Volume 3 Edition 8 August 2011
2011 CMS Awards
The 2011 Open Source Awards by Packt Publishing is currently in the nomination phase. We hope to compete in the Open Source CMS category again this year, but every year it is very competitive so to do that we need a lot of nominations. If you haven't already please nominate mojoPortal. The deadline for nominations is September 9, 2011. The nomination phase determines the finalists, then there will be a phase of voting for the finalists and finally a phase where judges weigh in and determine the final winners.
We need your help, so please nominate us today!
What's Next for mojoPortal
As you know our last release was focused on mobile and I believe mojoPortal is now ahead of the pack when it comes to support for modern smart phones. The new features in mojoPortal combined with our Mobile Kit Pro add on make it very easy for you to deliver a good experience to your mobile visitors.
The next big thing we want to accomplish is to make mojoPortal very friendly for web farm and cloud hosting environments. In the past we've refrained from describing mojoPortal as an Enterprise CMS partly because we knew there was work yet to be done to make it easier to scale out across machines and we consider this an Enterprise feature. We've always been able to support a lot of traffic on a scaled up system and very few sites on the web really get that kind of traffic. But more and more we have found that the user friendliness of mojoPortal has attracted enterprise customers and quite a few community members are already managing to run mojoPortal in small web farms and failover clusters. So we decided it is time to really look closely at the kinds of issues that affect scaled out environments and make it as easy as possible to use mojoPortal in a variety of web farm configurations. We want to support traditional web farms that use load balancing accross multiple web servers as well as modern cloud hosting environments such as Windows Azure and we want to provide documentation and guidance to help people setup and configure such environments.
We've been working on this for most of August and some of the pieces are coming together but we still have more work ahead. With luck we will be able to complete most of the work by the end of September. It has been some difficult work implementing abstraction layers around the file system for user uploaded files and caching so that different providers could be plugged in for file storage and caching. We want to be able to use Windows Azure Blob storage for user uploaded files for example, and we'd like to be able to use things like AppFabric Caching or Memcached so that the cache can be shared across nodes in the farm. The work has been both challenging and fun so far and it is going to be very exciting to see mojoPortal optimized for these scenarios. We've also implemented a way to log to the database instead of the file system so that there can be a central log for all the nodes in a farm or cloud environment. Stay tuned for announcements in late September!
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.
Improving your YSlow Score
Design Resources
Customizing the 404 Page Not Found Page
Adding a Google Plus Button to All Pages
Visual Studio Performance Tips
Sending Bulk Email
Using a Wildcard SSL Certificate in IIS 7.x
Blog post - mojoPortal Sighting for August 2011
In addition to these articles I'd like to thank Carole Bennett of Indigo Tea and Ian McIntosh. Both of them have been acting as mojoPortal community liaisons for Arvixe Web Hosting, and they been writing a lot of great blog posts on the Arvixe Blog and I've compiled a list of them here, and highly recommend you check them out
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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