mojoPortal 2.2.8.6 Released

Whats New

French translation of resource files by Thomas Nicolaïdès and Bernard Cortesi. This brings us up to 17 languages that mojoPortal has been translated into!

Updated Danish Translation by Kurt Greve

Upgraded FCKeditor from 2.6.4 beta to 2.6.4 final release.

Upgraded NeatUpload to version 1.3.8

Upgraded to the newest version of NeatHtml, NeatHtml is a tool for protecting against cross site scripting. This release fixed a bug where sometime un-trusted content would be visually clipped in WebKit based browsers like Chrome and Safari. We use it in the forums and in the blog comments.

Moved commerce reporting out of WebStore and into the core. This is a preliminary step so that we can aggregate commerce reporting across features at the site level. This will also eliminate the need for a lot of duplication of effort that would occur if we implemented reports in each commerce enabled feature.  My next 2 add on products will be e-commerce features, Fund Raiser Pro and Web Invoice Pro, so I'm thinking ahead and implementing commerce reporting as a core feature so I only need to implement reporting in one place and each feature will push its own data into the common reporting system. Event Calendar Pro for example is already a commerce enabled feature since it can sell tickets and soon it will have the ability to push its data into the reporting system. I still have a lot more reports to develop, but the point is I only want to develop one set of them.

Implemented a separate skin setting for MyPage. This was requested recently in the forums and it was a good idea since the layout needs of MyPage are not the same as for the main content system.

Implemented a Web.config setting to disable the search index. While mojoPortal works well in Medium Trust, there can be some problems with the search index if you host multiple sites on a single installation under Medium Trust so this provides an option if you can't get it working correctly you can disable it.

Added an anchor to the ModuleTitle control so that if you have a bunch of modules on a page you can easily create links that jump right to a module with #Modulex, where x is the module id. This was also a recent community request.

Fixed a recently introduced bug in the Shared Files module where the upload controls were displayed to users who did not have upload permission.

Added better error handling to the SiteMap to prevent errors if invalid urls are entered manually. Urls are generally auto-suggested but users can override the suggestion and put in something invalid. With great power comes great responsibility, but at least with the better error handling we can keep it from causing major problems with the menu when a user puts in something invalid. We also added a regular expression validator that checks for common mistakes and typos but it doesn't prevent all possible bad urls.

Fixed a bug in the url re-writer that caused a problem in folder based sub sites. In folder based sub sites, you can have an extensionless root url like /folder1/ if you actually create a folder named folder1 and put an empty text file there named Default.aspx, but there was a bug in the url re-writer that prevented this from working. There are components available for IIS to enable extensionless urls but this approach works without any IIS add ons.

A Shout Out To Our Consulting Partners

My own small company Source Tree Solutions, LLC has only limited availability for consulting engagements. I am trying to shift my business to product sales of add on features for mojoPortal so that I can have more freedom to work on the things I think will best advance the project. Consulting will always be a part of my business but I am very selective about projects I will take on myself and prefer to be a consultant to the consultants, so I am fostering a Consulting Partners Program to build a network of reliable consultants I can refer customers to and so that there are other qualified developers I have a relationship with and could pull in as additional resources to meet tight deadlines on larger projects. So far we have 5 companies in the program.

Summit IT Solutions

Summit IT Solutions uses mojoPortal extensively in their work, providing custom feature development, skinning and hosting.

Abertech

Abertech provides custom solutions and feature development based on mojoPortal and also helps maintain the Italian translation files.

Turbo Front Office

Turbo Front Office is a Dutch company that can handle all technical aspects of your mojoPortal site you can focus on the content. They also manage the mojoPortal Dutch Community site.

Samar Software Samar Software provides services for mojoPortal and also maintains the Persian translation files and manages the mojoPortal Persian Language Community Site.

talesis100b

TALESIS is our newest partner in Paris France, and helps maintain the French translation files for mojoPortal.

Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

Cool mojoPortal Linux Appliance by Jordi Massaguer Pla

Got a google alert this morning bringing my attention to this blog post by Jordi Massaguer Pla. Jordi is doing a lot of work making cool Linux appliances with Suse Studio and his latest one is a mojoPortal appliance. I've played around a little on Suse Studio myself but have been so busy I haven't finished any appliances yet, so I was glad to see the one Jordi has put together.

screen shot of mojoportal appliance running in VMWare player

Its running mojoPortal 2.2.8.2 using SQLite. You can download it from Jordi's post, boot it up in VMWare player or server and login with user=tux and password = linux

Suse Studio is an amazing tool, it allows you to build a custom linux installation with just the features and applications you want to include and then target your build for a VMWare appliance, installation media or live CD. And you do it all from a web browser.

Thanks a lot to Jordi for putting together this appliance!

Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

A New Alternate Demo Site Hosted by OpenSourceCMS.com

If you've been involved in the open source content management world for while, you've probably come accross OpenSourceCMS.com before. For a long time they have hosted demos of all the popular open source PHP CMS and web applications. Its kind of a one stop shopping place where you can test drive a lot of different CMS and web applications without having to install them yourself. I've always wished mojoPortal could be on their list but since they were only doing PHP it wasn't possible. But now they are tackling ASP.NET demos to bring the same convenience for trying ASP.NET web applications without having to install it yourself. Happily, mojoPortal is now on there as well as quite a few other popular ASP.NET content management systems and blogs. I still encourage you to use our demo site but sometimes it can get a little out of whack with lots of people using it so its good having another alternative demo site available.

screen shot from opensourcecms.com

Congratulations to Scott Goodwin and Mark King on the launch of their new ASP.NET demo site, I hope it does as well as their PHP demos have.

Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

Woopra - Fantastic Real Time Web Site Tracking and Analytics

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.

woopra screen shot

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.

mojo users online screen shot

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.

Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

Event Calendar Pro 0.0.1.0 Released

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

monthview screen shot

event editor screen shot

color picker screen shot

Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.