mojoPortal 2.3.7.0 Released

We released mojoPortal 2.3.7.0 today, September 29, 2011. Since the last release, the focus of our work has been on improved web farm support. We've completed abstraction layers for the file system and for caching, and we've implemented a log4net appender that can log to the database. We are still working on various providers that can plug into the new abstraction layers and other improvements, so our work on web farm support will continue into October. We've almost completed our support and guidance documentation for Windows Azure, we have some of the documentation online now as mentioned below in the new and updated documents section, but we will be completing that work and making an announcement about it soon. After that we will turn our efforts to more traditional types of web farms using the Amazon EC2 cloud, and the Microsoft Web Farm Framework.

So, for now much of the web farm improvements won't be things users will notice. Other highlights of this release include:

• Implemented an option to log errors and informational logging to the database instead of the file system
• Upgraded to TinyMCE 3.4.5
• Upgraded to CKeditor 3.6.2
• Upgraded to the latest AjaxControlToolkit
• Updated to latest version of Recaptcha library
• Updated the google maps to use the new v3 API, thanks to Jamie Eubanks for his work on this
• Added Whois ip address lookup dialog in most places where ip addresses are displayed

The update to AjaxControlToolkit required us to also make new releases of Event Calendar Pro, Form Wizard Pro, and Web Invoice Pro, because these features use the AjaxControlToolkit and they need to use the same version as mojoPortal. So you'll need to upgrade these products at the same time as you upgrade mojoPortal.

Product Updates

Event Calendar Pro 3.4.0.2 includes new links to allow users to easily add events to Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Windows Live Calendar, and Outlook/iCalendar. We also added a new text area that can be shown during event registration to capture additional information from users who register or purchase tickets for events. You can provide instructions that will be shown above the text area to let your users know what additional information is needed. As mentioned above this version was also updated to use the latest version of AjaxControlToolkit to keep it compatible with the latest version of mojoPortal.

Form Wizard Pro 2.6.0.3 includes a minor improvement to allow file uploads to be configured as optional instead of required. It also was updated to use the latest AjaxControlToolkit for compatibility with mojoPortal 2.3.7.0.

mojoPortal.com Gets a New Look!

Thanks to our friends at DM2 Creative Marketing Communications and i7MEDIA, mojoPortal.com now has a much nicer new design. Mark Asquith and the talented team at DM2 Creative came up with the design and Joe Davis of i7MEDIA did the conversion from a .psd file to a mojoPortal skin and also did lots of styling work for the features. I really love the new look and can't thank those guys enough for their great work. I hope you like it too!

You've probably noticed that we also updated our newsletter template to coordinate with the new site design.

Vote for mojoPortal in the 2011 CMS Awards

Thanks to your nominations mojoPortal is now a finalist in the 2011 CMS Awards! This means we've made it to the voting stage, and now we need your vote. The competition is very tough because we are competing against much larger communities, so we need every vote we can get. If you haven't already place take a moment and Vote for mojoPortal.

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.

• Controlling the Size of Avatars
• Allowing Users to Upload and Browse Files
• Using the Blog Feed in Feed Manager
• Using the MyPage Feature
• Web Farms and Clusters
• Overview - Scaling Up vs Scaling Out
• Implementation Considerations for Web Farms
• Overview of the Windows Azure Platform

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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