Back in August we tried out what was then a fairly new service, Amanuens, that makes it easy to crowd source translation. We tried it with several translators, but at the time it seemed confusing and difficult to use so we stopped using it for a while. Since then Amanuens has made a lot of improvements to the usability and now we have used it successfully with a small group of translators and it seems very much easier. So if you are interested in translating mojoPortal into a new language or updating an existing translation, let us know on this forum thread and we can see about setting up an account for you to help with translation. The Amanuens service makes it easy to translate the .resx files used for all labels and buttons, and these are the most important files to translate, but there are also message templates and help files that are just plain text files. These files are not supported by Amanuens so we still work by having you send those in a .zip if you translate them.

mojoPortal is currently translated at least partially in 24 languages, though many of them have not been kept up to date over time. The English resources are always the most up to date, and Italian is also kept very up to date by Diego Mora. Most other languages are only partially complete so we could use some help in getting them updated. Translated files in Amanuens are automatically synced and committed to our source code repository each morning, so it is a very efficient process.

Amanuens provides this excellent service free for open source projects and it is really working out well for us so far, so I thought I should give them a shout of thanks with this blog post. It isn't just a service for .NET applications, they support all kinds of technologies and they integrate with all kinds of source control systems. You can even hire translations directly through their service. Anyone who is working on a project that needs localization should take a look at Amanuens.

Thanks especially to our translators who volunteer their time to keep our translations updated!

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.6.2, available now on our download page.

This is a minor release with just a few bug fixes, the primary purpose of this release is to fix a problem in our Shared Files feature and in our alternate File Manager when running under Medium Trust hosting. In the previous release of version 2.3.6.1 we had changed to strong name signed assemblies for NeatUpload and for the NeatUpload Greybox Progress bar. This strong signed version of NeatUpload allows it to be installed in the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) on the server so it can work in Medium Trust, but there was a bug in the previous release because the NeatUpload.GreyboxProgressBar.dll was not compiled with the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute so it caused an error under Medium Trust. This release addresses that problem, it just required adding the needed attribute and re-compiling the NeatUpload.GreyboxProgressBar.dll. Since most shared hosting uses Medium Trust we felt it important to get a fix out for this quickly.

Fixed Bugs

• Fix error under Medium Trust in Shared Files and in the Alternate File Manager
• Fix bug in SQL CE data layer when creating new sites
• Fix bug where file manager did not overwrite existing files
• Fix redirect bug in Search Input that could happen on blog detail pages
• Fix bug in blog when using google maps (this bug was introduced in version 2.3.6.1 when we added an option to use Bing maps in the blog)

Other Stuff

• Upgrade from CKeditor 3.5 to 3.5.1
• Updated Italian resources from Diego Mora
• Updated Persian resources from Asad Samarian
• Updated Portuguese (Brazil) resources from Fabio Mastaler
• Updated French resources from Yves Jadin
• Updated German resources from Jan Aengenvoort
• Updated Spanish resources from German Barbosa
• New partial Arabic translation from Sameer Alomari

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.6.1, available now on our download page. We will submit this release to the Web App Gallery next week after we've had a chance to get any feedback from our early adopters.

New Security Options

• It is now possible to require approval of new users before they can sign in, a setting in Site Settings enables it and you can specify email addresses to receive notification of new users that need approval, and a new button will appear on the member list page to find users not approved yet if you enable this. This is not a recommended configuration if you are doing eCommerce since it creates more barriers to completing a purchase if the user must wait for approval before he can sign in.
• It is now possible to require any user to change their password from a setting in user management.
• From Site Settings, you can now configure it to require a user to change their password after password recovery or reset.
• There is now a custom error message you can configure in site settings if you are using a regular expression to validate password rules, you can provide an error message that explains the rules.

We also made the MS SQL packages of mojoPortal pre-configured for Medium Trust by default since this is the most common installation issue that people encounter. If you are hosted in Full Trust you can use the Web.fulltrust.config file.

Easier Content Re-Use

There is a new way to mark re-usable content as global content, which makes it available for page editors to add existing content to their pages. Joe Davis of i7MEDIA has made a nice video tutorial showing how to use this new feature, see the Global Content Section on this page.

