mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

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8/21/2012 4:57:15 AM
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mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

Just perusing my daily TechRepublic articles, and came across this one: Windows Azure Web Sites simplifies app deployment. While the article doesn't' specifically mention mojoPortal, if you scroll down to Figure C, you'll see it right there with Drupal, Joomla, Umbraco & Wordpress, as available for install "From Gallery".

8/21/2012 10:02:31 AM
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Re: mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

Always nice to see mojoPortal get some exposure! Being right in the middle of a list with the "big boys" is great.

8/21/2012 10:39:31 AM
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Re: mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

Very nice indeed. Anybody else find humor in the release date and version under Umbraco in the screenshot? That whole Umbraco v5 debacle makes me chuckle.

8/21/2012 5:58:24 PM
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Re: mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

I've been spending a lot of time in nopCommerce land lately; they shifted to MVC around the beginning of this year, and it's taken several releases to get the performance issues smoothed out. Seems like the folks at Umbraco could have done the same, but since I don't follow that CMS community all that much, I can't say what insurmountable issues they felt they'd run into.

8/21/2012 8:19:43 PM
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Re: mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

Correction re: nopCommerce: they shifted to MVC as of August last year (2011).  I don't seem to be able to edit my entry above (though I can edit this one, strange) - has a new glitch surfaced, or is this a new 'feature'?

8/22/2012 9:49:56 AM
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Re: mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

Hi Carole,

Umbraco said, about v5, they ended up building a beast that they felt would be 1) difficult to support and 2) difficult to use and develop with. (That's my paraphrase of course). The big issue I saw was that they abandoned everyone who had built sites using v4 because they didn't provide any upgrade path whatsoever. They even went as far as stating that people do not upgrade their CMS platform so their was no need to provide an upgrade path. Add that to the complexity of v5 and adoption was very slow (slower than Vista slow). 

Re: editing your post. It's a feature that was added some time ago. You're allowed to edit a post up to 60 minutes after posting. This was added for a couple reasons but the biggest is that some people will edit a post after an answer has been given and their edit makes the answer seem ridiculous. Also, some people were editing very old posts just to add a link to their website. Each time a post is edited, an email is sent to everyone that's subscribed to that thread or the forum as a whole. That's a lot of emails for silly edits to include a link.

- Joe D.

8/22/2012 10:57:07 AM
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Re: mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

I don't want this thread to devolve into bashing another cms product and so far it has not, only facts have been mentioned that are straight from the source, The Upgrade Myth and the v5 RIP Announcement.

But I don't think this means there is any fundamental problem with MVC, its a good design pattern, but there is much more than MVC involved in building a CMS or web app framework. They are just saying that in their start from scratch approach they ended up over-engineering a monstrosity (I'm not being derogatory this is what they themselves have said). As I understand it, their plan now is to implement support for MVC and other improvements moving forward form their current code base rather than starting from scratch and pulling in some of the good ideas they had in working on v5.

It will be interesting so see how that turns out because there really is a fundamental incompatibility between WebForms and MVC. They can be used side by side within the same app but a given request can only effectively use one or the other so you can't mix and mingle much at all. You cannot use WebControls or UserControls in MVC, the life cycle of page events for example does not exist in MVC. So while data access and business layer logic could be re-used it stll requires a re-write of most or all of the web UI to change to MVC. I think it will be challenging to make that change in any kind of way that doesn't break custom funcitonality that others may have built on top of it. I guess if you beleive upgrading is not a concern then its ok, but I can't really go along with that. I've worked very hard to make upgrading mojoPortal a smooth process and we do have lots and lots of people who upgrade to every new release while I'm sure there are some who upgrade less frequently.

These are the reasons I decided not to rewrite mojoPortal in MVC. It would probably take a good 3-5 years to really do it for all features we ship (which I cannot afford to do on my own dime) and it would still break compatibility for all custom features that anyone previously built with WebForms. All that without actually adding anything that benefits end users.

MVC is a design pattern, that does help in separation of concerns and it appeals to uber engineer types for that reason, but my goal with mojoPortal is for the code to be easy to understand by average developers not to impress uber engineers. We get a lot of people using and extending mojoPortal that are sysadmin or designer types who can do some programming but are not hard core engineers, and that is our target audience. WebForms has its own advantages that are different than those of MVC and I think it is more approachable just as VB was more approachable than C, and the uber engineers who like MVC better tend to look down on WebForms in the same way that C developers used to look down on VB developers. But lots and lots of good apps were developed in VB because it was more approachable and more suited for rapid development, and there are still a large majority of ASP.NET developers using WebForms. Also some of the things that people don't like about WebForms can be solved by smart app design and also they continue to improve things with each version of .NET. So myself I respect MVC and can see it has its merits but I'm still a fan of WebForms and cannot see a business case for re-writing 7 years of good code written in WebForms in MVC.

Best,

Joe

8/22/2012 12:38:36 PM
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Re: mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

The longer I use it, the more I appreciate the incremental-only upgrade philosophy of mojoPortal. With few exceptions, no matter what version you are on, you can upgrade to the latest just by installing the new version and running setup. Of course, the older the version you are upgrading from, the more manual changes you'll have to make, but there's no more work involved than if you'd upgraded each version along the way--you just have to do all of those historical changes at the same time.

Jamie

8/22/2012 3:30:55 PM
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Re: mojoPortal available on Windows Azure Web Sites

Jamie - well-said. I'm in the process of upgrading a nopCommerce client to the latest version, and all in all, it'll have been the better part of a day's work to apply the updates, identify the glitches, and get the core functionality updated. Good thing I planned on a re-design, because there's no way to update the old theme. I'm grateful that Joe hasn't gone the MVC route with mojoPortal; there's a great deal of custom work I've done that would have to be re-written, and having to do that for two platforms at one time would be...painful.

Joe makes the upgrades much easier with mojoPortal, which I appreciated deeply. When you're deploying customized CMS sites as part of running a business, you're not nearly so interested in impressing the "uber-engineers" as you are your clients, and uncomplicated makes that much easier.

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