Hey Will,

I enjoyed having the brief opportunity to take you under my wing when you were fresh out of college. You were a quick study so its no surprise that you would come up with a lot of good questions all pointing to the holes in my developer documentation .

Thanks for prodding me, I've taken a little time this morning to fill in some of those holes.

Cheers,

Joe

Question 1 Managing source control for your project while working with mojoportal from svn trunk:

I just created a page

here

with notes about that.

Question 2 Using the mojoPortal Installation with your own features.

I just created this documentation.

Question 3 Deployment

Some of this is covered in the above links and also in the existing deployment documentation. I don't understand what you mean about medium trust requiring separate copies. In medium trust you have to disable a few things and configure differently and delete a few dlls, notes on that here.

Question 4 Managing Skins

Skins are self contained in their own folders. As long as you give your skin folder a good unique name it is very unlikely that mojoportal skins will ever overwrite them. The library of skins avilable when creating new sites in an installation come from the /Data/skins folder and when the site is created they are copied to  /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins and these are the ones actually used by the site. You can put your owns site specific custom ones here and they will not be avialble to other sites. Though a mojoportal skin does contain a theme.skin file I recommend you don't ever use that and stick with just css. Styling controls with ASP.NET themes causes a lot of bulky inline style to be rendered in the page and this hurts performance becaue bulkier pages are slower to load.

Question 5 Automated Process and long running tasks

Yes mojoportal does have a framework that makes it easier to build tasks that can run on background threads. I doubt if anyone else is using this as its not been documented until now, but I implemented it for sending emails to the newsletter subscribers. For a long list this task could take a while so it shouldn't run on the same thread as a web page because it will block until it finishes and this would create a bad UI experience. Instead wanted to queue the task on a new thread and allow the current thread to render the page.

Hey Will,

Oh, now I understand what you mean about separate copies. There are issues with multiple sites in medium trust that can be mitigated with separate physical installations. If it were me I'd just get Full trust hosting. You can get Full Trust at DiscountASP and I also know you can get it at Crystal Tech though not by default, you have to explicitely ask them to move you to a Full Trust server after getting your hosting account.

In medium trust you lose cool features like NeatUpload and support for OpenID authentication both of which are really important features in my book.

I will also say that you "may" be able to get multiple sites working satisfactorily in medium trust with a single installation. I would start with that approach and only go to the mulitiple physical installations if its not satisfactory. I generally stear people toward the separate physical installations to avoid the support hassles of trying to help people run multiple sites in medium trust. The main issues that come to mind are the need for a lucene lockdirecotry setting, but I might try just using the /Data folder as the lock directory instead of Data/Sites/[SiteID]/index folder. It may or may not work doing that buts its something I would try. The other issue is that VirtualPathProviders don't work in medium trust so it will use the theme.skin file from the App_Themes/default folder instead of the one in the skin folder. But because we don't use the theme.skin file for much there is really very little difference in that file from skin to skin so it may not cause any problem. So I would try it with a single physical installation and if it gives you no problems then great, if it does give problems then mitigate them with separate physical installations.

Best,

Joe

I generally use the Paste As Text toolbar in the editor to remove any formatting for pasting small code samples. For large code samples I recommend using an external html file and just link to the example from your article. A good tool for generating the html to paste into this file is the Copy Source as Html plugin for VS 2008. An example where I've used it to create an html file showing code an article here, see the link in the article that points here, its a plain old html file using content generated from the plugin linked above.

Hope it helps,

Joe