbers and date formats and uses English for the resource files.

<add key="UseCultureOverride" value="true" />

<add key="site1culture" value="de-CH" />

<add key="site1uiculture" value="en-US" />

Fixed bug in the SQL CE data layer that prevented the Newsletter feature from working in our package for SQL CE.

Lots of updated translations thanks to our Translation Team

Other miscellaneous little tweaks and fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

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