Blog Improvements

• Someone asked for the ability to not create a 301 redirect when a post is renamed and the URL changes. By default, we believe this behavior is what should happen to automatically help with SEO when a URL changes, but if you don't want that behavior you can turn it off by adding this to your user.config file: 
  <add key="Blog:Create301OnPostRename" value="false" />
• It is now possible to use Bing Maps in the blog instead of Google Maps.
• There have been settings in the blog for a while to allow showing the right and left column content from the main blog page also on the blog post pages. Recently someone asked to be able to show upper and lower content when using skins that have 5 content panes, so we added these Web.config settings that you could add to user.config:
  <add key="Blog:ShowTopContent" value="true" />
<add key="Blog:ShowBottomContent" value="true" />
• Improved Feedburner integration. When using Feedburner, we now redirect to the FeedBurner feed instead of direct linking so that you can keep users subscribed to your original blog feed and not lose subscribers if you later decide to stop using Feedburner. See updated documentation Using Feedburner with your Blog.

Miscellaneous Little Improvements

• There is a new setting in Page Settings that allows you to control if pages appear in the child pages site map separately from if they appear in the menu
• added config setting to allow using a custom registration page URL
• added config option to not re-suggest URLs when renaming existing pages
• made it possible to exclude HTML content instances from search index for landing pages that one doesn't want to come up in search, this is in the feature instance settings for Html Content
• when moving items in pagelayout.aspx keep the item selected
• make it possible to move pages to the top or bottom of their page tree node in PageTree.aspx
• revamp of PageLayout.aspx thanks to Joe Davis - it required additional CSS so skins were all updated as well, see notes in this sticky thread for new CSS you need in your skin
• CSS and markup improvements in WebStore - thanks to Joe Davis
• when using excerpts in the feed manager make it possible to open the link in a new window
• added an instance setting in Image Gallery to control the background color used when resizing images
• update to a strong name signed version of NeatUpload so it can be installed in the GAC to make it work in Medium Trust hosting
• upgrade to CKEditor 3.5
• refactor system content templates and add new 2 column over 1 template from Jamie Eubanks
• make it possible to specify a different site map data source id for SiteMenu control
• when not combining CSS make URLs relative
• updated Italian resources from Diego Mora
• updated Persian resources from Asad Samarian
• updated German resources from Jan Aengenvoort

Bug Fixes

• restore possibility to edit HTML content instances that are loaded by modulewrapper
• make IE specific CSS and favicon respect page specific skins
• fix a bug in blog RSS when using folder based child sites it was incorrectly resolving URLs
• fix bug where the smiley base path was not resolving correctly if running in a virtual directory instead of root
• fix a bug in pgsql data layer for survey
• fix a bug in pgsql data layer for content catalog paging
• fix bug in sqlce data layer when adding features to child sites
• fix a bug in timepicker - thanks, David Dean
• fix an issue where export to CSV or word was not working correctly in IE 8 when SSL is enabled
• fix a bug in webstore - add abstract to offer edit page
• fix a bug in the forum where external images were handled differently on edit page than thread page
• fix bug - don't show host name tab in site settings until after new site is created

As always, it is a good idea to backup your site and database before upgrading.

Corresponding Update For Form Wizard Pro

Users who have purchased  Form Wizard Pro should upgrade at the same time to the new version of Form Wizard Pro 0.0.2.3, released today for compatibility with mojoPortal 2.3.6.1. This was needed because we updated to a new version of NeatUpload and Form Wizard Pro must use the same version of NeatUpload as mojoPortal or it will result in errors.

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.5.8, available now on our download page.

Whats' New?

• A new Flickr Gallery feature
• A new User Sign In Module that can be put on a content page such as the home page
• A new scroller setting in the Feed Manager to enable a scrolling news ticker
• Some improvements to the List/Links feature including a new introduction that can be used to place html above the list and a new option for non-ajax paging
• Thanks to Jamie Eubanks for implementing a way to use both database authentication and LDAP, there is a new config setting for fallback to LDAP if database authentication fails. This allows scenarios where your internal users such as content authors can login with their LDAP credentials while still allowing public users to register and sign in with database credentials.
• A new option to disable CSS caching while designing by clicking a button that sets a cookie to disable it. The previous way of of disabling it from config still works but this new way may be more convenient. You will find the button under Administration > Advanced Tools > Designer Tools
• Upgraded to CKeditor 3.4.2
• Updated Italian resources thanks to Diego Mora
• Bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the previous release including several fixes in the SQL CE data layer and the Firebird data layer.

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mojoPortal is catching on in local and state government as a way to improve web presence quality and reduce cost and effort of maintaining web sites and managing their content.

Yesterday after a year of work, the City of Escondido California went live with their new web site built on mojoPortal.