New Multi Sites Feature landed in svn

I mentioned in this previous post that I'm working on a new variation of the Multi Sites hosting feature. This work is being sponsored as open source development by one of my customers. I'm not sure if I can mention who the customer is so for now I will leave them nameless.

For a long time it has been possible to host multiple sites using a single installation of mojoPortal with the secondary sites defined by different host names. The new feature provides an option to define the secondary sites by the first folder after the host name like http://somehostname/somefoldername.

The initial implementation of this has landed in svn/branches2.x for anyone interested in trying it out or providing testing. I'm sure there are still a few bugs here and there and am working to test all the features and fix any outstanding issues before making an official release.

I've also updated the documentation here:
http://www.mojoportal.com/muliplesites.aspx
and here:
http://www.mojoportal.com/multiplesitesbasedonfoldernames.aspx
with information about using this feature.

mojoPortal mentioned at Mix07 Open Source Panel Discussion

I got an email the other day from Stephen Jazdzewski, a mojoPortal user running his site on Mono

He attended the Mix07 conference and mentioned mojoPortal in the QA session at the end of the Panel Discussion: Open Source Applications Using the .NET Platform.

The presentation is now online here. You can hear mojoPortal mentioned at about the 50:09 time reference.

Thanks a lot Stephen!, its great to get a little exposure at such an important event.

A few interesting things landed in svn

Some interesting changes have been committed to svn branches/2.x

One big change is that I have created dedicated physical pages for the admin features (SiteSettings, Role Manager, Content Manager, etc) which until now have just been modules that plug into the content sysem the same as the content modules. Now there is an Admin Menu page with links to all the admin features, and they no longer appear in the main menu. I did this for a number of reasons.

I'm planning to make it configurable which features are "installed" but the admin features should always be there. In the previous model because the admin features just exist on pages in the content system, it is possible to remove the admin features from the site using the content management features with no way to get them back easily without doing it directly in the db.  So separating the admin features into physical pages outside the content system seemed the way to go. This change also helps with multi site installations using one web and db because when new sites are created we don't need to create admin pages in the content system in the new site either.

There are now 2 new skins named treeview1 and treeview2 which are really coopies of the existing jwv1 and jwh1 skins but modified to use the TreeView control for the menu. One of the cool things about the TreeView is its ability to load nodes on demand from the SiteMap. In large sites with lots of pages and deep hierarchies this can be a performance benefit.

When using the normal Menu all the navigation links for the entire site are rendered as markup into the page, typically showing only the top level and using mouse over to reveal deeper nodes. If you view the source you see the Menu rendered as ul and li elements in the markup and every link is there for the whole navigation tree which can be a lot of markup in a large site. The more markup there is the bigger the page size and the slower the perfomance. Since the menu is on pretty much every page its part of the payload of most requests.

The TreeView control also renders as ul and li elements but with PopulateOnDemand it will not render the markup for invisible nodes. When you click a node it will expand and add just the nodes requested. You can see this when you view the source of the page. If you want to check it out, the treeview1 skin has the TreeView for the menu and the treeview2 skin has a regular horizontal menu for the main menu and a TreeView for sub pages beneath the top level. To see for yourself, create some deep hierarchies of pages and view the source of the page as you drill down from the top.

I also shortened the 3 column names on the mp_Users table and 2 column names on the mp_Sites table. Recently there has been some renewed activity by the Firebird data layer team. Firebird doesn't allow columns longer than 31 characters so this was a barrier in implementing the 2.x mojoPortal data layer. By renaming the columns this barrier is now removed so hopefully work will proceed for the Firebird data layer. Thanks to Gareth for all his hard work implementing Firebird for 1.x mojoPortal!

Some have noticed that the SQLite data layer for 2.x mojoPortal was broken a few versions ago and has not been shipped with the last few versions. Joseph Hill, who initially implemented the SQLite data layer has agreed to look into, so hopefully that data layer will come back to life sometime soon.

The National Recycling Coalition Goes Live With mojoPortal

The National Recycling Coalition (NRC) recently revamped their web site using mojoPortal.

The project was managed by DDB Seattle, which is part of DDB Worldwide Communications Group.

I helped with the project as a consultant, providing some help with skinning and custom feature development.

"The NRC represents every sector of the waste reduction field including local recycling coordinators, corporate environmental managers, state and federal regulators, environmental educators and advocates, and waste management professionals. NRC's objective is to eliminate waste and promote sustainable economies through advancing sound management practices for raw materials in North America."

Its very exciting to know that mojoPortal can play a small part in such an important cause as Recycling. It was also a pleasure working with the good folks at DDB Seattle, I hope to have an opportunity to collaborate with them on other projects in the future. They are true professionals.

mojoPortal 2.2.1.8 Released

I just released mojoPortal 2.2.1.8 and 1.0.6

No major new features but an important security fix for NeatUpload is included in both releases.

The 2.x release also has:

the new version of FCKeditor

a new feature to prevent friendly urls from masking real urls while still allowing virtual pages to link to physical pages if desired

a number of bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release

As always be sure and back up both your site and your db before upgrading, and post in the forums if you have any trouble and I will try to help.