A few days ago mojoportal.com finally got accepted into the woopra beta program. If you haven't heard of woopra, you really should check it out. I've only been using it for a few days but I'm already addicted and I think anyone who has a web site that is important to them and particularly anyone with an e-commerce web site will find this tool to be awesome.

I'm using it in addition to google analytics. The big advantage it has over google analytics is the way they make it possible to see clearly how individual visitors are using your site in real time (or close enough to it). You can see a lot of information about each visitor, what country they are in, if they arrived at your site as the result of a search, you can see what they were searching on that led them to your site, you can see the sequence of pages the visitor has looked at. In short its just brilliant!

You add a little javascript to your site just like you do for google analytics, but you also install a desktop application (its a Java application) that gives you a rich user interface with a lot of different views. Its the live data that has me hooked.

I've always been addicted to keeping tabs on how many visitors are on my site at any given moment. I used to frequently check my community page, which gives a little chart showing how many people are online and who is logged into the site.

Woopra takes it to a whole new level for me, now I not only know how many people are on the site but also what they are looking for, have looked at, how they arrived. I have a secondary machine with a separate monitor and I pretty much keep the woopra running all day on that screen while I work. It gives me the feeling as if I were running a brick and mortar store. I can see the people walk in and look around and get a good idea of what they are looking for or interested in. In fact if I wanted to, woopra has a built in web chat feature (see the "start a conversation" links next to each user in the screen shot), so if someone is looking at a product page I could prompt them and ask if they have any questions, very much like a real store where people offer help. All of this is giving me better insights about how users interact with my site.

If you have an important web site you really ought to sign up for woopra, it may take a while before they accept your site as they are scaling up gradually but the sooner you get on the list the better.

I'm happy to announce the release of Event Calendar Pro 0.0.1.0 a premium event publishing system for mojoPortal. This is a significant upgrade and is free to existing customers who have already purchased Event Calendar Pro. Just sign into the site and visit our Store, click the "Order History" link to get to your order history and you will be able to download the new version using the same page where you originally downloaded. For new customers pricing starts at $99 for a single installation license. You can also try it on our demo site at demo.mojoportal.com. This release requires mojoPortal 2.2.8.3, so you should upgrade to the latest mojoPortal before installing or upgrading to the new version of Event Calendar Pro.

Whats New?

• Ability to take registrations or sell tickets to a course or class. If you create a recurring event, for example a weekly course that runs every Tuesday for 6 weeks, you can specify that the ticket/registration includes the recurrences.
• If you have customers that pay by check or other means in person, you can enable a "Will Pay Later" button so users can register for the event but pay upon arrival. You can optionally limit the roles allowed to use this feature so for example you could create a role named "Trusted Customers" and add your trusted customers to that role and then limit use of the "Will Pay Later" button to members of that role.
• You can color code events differently on the Month View using our new color picker.
• You can customize the text on the ticket purchase/register link per event, so instead of the default "Register for this event", you could put "Register for this class" or whatever you like.
• There is a new setting to specify the default Country and State for ticket orders/registration to make it more convenient if most of your customers are local.
• Ability to specify the end date for recurrences.
• Location Alias in case you want the location label to be different than the location you use to get the google map to work.
• Meta keywords and description per event.
• Google Map settings are now per event rather than global.
• Addition of a Summary field so you can have a more brief description of the event on the List View and Ticket Purchase/Registration page.
• This version now supports all 5 databases that mojoPortal supports, including MS SQL, MySql, PostgreSql, Firebird Sql, and SQLite

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.8.3, available now on the download page.

In addition to bug fixes for things reported in the Forums since the last release, highlights of this release are as follows:

• Upgrade to FCKeditor 2.6.4 which includes a new spelling checker that works out of the box, a long wished for feature.
• A new set of translation files for Danish language thanks to Kurt Greve
• Blog improvements, an option whether to hide the URL input for comments and an option to require users to authenticate in order to post comments.
• New sorting levels for products and offers in WebStore to allow better control over sorting on the product list.
• A new CountryStateSetting control. I needed this for an improvement to Event Calendar Pro in order to specify a default country and state for ticket orders, but I built it into the core so it can be re-used in other features.

