Volume 2 Edition 5 June 2010
mojoPortal 2.3.4.5
mojoPortal 2.3.4.5 was released on June 18, as a follow up to version 2.3.4.4 which was released on June 3rd.
The highlights of new features for June include
- A new skin, artisteer-24flashclouds to provide an example of an Artisteer design that uses Flash.
- A Facebook "Like" button that can be enabled in the Blog and Html features
- A new Bing Map feature with similar functionality to our existing Google Map feature. I kind of like the Bing maps better myself.
- New alternate site search features allow you to use Bing or Google for site search instead of or in addition to the internal site search.
We moved our source code repository to Codeplex using a new Mercurial repository in May. Novell Forge which hosted our Subversion repository since 2005 officially closed down in March, though I only found out about it in May when it went offline. Interestingly, it seems someone turned the server back on as it was back online in June and I was able to recover the history from Subversion into a new Mercurial repository which is now archived on CD.
We also established our .NET 4 Transition Plan in May which made it possible to move forward with .NET 4 while still supporting builds for 3.5 .NET for at least another year.
Developer Tutorials
I completed quite a few more videos in May, there are currently a total of 32 developer training videos.
There are still a few more things I plan to cover. I will be teaching about how to use friendly urls in your features, how to make your features searchable in the site search engine and a few clips with various developer tips and pointers to built in helper methods that you can use in your custom features.
In Site Analytics Pro
I have begun work on a new product that I hope to have on sale in the mojoPortal Store in the near future. The feature will be named In Site Analytics Pro and it will enable you to see and optionally publish reports and charts of site traffic. It uses the Google Analytics Data API to query data from your Google Analytics account, so it requires Google Analytics to be enabled and capturing traffic data.
For the first release it will plug into the Administration Menu and it will have a few built in reports and charts as well as a query tool that allows you to do ad hoc queries of various metrics and dimensions captured by Google Analytics.
For the second release I plan to implement saved query definitions and report definitions and introduce a Module that can be plugged into the content system making it possible to publish reports or charts on CMS pages.
Beyond that I think there could be a lot of value added by capturing the most important metrics into the database for caching. There is a 10,000 request per day limit on the Google Analytics Data API, so we would definitely want to cache reports published on public pages if they get a lot of traffic. Also Google only keeps Analytics data for 2 years, so capturing the important metrics into the database would keep a permanent record of previous traffic metrics.
I'm hoping that many of you will be interested in this product and purchase it when the initial release is available and provide feedback. There will be free upgrades for the life of the product and your input could help shape the features along the way.
This is now also the policy for Form Wizard Pro and Event Calendar Pro. You get free upgrades for the life of those products too (retroactively). When I first released those products I promised free upgrades for at least the first year, but over time ther have been many occasions when there were changes needed in those products to accommodate changes in mojoPortal. For example whenever we upgrade to a new version of AjaxControlToolkit in mojoPortal, we have to update the add on products as well since they also depend on the AjaxControlToolkit. So I would never want to have anyone in a bind where they could not upgrade their mojoPortal site because it would not be compatible with an older version add on product or they would have to buy the product again to get a compatible version. It is just simpler for everyone knowing that you can always get the updated version of the add on if needed whenever you upgrade to new version of mojoPortal.
Keep an eye on our blog as I will announce when the first release of In Site Analytics Pro is available.
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Warm Regards,
Joe Audette
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