Happy Leap Year!

Now that the dust has settled on 2011, I'm happy to report that it was a very good year for mojoPortal and the business I've built around it. In 2009 I made the trnasition from a mostly consulting business to a mostly product sales business with my add on products for mojoPortal. 2010 was the first year that I made enough revenue to meet both my business and personal expeneses (living frugally). In 2011 I had 100% revenue growth over 2010 and I'm very optimistic for 2012 to be an even better year. I've got lots of exciting things planned both for improvements to the free core feature set of mojoPortal and also new add on products and enhancements for existing ones. Within the next month or so I expect to release the first version of Site Membership Pro which will make it easy to sell membership subscriptions that grant users roles that allow viewing your premium content. You can already protect content by roles and add or remove users from roles to control which content they have access to in mojoPortal, but you would have to do the role management manually. This feature will manage the ecommerce around selling memberships and adding or removing users from the granted roles, sending reminders when they are due for renewal etc.

From February 11th through the 18th I was on my first real vacation since 2008. I got to stay for free with my Uncle who has a time share at this swanky resort in Cancun Mexico, my only expenses were my flight and expenses while I was down there. It was a lot of fun and a very relaxing break from work. Huge thanks to those who helped out in the forums while I was gone, especially Joe Davis and Jamie Eubanks. You guys did an outstanding job and without your help I would not have been able to really relax on my vacation.

Now I'm glad to be back at work, I do love my work after all. But there is always so much to do I never really feel caught up. I'm glad there is an extra day in February this year. Happy Leap Year!

mojoPortal 2.3.8.1 Released

We released mojoPortal 2.3.8.1 on January 26, 2012

Whats New?:

• Stronger password hashing for hashed password format. Previously we were using MD5 without salt, but now we use sha512 with a random 128 character salt per user. Existing users will be automatically updated to the stronger hash the next time they login. For encrypted passwords we’ve also updated to use a 128 character random salt per user. Existing users will be updated with a salt the next time they login.
• When a user’s roles are changed, the role cookie will now be updated automatically on the next authenticated page request. Previously, if you added a user to a role or removed him from a role he needed to logout and login again to get the new role cookie.
• We’ve made the role permissions more clear on Page Settings and Feature Instance Settings. There has been some confusion in the past about a special case of permissions. By default Administrators and Content Administrators can access and edit any content without adding them to the allowed roles, but we had a special case where if you set the allowed roles to only Administrators then the content could be locked down to only Administrators and Content Administrators would no longer have access. In the past this has not been an obvious feature from the UI and users who did not know about that feature would mistakenly check the box for Administrators, accidently locking out Content Administrators. We’ve now made it more clear in the UI with radio buttons above the role lists for Page and Content View and Edit Permissions.
• The blog now shows the post categories for a post in the post list and in the post detail. We’ve also implemented more of the Wordpress API, so in addition to being able to use Windows Live Writer, it is also now possible to use Wordpress clients such as the Blogsy app for iPad. I’ll be documenting that soon but basically you configure it as if you were using Wordpress.
• Several people have reported problems when trying to use javascript in the Html Content Feature, the WYSIWYG editors such as CKeditor and TinyMCE tend to do some “cleanup” on the markup which sometimes removed things that people intended to be there. In CKeditor for example you could get around it by saving while still in Html view, but the next time you opened the content in the editor it would run the “cleanup” and mess up your javascript. For content instances where you are using javascript and just want to edit the raw html without interferance from the WYSIWYG editor, you can go into the settings and un-check the box for “Use WYSIWYG Editor?”, and then it will just use a plain text area when you go to edit that content instance.

For more details see the blog post release notes for mojoPortal 2.3.8.1.

New and Updated Articles

Each month we continue to fill in some gaps in our documentation and update some documents that were out of date and no longer accurate. Below are links for some of the new and updated articles.

• Blog Post: mojoPortal Sightings for February 2012
• Blog Post: Using the Blogsy iPad App With mojoPortal
• How To Get Multiple IIS Web Sites Working on Your Development Machine Breaking free of the Default Web Site.
• Overview - Creating Skins for mojoPortal
• Creating mojoPortal Skins With Artisteer 3.1
• A More Flexible Set of Container Panels
• Controlling the Size of Avatars
• Forcing a Preferred Host Name

Arvixe Web Hosting is our top financial contributor to the mojoPortal project. They provide us with a dedicated server for running our site, a very generous affiliate program only available to open source projects, and they also sponsor members of our community as liaisons to help out in general in our forums and especially to help out if anyone has problems with their hosting at Arvixe. If you click one of our Arvixe ads and then purchase hosting and keep it for at least 60 days we get a very generous contribution from Arvixe no matter how low the hosting cost is to you. We think Arvixe is one of the best large shared hosting providers around. If you need hosting click one of our ads and give them a try, by doing so you will also be helping the mojoPortal project.

Carole Bennett of Indigo Tea and Ian McIntosh are our current Arvixe Commiunity Liaisons. Both of them have been writing a lot of great blog posts with good tutorials and tips for mojoPortal on the Arvixe Blog and we are maintaining a list of them here.

For those who would rather have someone else handle all the technical details of their hosting including installation, configuration, and upgrades of mojoPortal, we recommend i7MEDIA. You can let them handle all the technical details so you can focus on your site content. Joe Davis of i7MEDIA is our Community Manager, an expert in all things mojo and an all around helpful guy that you can count on.

We are continually trying to learn from our newsletter process, if any of you notice this message landing in your spam folder please do let me know.

Warm Regards,

Joe Audette

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