Note that the spell checker uses a free ad supported web service. Its very useful but you probably would not want to use this if your web page contains top secret content. It can be disabled from a configuration file for that kind of scenario but I think most users will be glad to have this. It is also possible to purchase a paid account with no ads or a version that can run on your own server, though I'm not sure what the integration steps are for those scenarios.

Over the weekend, Jan 16-18 2009, Microsoft held a great event, "We are Microsoft Charity Chellenge Weekend" to help charities. The event paired teams of developers with charity organizations to produce web solutions to better meet the needs of the charity organizations. The challenge was that the time available to produce the solution was limited to the weekend, everything from gathering requirements to final delivery had to be completed in that time frame.

I was very honored when one of the teams chose to use mojoPortal.

Todd Stone, Tim Mitchell, Nathan Woodward, Jay Smith, Andrew Dalgleish

You can read the full details and see before an after screenshots in this blog post by Microsoft MVP Jay Smith "We Are Microsoft: Developers Rally Around Charities"

"After checking out Telerick’s SiteFinity and Telligent’s Graffiti CMS, both very powerful and capable Content Management Systems, we elected to go with mojoPortal."

These guys really did an impressive job accomplishing so much in a very limited time frame. I congratulate them and thank them for their good work for a good cause and for giving mojoPortal the oportunity to participate in this exciting event.

Big Congratulations to the Mono Team for shipping Mono 2.2!

We've seen growing interest in our support for running mojoPortal on Linux with Mono judging by the increasing forum posts related to it. We try to be very careful as we improve mojoPortal, not to break compatibility with Mono. My testing is usually using the latest Mono built from their svn repository but when a release of Mono comes out I try to also test with the release version since this is what most people are using. Things are progressing rapidly in the Mono project which allowed us not long ago to change our target to the 3.5 version of .NET so that we can begin to dabble in Silverlight, and RESTful web services. Enough of the 3.5 stuff is there in Mono that we can compile and things mostly work but with a few bugs here and there including some bugs in the 3.5 version of Mono's implementation of MS Ajax aka System.Web.Extensions.

Historically I've used my physical openSuse machine to run VMWare server and then I could run the  Mono release virtual machines from there, but after upgrading to openSuse 11.1 I couldn't get my VMWare server to open any virtual machines. So I installed the VMWare Player on my Vista machine this time to test.

The Mono 2.2 virtual machine already had mojoPortal 2.2.6.8 installed and it works well and I noticed the ajax stuff worked fine there but in testing mojoPortal 2.2.8.2-b the UpdatePanels were not being updated in the UI and were logging some errors so I figured if I change the references and use the 2.0 .NET version of Ajax aka System.Web.Extensions 1.0 (since thats what mojoPortal 2.2.6.8 uses) maybe I could get the latest mojoPortal working as well as 2.2.6.8 does. And sure enough, after making this change, the latest mojoPortal seems to work very well ajax and all.

So I've packaged up a new mojoPortal 2.2.8.2-c release to work smoothly with the latest Mono 2.2 release. You can even download the source zip and build it an run it using Mono 2.2, the only thing you'll need to do for that is to copy the contents of Web.mono.config into Web.config so it will have the correct references to System.Wen.Extensions 1.0. The mojoportal-2-2-8-2-c-pgsql-for-mono.zip file is pre-compiled and the web.config is already configured for Mono. You can swap out the data layer dlls if you want to use a different db.

I think this is a major milestone for the Mono Project. mojoPortal is a complex application, and the fact that it runs well on Mono 2.2 shows that the Mono 2.0 ASP.NET stack is pretty solid. The 3.5 stuff is coming along but your mileage may vary.

The Visual studio solution and the Windows release packages are still targeting .NET 3.5. Its very handy that we use a separate mojoportal.mds for MonoDevelop even though it could open the Visual Studio solution, it allows us to do things differently on Mono as needed.

In our svn repository, will be changing our MonoDevelop projects back to reference the 3.5 version of System.Web.Extensions so we can keep moving forward and report bugs so they can get fixed in the next version of Mono. So 2.2 Mono users who want to play with the source code should use the .zip download instead of svn, unless you are also working with Mono built from svn as I am.

Other minor changes in 2.2.8.2-c include a new color picker that I mentioned in my previous post and we upgraded from jquery 1.2.6 to 1.3.