Release 20050912

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

New Release This Weekend

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

Major Skinning changes landing in svn today

Update: I've commited the changes to svn and still testing and tweaking but as you can see I've updated this site with one of Jasmin's new skins.

I'll be committing major changes to svn today that affect the skinning system of mojoportal.  This will require a little re-work for those of you who already have your own custom skins. I have already done this re-work for all the included skins so if you are using one of those you don't have to do anything.

Jasmin Savard contributed a complete re-organization of the stylesheet classes that is much better than what we had before and allows for much more intricate styling, he also contributed 2 very nice skins that show what is possible with this new style organization.

I have changed the way skins are stored in the file system to make it easier to work with skins and create new ones. Now all skins will have their own folder and the name of the folder will be the skin name you see in the SiteSettings dropdown for skins. Inside this folder will be the skin file which must be named layout.ascx and the stylesheet which must be named style.css. Any supporting images can also be put in this folder.

To convert your existing custom skin just create a folder as mentioned above and put your files in it with the appropriate names. You will also need to re-visit the stylesheet and compare the classes in the new built in skins with the ones in your stylesheet and update your stylesheet with the new classes.

I will hopefully deploy the new model to this site later today after some additional testing and after I commit these changes to svn.

On another note, those of you using the latest release of mojoPortal on Windows should be aware of a bug in NeatUpload that was found to corrupt some file uploads. This does not affect users who are running on mono, only on Windows. The bug has been fixed in NeatUpload and will be included in the next release coming soon. In the meantime you can either comment out the upload module in your Web.config file or go get the updated NeatUpload code, compile and replace the Brettle.Web.NeatUpload.dll file in your bin folder beneath the web site root.

Release 20050829

A new release of mojoPortal is now available on the download page.

New this release is the inclusion of NeatUpload by Dean Brettle. NeatUpload, licensed under the LGPL, is an ASP.NET HttpModule for handling file uploads gracefully with a progress bar. It works on Windows with IIS or on Linux/Mac OS X with mono using XSP web server or using mod_mono with apache web server. Pretty sweet! Dean developed this specifically for mojoPortal but I'm sure it will be used in countless ASP.NET projects once the word gets out about it.  I really can't imagine an ASP.NET developer that won't want to use it. Previously, mojoPortal shipped with SlickUpload which was disabled by default because it only works on Windows. A similar commercial control ABCUpload I've used before also does not, as far as I know, work under mono. Great work Dean!
Here's a screenshot of the progress bar in action:


you can even stop the upload midstream by clicking the icon.

Also new  is the final release of version 2.0 of FCKEditor, previously we were using RC1.

Thanks to Tom Opgenorth for adding a small enhancement to the Links Module to enable specifying the target. He is currently working on adding categories to the Links module allowing you to organize links in a TreeView by category. That will be a cool option. After that project Tom is planning on implementing a new image gallery using nGallery.

mojoPortal now includes, in addition to US English, culture files for Italian, Portuguese, and Czech.  If anyone transaltes to additional languages, please send me the translated files.