features i need

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7/7/2006 4:55:02 PM
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features i need

What I need in my current project:
- user management (add/edit/remove/activate/deactivate etc)
- user to signup for account, but not be able to login immediately(unlike mojoportal), when user signs up this should send email for someone to authorize,kind of like phpbb forums
- i have a design already started, and id like to plug in the pieces around that design.  Instead of using master pages, I stayed with include files for things like a header, menu and footer. 

Can the current version handle user registration to be authorized rather than automatic.  When a user registers, there should be an email kicked off to some designated person.  That person clicks a link in his email message, logs in (as an admin) then enables the users acount as active.  Then the user should get an email conforming that his account is active and he can login.

comments ?
7/7/2006 5:16:22 PM
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Re: features i need

Right now there is no feature implemented to prevent login/send email for admin review before user can login. It would not be very difficult to implement though. Sounds like a good feature to have.

If you don't want to use MasterPages and the design/skinning features implemented in mojoportal, mojoportal may not be the solution for you.
7/8/2006 3:44:51 AM
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Re: features i need

Well, I do have a master page that i started, I just decided lately to cut the items out into include files.  Something about master pages that im not comfortable with yet.  What if i decide i need a new stylesheet or script file on one of the child pages ? 
7/8/2006 3:52:28 AM
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Re: features i need

You can assign a different skin to an individual page. A skin is a combination of MasterPage, css file, theme file, supporting images. You have to enable this in Site Settings to allow page skins, then you will see a setting in Page Settigns for it.

I would avoid using the theme.skin file and just style with the css though because theme is cached which makes it difficult to override at page level. I prefer css anyway, I think mainly just the calendar control is styled with the theme but you can edit the theme so it just assigns css classes and there will be no problem with caching that way.
7/8/2006 7:23:02 AM
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Re: features i need

I assume I can use my own masterpage ?

I was under the impression that a skin was applied to a type of a control, within the context of a theme (App_Themes/theme_abc/label1_skin).  Good point about the caching though, I wasnt aware of that.  Would that be an issue for example if you wanted to dynamically change the style of a row within a gridview ?  For example, something like this
http://www.toyotaofkilleen.com/NewInventorySearch.aspx?SeriesCode=TA4&From=Launchpad

Actually, if you look at the source of that page above, they appear to be using a master page (clue is using content placeholders), so maybe not.  That link above is a nice example of using a gridcontrol (or prbably a gridview).

This evening I plan on reviewing the mojoportal source a lot closer, but for now I have some more questions about user logins and user management (which might be answered after i review the source a bit).  After reviewing the 2.0 demo user mangement, i think this very like is going to fit what I need to do with the addition of user verification which I will have to add.  Thats something ill be looking at very shortly so we can discuss ideas on that.  That soulds like a possible addition that would be generic enough to add to the trunk ? 

Also:
-I really like the ability to give someone access to the content editors.  Can I lock this down to only certain areas, admin users and turn it off completely for normal users ?
-for the user, can i make only a selected set of pages require login ?
-for the user management, can i add additional fields for user profile data ?
-regarding the mojoportal source, what is the base/minimum set of subprojects / assemblies that i need If I just want (for now) a site with user login and user management ?
-can I apply the membership schema to an existing database, or is it best to keep it seperate ?

Im sure ill have some more questions soon.

7/8/2006 7:25:50 AM
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Re: features i need

oops, didnt notice i wasnt logged in when i post that last message.   when i signed in to the mojoportal demo, it might have affected my login here ?  more likely my login timed out between starting and ending that last post.
7/8/2006 8:04:14 AM
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Re: features i need

Yes, you can create your own skins which have your own master pages. When I say skin I'm referring to mojoportal skins though the theme files also have that .skin extension, I was calling them skins before 2.0 .NET came out.

The stuff in App_Themes folder is not used except to fool the .NET framework. There is only 1 theme file per skin named theme.skin and it is stored in the skin folder Data/Sites[SiteID]/skins/[skinname] and we use a custom VirtualPathProvider and VirtualFile to make .NET retrieve it from there instead of App_Themes but it still needs a theme.skin file to exist in App_Themes to satify internal .NET checks

If you look in the theme.skin files in the skin folders you will see that most of the .NET server controls are stubbed out there. If you use the theme to just set css classes you can avoid the cache issues whereas if you directly set other properties the cache will get in the way of making some pages use one skin and others use a different skin.

Regular users don't have content edit permissions unless you put them in a role that has edit permissions. It is very easy to give a user edit permission on only a page or section of the site by setting roles that can edit and roles that can create child pages on a page. If a user is in the role with edit permission they can edit that page. If also in the create child page role the user can create more pages beneath the page and edit them but still has no edit permission on other pages outside that sub tree.

A user can also be given edit permission directly on a module instance from module settings (gear icon in module) without having to create roles or give general edit permission to a page.

