I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.8.3, available now on the download page.

In addition to bug fixes for things reported in the Forums since the last release, highlights of this release are as follows:

• Upgrade to FCKeditor 2.6.4 which includes a new spelling checker that works out of the box, a long wished for feature.
• A new set of translation files for Danish language thanks to Kurt Greve
• Blog improvements, an option whether to hide the URL input for comments and an option to require users to authenticate in order to post comments.
• New sorting levels for products and offers in WebStore to allow better control over sorting on the product list.
• A new CountryStateSetting control. I needed this for an improvement to Event Calendar Pro in order to specify a default country and state for ticket orders, but I built it into the core so it can be re-used in other features.

Note that the spell checker uses a free ad supported web service. Its very useful but you probably would not want to use this if your web page contains top secret content. It can be disabled from a configuration file for that kind of scenario but I think most users will be glad to have this. It is also possible to purchase a paid account with no ads or a version that can run on your own server, though I'm not sure what the integration steps are for those scenarios.

Over the weekend, Jan 16-18 2009, Microsoft held a great event, "We are Microsoft Charity Chellenge Weekend" to help charities. The event paired teams of developers with charity organizations to produce web solutions to better meet the needs of the charity organizations. The challenge was that the time available to produce the solution was limited to the weekend, everything from gathering requirements to final delivery had to be completed in that time frame.

I was very honored when one of the teams chose to use mojoPortal.

Todd Stone, Tim Mitchell, Nathan Woodward, Jay Smith, Andrew Dalgleish

You can read the full details and see before an after screenshots in this blog post by Microsoft MVP Jay Smith "We Are Microsoft: Developers Rally Around Charities"

"After checking out Telerick’s SiteFinity and Telligent’s Graffiti CMS, both very powerful and capable Content Management Systems, we elected to go with mojoPortal."

These guys really did an impressive job accomplishing so much in a very limited time frame. I congratulate them and thank them for their good work for a good cause and for giving mojoPortal the oportunity to participate in this exciting event.

Big Congratulations to the Mono Team for shipping Mono 2.2!

We've seen growing interest in our support for running mojoPortal on Linux with Mono judging by the increasing forum posts related to it. We try to be very careful as we improve mojoPortal, not to break compatibility with Mono. My testing is usually using the latest Mono built from their svn repository but when a release of Mono comes out I try to also test with the release version since this is what most people are using. Things are progressing rapidly in the Mono project which allowed us not long ago to change our target to the 3.5 version of .NET so that we can begin to dabble in Silverlight, and RESTful web services. Enough of the 3.5 stuff is there in Mono that we can compile and things mostly work but with a few bugs here and there including some bugs in the 3.5 version of Mono's implementation of MS Ajax aka System.Web.Extensions.

Historically I've used my physical openSuse machine to run VMWare server and then I could run the  Mono release virtual machines from there, but after upgrading to openSuse 11.1 I couldn't get my VMWare server to open any virtual machines. So I installed the VMWare Player on my Vista machine this time to test.

The Mono 2.2 virtual machine already had mojoPortal 2.2.6.8 installed and it works well and I noticed the ajax stuff worked fine there but in testing mojoPortal 2.2.8.2-b the UpdatePanels were not being updated in the UI and were logging some errors so I figured if I change the references and use the 2.0 .NET version of Ajax aka System.Web.Extensions 1.0 (since thats what mojoPortal 2.2.6.8 uses) maybe I could get the latest mojoPortal working as well as 2.2.6.8 does. And sure enough, after making this change, the latest mojoPortal seems to work very well ajax and all.

So I've packaged up a new mojoPortal 2.2.8.2-c release to work smoothly with the latest Mono 2.2 release. You can even download the source zip and build it an run it using Mono 2.2, the only thing you'll need to do for that is to copy the contents of Web.mono.config into Web.config so it will have the correct references to System.Wen.Extensions 1.0. The mojoportal-2-2-8-2-c-pgsql-for-mono.zip file is pre-compiled and the web.config is already configured for Mono. You can swap out the data layer dlls if you want to use a different db.

I think this is a major milestone for the Mono Project. mojoPortal is a complex application, and the fact that it runs well on Mono 2.2 shows that the Mono 2.0 ASP.NET stack is pretty solid. The 3.5 stuff is coming along but your mileage may vary.

The Visual studio solution and the Windows release packages are still targeting .NET 3.5. Its very handy that we use a separate mojoportal.mds for MonoDevelop even though it could open the Visual Studio solution, it allows us to do things differently on Mono as needed.

In our svn repository, will be changing our MonoDevelop projects back to reference the 3.5 version of System.Web.Extensions so we can keep moving forward and report bugs so they can get fixed in the next version of Mono. So 2.2 Mono users who want to play with the source code should use the .zip download instead of svn, unless you are also working with Mono built from svn as I am.

Other minor changes in 2.2.8.2-c include a new color picker that I mentioned in my previous post and we upgraded from jquery 1.2.6 to 1.3.

I've recently been working on some soon to be released enhancements to my Event Calendar Pro product. One of the requested features was the ability to set the colors for each event so they can be colored differently on the Month View. In order to implement this I needed a color picker, but rather than build the color picker into the Event Calendar Pro product, I decided to implement it in the core of mojoPortal so it can be used in other features and so other developers can use it in their own features. I implemented it as a UserControl that implements ISettingControl, a simple interface that makes it possible to use the control in Module Settings or in custom user profiles. So for example if you wanted to have a Favorite Color Property on the user profile page you could add this to your profile.config file:

<add name="FavoriteColor"
type=""
iSettingControlSrc="~/Controls/ColorSetting.ascx"
labelResourceKey="Favorite Color"
defaultValue="#34983E"
/>

and the result looks like this:

The color picker javascript is using the YUI Color Picker via a custom implementation from Dynamic Drive that I enhanced further to add localization and pre-selection of the color in the picker.

I hope to release the new version of Event Calendar Pro in the next few days. In order to do that I will also be releasing a new version of mojoPortal with the color picker because the Event Calendar Pro upgrade depends on this feature.

UPDATE 8:45am EST

I've deployed the latest version of Event Calendar Pro to the demo site.

Here is a list of the improvements:

1. Ability to specify the end date for recurring events.
2. Will Pay option for ticket sales. There is a setting on each event where you can check a checkbox to allow users to register for the event by clicking a button that says "I Will Pay Later". You can further control this from the module settings (gear icon) where there is a new setting so you can specify roles that are allowed to use the Will Pay button. That way you can put your trusted customers into a role and only allow them to register with this button, other users will not see the "I Will Pay Later" button, they will have to use the normal payment methods. button.
3. Color coding of events in Month View. You can now sepcify foreground, background and border colors for events to make them have different colors in Month View.
4. Ability to specify the text for event registration link.
5. Location alias - for use when you want the name of the location to be different than what you need to enter for the google map to work.
6. Meta Keywords and description per event
7. Map settings per event instead of global

Any testing or feedback much appreciated, I'd like to release it soon. It will be a free upgrade for existing customers who have purchased it already.

mojoPortal got some favorable coverage in the Information Week blog.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/01/mojoportal_a_so.html

Nice to see!