I just commited the Blog calendar navigation feature to svn. I also added some new module settings to the upgrade script. One of the settings is whether to show or hide the calendar in the blog.

This will also be in the next release.

Coming next Category Navigation for the blog.

I just commited a new feature to svn, it will be in the next release.

It allows you to setup mappings between friendly urls and pages in the site.

For example
http://www.mojoportal.com/forums.aspx

maps to

http://www.mojoportal.com/Default.aspx?pageid=5

Try it and see

The feature works better under mono/apache than it does under IIS because of the way IIS uses file extensions to determine which isapi handler processes the request.

In IIS to use a friendly url like http://www.mojoportal.com/Forums, you have to actually create a Forums directory and put an empty text file in there named Default.aspx otherwise the request will not be handled by asp.net and you end up with a 404 error. You can use something like http://www.mojoportal.com/Forums.aspx as a friendly url in IIS without having to actually create a folder or file. Using apache/mod_mono this is not needed as long as mod_mono is set as the handler for the site directory.

Some uses of this feature include:

• Making it easy to migrate to mojoportal without breaking urls that google may have indexed from your old site.
• Creating friendly urls for print ads or other communications
• Giving users who have their own blog within your site a friendly url like http://www.yoursite.com/someblogger

For those of you who are working with the source code from svn, feel free to try it out. There is an upgrade script in the folder for each data layer to create the new table and add the Feature

A new release is now available on the download page. See my previous post for details about whats new in this release.

I'm very happy to report that mojoPortal is included on the new mono-live cd! This new bootable cd should make it easy for more people to take mono out for a test drive. It has the MonoDevelop IDE, mono documentation, tutorials, and a number of good applications that run on mono including mojoPortal.  There's also Beagle, the cool new desktop search tool, F-Spot an awesome photo management tool, and a neat little note taking app called TomBoy. Pretty sweet! I'm downloading my copy now.

Another cool thing to notice is that the www.mono-live.com web site is also running on mojoPortal!

I'm working on the new role and permission structure to facilitate a content workflow and approval process. See here for my plan on how it will work.

Also implementing some of the things I left hanging in previous releases. For example the Show Child Page menu feature. There was a page setting created for this in the last release but setting it didn't do any thing. This will be usefull for pages where you are using the page as a top level menu and the content is in sub menu pages like the  Documentation meu item in this site.  Right now that page has an Html module where I have manually created links to its child pages but with this new feature all I have to do is check the box in page settings for "Show Child Page Menu" and this menu is automatically created.

Also adding a "Show Child Page Breadcrumbs" setting at the page level to show a breadrumb style menu accross the top if the page has actual content but also has child pages.

Adding a feature to the blog so that you can exclude posts from the outbound feed if you want to.  I will use this in my blog at JoeAudette.com because it is aggregated on monologue and somehow I feel a little more cautious about what I put on there.  I might want to blog some drivel or go on a rant without it going onto monologue.

Adding settings to configure the width and height of the editor in the Blog and Html Content modules.

A skin preview feature and the option to let users choose a skin. This is another setting that exists in Site Settings "Allow Users to choose Skins" but doesn't currently do anything. I will make it so if you check this box in Site Settings the user profile page allows the user to choose a skin that will be used whenever they login to the site.

This will probably be a bit of a bumpy upgrade for existing sites with not only new columns being added but a few columns changing the data type from varchar 255 to text.  I will do my best to make good upgrade scripts for all 3 data layers but it will be essential that you backup everything before doing the upgrade and ideal if you can do the upgrade on a copy of your site and db and then point to your site to  the copy.

I guesstimate about 2 weeks from now for the next release.