Big news today that Codeplex now supports svn bridge on the server. I'm thinking it would be very good for the mojoPortal project if we move our source code repository there, it would get us a lot more visibility among ASP.NET developers.

The Codeplex repository actually uses Team Foundation Server and in the past you could still connect with TortoiseSVN if you installed a client side svn bridge. The problem we faced with mojoPortal is that some developers work with mojoPortal on Linux using MonoDevelop and there wasn't an svn bridge for Linux, so it could not work for developers working on Linux. That pretty much made it not an option for us. Now, if I understand the announcement correctly, with the server side svn bridge, there is nothing to install on the client so it should work with the command line svn client. I will have to test it out before making a move, but I'm leaning very strongly that way. If anyone in the mojoPortal community has strong opinions about it, now is the time to sound off. Novell Forge, where we host our source code now has been good to us but I think being a part of the Codeplex community would be good for getting more exposure to a wider community of ASP.NET developers.

UPDATE 2008-09-22

I've been trying out the Codeplex svn bridge and its mostly working but not currently able to do merge. The Codeplex team has been very helpful and responsive and is looking into the merge issue. We should know more in a few days, but as long as we can get the merge working I see no reason not to move to Codeplex. Thanks for all the input, I'll post updates as things progress.

UPDATE 2008-09-27

The latest update from the Codeplex team is that its going to take about 4-8 weeks for them to implement support for svn merge. So we will have to wait a while and try it again after they implement this. To me this is good news. I was afraid the answer was going to be that they only support svn checkout and svn update. The fact that they are going to get it working (or at least try) is very good news even if we can't move to Codeplex right away, we will be able to move there when this feature is implemented. I was surpised that they think svn merge is a rarely used feature since I use it all the time merging changes from my sandbox into trunk. It makes me wonder if I use svn merge more than most svn users. I thought my use scenario was very common having trunk and branches, and sandboxes. I generally work in my sandbox and merge changes to trunk at the end of each day as long as my work is at a stable point. I'm curious what work flow other svn users have.

Huge Thanks! to everyone that nominated us.

mojoPortal is a finalist again in the Best Other CMS category in this years CMS Awards sponsored by Packt Publishing ("other" means not based on PHP).

Last year we won this category but we were the only project based on ASP.NET in the group of contenders. This year there are 2 other .NET projects in the finalists including the dominant and much better known DotNetNuke project. I think last year this award was not really on their radar, but since Packt published a book on DotNetNuke skinning I'm sure their project team is paying attention this year. If they rally their community they will trounce us in terms of votes. DotNetNuke is also a finalist in the Best Overall category and to some extent that indicates they have already beat us.

To the extent that the award is based on current popularity it seems not very likely that we can win this year, though we did beat out Plone last year and they are also much better known than mojoPortal. Our best hope is to do as much as we can to get a lot of votes and to do well in the phase of the contest where we will be evaluated by a panel of judges.

So you may ask why is DotNetNuke so well known and so dominant? The answer is they had a 2 year head start and they got a lot of help and continue to get a lot of help from Microsoft. They have their forum integrated into the hugely popular Microsoft ASP.NET site which I'm sure drives a huge amount of traffic to their site and has been very helpful for them in building their brand. Microsoft has also recognized many of their core developers with MVP awards.

I certainly don't begrudge them their success or the support they get from Microsoft. I just want people to consider that popularity doesn't neccessarily mean you have a better product. You can have a better product and still fail to get your message out there, especially if you can't get access to the same valuable promotional mechanisms and support that your competitors have available to them. I hope one day to emulate their success and am glad we made it to the finalist stage again this year. One irony may turn out to be that if DotNetNuke brings a lot of attention to this years award, it may actually help us because some of the people who go to vote for them may read about the other finalists and this may help raise awareness of mojoPortal in the .NET community.

mojoPortal has grown its community organically in spite of not having any love from Microsoft (though we wish we would get some support from them). When I inquired about getting a mojoPortal forum on the ASP.NET site I pretty much got the brush off. Its very difficult for .NET developers to find out about mojoPortal and though we have a growing and supportive community, only a small percent of the huge ASP.NET community has ever even heard of mojoPortal.

I said it last year, and I'll say it again this year, we are the underdog going into this competition. Its going to be very difficult to win and every vote will matter so please vote for us and help us spread the word about mojoPortal!

