mono Demo has no errors now

I was having some errors on the mono demo site but was able to resolve them. I was getting a major error on a line of code like this:

ddAvatars.SelectedValue = user.AvatarUrl;

even if it was inside a try catch it blew up the page, but changing to this fixed it:

ListItem itemToSelect = ddAvatars.Items.FindByValue(user.AvatarUrl);
if(itemToSelect != null)
    itemToSelect.Selected = true;

There was another error in the gallery but it was because I forgot to install some new schema files for XSS prevention that Dean has been working on.

So as far as I know the mono demo site is now error free which bodes well for a release soon, so let me know if you find any.

Thanks,

Joe

A Call for QA and a new Demo Site

I just put up a new demo site for the upcoming 2.0.1 release of mojoPortal and also updated the mono demo site with the latest svn code in preparation for the 1.0.1 release

http://demo.mojoportal.com is the new demo site running on Windows Server 2003 with 2.0 .NET and using the MySQL database
previously this was the url for my mono demo site but it has been changed to:
http://mono.mojoportal.com
running Suse 10, mono r58211 built from the svn repository tonight 3/20/2006 and using PostgreSQL for the database

Since we are grearing up for a release it would be great if any of you would test the sites and let me know any problems you encounter or any usability feedback.

There are currently a few issues on the mono version on the User Profile page and the Admin Manage User page I am getting an error that seems to be mono related but it would be good still to test as much as possible and find if there are any other errors.

I made the DNS change for demo.mojoportal.com last night but tonight on my Comcast machine it was still pointing to the mono server even though it worked fine today at work and should be pointing to the windows server with mojoPortal 2.0. If that happens to you you can put this in your hosts file to fix it
66.98.156.141 demo.mojoportal.com

SVN Update

Just wanted to let everyone know that the subversion repository for mojoPortal source code is back up and running on the new server.

I have updated the documentation here to reflect the new change. Basically, ssh access is only available to those with commit access but https access is available both to anonymous users and those with commit access. The urls to use in TortoiseSVN are now

https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/mojoportal/trunk  for the 1.x branch
and
https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/mojoportal/branches/2.1 for the 2.x branch

On initial checkout you will be prompted to accept a security certificate.

https access is better anyway because most companies have the port for https open on their firewalls while not all have the port open for ssh.

Thanks go out to Paul at Novell for all his hard work in this transition!

Just Updated This Site to Latest svn

In preparation for the release, I've just updated this site to the latest code from svn. A lot of layout and style has changed, if anything looks funky, you may need to refresh the browser a couple of times to get the latest css stylesheet. It was cached in my browser when I first viewed the site after the update and the forums looked funky but refreshing the page fixed it.

If you notice any problems in this site that don't go away after a refresh be sure and let me know

A New Release Soon

A new release of mojoPortal is coming soon, either this Sunday or the following one if all goes well.

Hopefully we will release version 2.0.1 for Windows/2.0 .NET and version  1.0.1 for 1.1 .NET or Mono.

Most of my recent work has been in the 2.x branch. The 2.0 release of mojoPortal was just compiled against the 2.0 .NET framework, it did not use any of the 2.0 .NET features per se, but the upcoming 2.0.1 release will use a number of 2.0 .NET features.

Changes for the 2.0.1 version

  • MasterPages, previously we were using Paul Wilson's MasterPages which made this an easy change
  • Themes, using a custom VirtualPathProvider and VirtualFile, I am storing the theme.skin files in the same folder with the other skin elements like layout.master and style.css and images under ~/Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins/[skinname] instead of in the default App_Themes folder. Themes give you awesome control over the visual properties of all the built in server controls. I have stubbed out most of the server control properties in the skin.theme files with the default properties to make it easy for designers to know what properties are available.
  • I implemented a custom SiteMapProvider and am now using the new ASP.NET Menu control for the menu instead of skmMenu. The skmMenu is still there if you want to use it there is a setting to allow that and you can also use the new TreeView control for the menu if you wish.
  • I reduced the number of included skins but the ones I kept are all using css layout with no tables.
  • I removed table layouts from most of the modules and supporting pages except where displaying tabular data
  • The site is in general now XHTML compliant though it may still be possible in some cases that you could manage to get non compliant markup into the database. To get my sites compliant I had to do some cleanup of existing content in the db.

Changes for both 2.0.1 and 1.0.1 versions

  • Update to the latest version of NeatUpload, the awesome upload control by Dean Brettle
  • Dean Brettle is also working on a new Cross Site Scripting (XSS) prevention technique that will hopefully be in this release
  • The last release added support for LDAP Authentication against OpenLDAP contributed by TJ Fontaine, this release we add support for Active Directory authentication as well as regular Windows NTLM authentication with help from Haluk Eryuksel, who also contributed the Turkish translation
  • Joseph Hill added a whole new data layer for SQLite and also provided a feature to expose the forums as RSS
  • I implemented a feature to automatically create initial site data for new installations and when creating new sites. Previously we had separate data creation scripts for each data layer and over time they had become inconsistent. This feature eliminates the need to maintain data creation scripts and makes the initial data consistent no matter which data layer is used. The initial data is retrieved from text files with a .config extension stored under Data/MessageTemplates and can be localized or customized

Numerous other little changes and fixes have also been done. If any of you think of anything major I've forgotten to mention let me know and I'll update this post.

For the current release, there will be no difference in the data schema between the 1.0.1 and the 2.0.1 versions but going forward the 2.x branch will begin to diverge as I add tables and columns to support the Personalization and Membership APIs and other plumbing to prepare for converting the modules into WebParts.

Its been several weeks since I have done any serious testing of the mono 2.0 stack. At my last test it was still broken in a number of places. I know they have been working hard on it though and I plan to get back on the testing and bug reporting after this release is shipped. Once the 2.0 mono stack is ready and stable we will drop the 1.x branch and get back to supporting just one version on all platforms.