Please review these docs, they should help you get up to speed on what is possible and I am happy to fill in gaps if you have questions.
http://www.mojoportal.com/rolesandpermissions.aspx
http://www.mojoportal.com/addingcontent.aspx
http://www.mojoportal.com/managingusers.aspx

If you would like to implement the feature for admin approval of registration and contribute it that would be nice. Please send me an email indicating that you agree that any contributions you make to mojoportal can be included under the mojoportal license, currently Common Public License, but please also agree that we can release it under any OSI approved license so that if we ever decide to change the license we don't have to track you down.

Although the svn instructions currently say use branches/2.1, that branch is not going to have any changes unless we have important bug fixes before we are ready for the next release. for current development use branches/2.1.1 but be aware that it is under heavy development and may not always work perfectly. Best if you subscribe to the svn commit mailing list so you get notified when new commits are made to svn
http://forge.novell.com/mailman/listinfo/mojoportal-svncommits

trunk is the .NET 1.1 framework/mono version, it is only under maintenance until mono better supports 2.0 then it will be tagged and the 2.x version of mojoportal will become trunk

You can only leave out assemblies for data layers you are not using. There is no version with only user management. The content modules are all included though you don't have to use them they are not in separate assemblies. It is possible to implement modules as separate projects/assemblies but the built in ones are not made that way
7/8/2006 3:49:39 PM
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Re: features i need

Now that I ponder it, if you want to wait on the admin approval for registration feature and just focus on the other things specific to your project, I'd be glad to implement the admin approval feature myself right after the 2.1.1 release. I know exactly what needs to be done and its not a big job so if you have heavier lifting to do for your main project feel free to leave that one to me. Of course I don't know the timeframe for your project but the 2.1.1 release will ship within a few weeks and then I can probably do this feature over a weekend.

I also plan to add a sample project to the solution to show how to do an external module. We already have such a project in trunk but that the 1.1 framework version. I may actually have this in svn sometime tomorrow.

Cheers,

Joe
7/31/2008 10:03:02 AM
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Total Posts 15

Re: features i need

Hello again, after several months. Im currently looking for a CMS solution that will allow virtual "paths" for users in the form of user123.some_domain.com -or- www.somedomain.com/user123

I suppose I should have searched the forums first, im sure this has been talked about in light of IIS7 coming out and its new pipeline that lets you do things not possible before with IIS without resorting to isapi filters.

 

7/31/2008 12:52:21 PM
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Re: features i need

Hello again after 2 years.

Your first example is a hostname that corresponds to a user name and your second example is a sub folder that corresponds to a user name.

mojoPortal can host multiple sites based on hostnames or on subfolder names, but its not user specific, its just a way of creating additional sites in a single installation so I don't think it is quite what you are looking for.

Best,

Joe

7/31/2008 1:43:15 PM
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Re: features i need

Im not sure If I explained it right.  Basically, I want to give users a (configurable) number of virtual pages.  The url to these pages would be like I mentioned above.  so instead of www.my_domain.com/userpage.aspx?user=userbob123 would instead be userbob123.mydomain.com

With apache mod_rewrite (or IIS7 url rewriting or isapi_rewrite with IIS6), this can be done.  However, its the page itself that im not sure about.  Can users have their own pages and/or blogs which the url can be emailed to their friends or co-workers.

Ive got projects piling up and Id like to use the same cms system.  Ive come back to mojoportal because having a large site on *other* cms systems with mysql & php kinda scares me.  Id much rather have Sql server stored procedures on the backend.

I seen a reference to something that might be relevant, what is the VirtualPathProvider, can you point me to any docs on it ?

Also, I was looking at this http://www.mojoportal.com/rolesandpermissions.aspx
and at first thought this was what i was looking for, but i dont think so. 

Basically Im trying to create a myspace type community portal, but add in some url-trickery so that users can email a link to a "virtual" page that is specific to the user.

 

 

 

 

7/31/2008 2:02:50 PM
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Total Posts 18439

Re: features i need

In mojoportal you could create a top level page for a user and give that user both edit permission and create child page permission on that page and the user can edit this page and create as many pages beneath it as he wants, but the page would be an url like http://somesite.com/joe.aspx and there is nothing automatic to create it for new users so you would need to implement your own solution for that.

As for Url re-writing, it takes more than just url re-writing to achieve hostname style urls like http://joe.somesite.com because host names require a DNS "a" record to resolve the host name to an ip address. So until you add he DNS a record on your DNS server(s) and until it propagates around the world the hostname joe.somesite.com will not resolve to the ip address of your IIS server and therefore IIS will not get the request. And if the IIS is running more than 1 web site on the same ip  address you would also need to add a host header to IIS for each new host name so that it knows which site that hostname maps to. Those configuration requirements will not be an easy problem to solve in an automated way.

VirtualPathProvider is not for url re-writing, its for locating physical files from a virtual folder location.

Hope it helps,

Joe

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