If you like you can also nominate me for the CMS MVP Award.

I'm happy to announce the release of Event Calendar Pro version 0.0.0.2

This release adds support for rendering events that span across days, weeks, or months, on the Month View.

From the beginning I felt rendering events that span across days was an important feature and I had hoped to have it working for the initial release, but since it took longer than expected to release this product I didn't want to delay any longer while I worked on this new calendar rendering. It was kind of tricky to achieve it. I struggled with it for about 4 days before finally arriving at a decent solution for rendering the events across days.  I hope you like it.

Event Calendar Pro includes 1 year of free upgrades, so anyone who already purchased it can just download it again from their order history to get the new version.

You can also try it out at demo.mojoportal.com

I'm happy to announce the Grand Opening of the mojoPortal Store!

We actually had a semi-grand opening a few weeks ago, but all you could do in the store until now is buy me a beer. Many Thanks to the kind folks who have bought me a beer since then! I really appreciated the beers and it really helped to be able to test the ecommerce before launching my first real product.

Event Calendar Pro is now on sale!

Yo can get a Single Installation License for $99 or a Server License for $299, or an Enterprise License with Full Source Code for $899

Checkout the product detail page for more info and screen shots, or watch this video for a guided tour of features.

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.6.8, available now on the download page.

Actually I released the files yesterday but didn't manage to get to making a release announcement until today because I was still working on some related documentation that I wanted to link to.

Whats New?

Google Analytics Integration

As I mentioned in my previous post, we now have Advanced Integration with Google Analytics built in. There was a lot to talk about so I made that its own post yesterday instead of including it all in the release announcement.

Gravatars

For a long time I've been wanting to implement a better avatar system, because the one we had with just a list of little cartoons you could choose from seemed pretty lame and out of date. The other day, while reading Scott Hanselman's blog, I noticed that he was using Gravatars in his blog comments. I looked into the implementation and it was trivial so I implemented support for Gravatars in the mojoPortal forums and profile system. I haven't got it in blog comments yet but will try to get to that in a future version. The idea of Gravatars is that you can have an avatar that follows you whenever you visit any sites that support Gravatar. If you look in the mojoPortal Forums, you'll see my Gravatar.

If you don't have a Gravatar it just displays a generic one:

So, if you are a frequent visitor, go and get yourself a Gravatar. Gravatars are rated like movies G, PG, R, X, by default, mojoPortal is only configured to display Gravatars rated as G, but you can set this in Web.config or user.config:
<add key="GravatarMaxAllowedRating" value="G" />

Its just a minor feature but its a social feature that I think can make a community site more appealing.

Enhanced OpenID Support

We've had support for OpenID authentication for quite a while now, but recently I came across ID Selector, an enhancement for the OpenID login box.

It makes it easy for users to sign in or register using their existing open id enabled account.  I've created documentation about enabling OpenID selector in mojoPortal here: http://www.mojoportal.com/using-openid.aspx

Using OpenID or Windows Live ID can increase the number of users who register on your site because they don't have to create any new passwords. Everyone hates new passwords and thats probably one of the biggest reasons people resist registering on new sites, so eliminating that issue can increase registration and participation in your site.

New Developer Extension Points

Actually, I implemented these a few versions ago but just now got around to documenting them.

• User Registered Event Handlers
• Page Created Event Handlers

These are basically plugin systems that let you build and plugin your own handlers so you can execute your own custom logic whenever a new user is created or a new page is created. I'm always trying to dicourage people from modifying the core of mojoportal and put their custom code in external projects. If you make changes in the core code and those changes don't go back into the project you are basically creating a fork and it will be difficult to upgrade to future versions without losing your custom code, so unless you are working on something that is going to be integrated back into the project you should never change code in the core. If you run into something where you think you are going to need to modify the core, let us know in the developer forum and maybe we can suggest a way to accomplish your goal using external projects, or maybe we will consider integrating your change if its appropriate, or maybe your questions will lead us to add new extension points to make it possible to do what you want without modifying the core.

Event Calendar Pro Will Be On Sale Next Week

My first for sale feature will be in the Store sometime next week. The first version is feature complete, and you can try it out on demo.mojoportal.com. I still need to make help files, documentation, training/demo video, marketing text, licensing text, etc etc, so it will take me a few days to get that stuff done. I'll make a detailed post about this feature after its available.