I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.6.8, available now on the download page.
Actually I released the files yesterday but didn't manage to get to making a release announcement until today because I was still working on some related documentation that I wanted to link to.
Whats New?
Google Analytics Integration
As I mentioned in my previous post, we now have Advanced Integration with Google Analytics built in. There was a lot to talk about so I made that its own post yesterday instead of including it all in the release announcement.
Gravatars
For a long time I've been wanting to implement a better avatar system, because the one we had with just a list of little cartoons you could choose from seemed pretty lame and out of date. The other day, while reading Scott Hanselman's blog, I noticed that he was using Gravatars in his blog comments. I looked into the implementation and it was trivial so I implemented support for Gravatars in the mojoPortal forums and profile system. I haven't got it in blog comments yet but will try to get to that in a future version. The idea of Gravatars is that you can have an avatar that follows you whenever you visit any sites that support Gravatar. If you look in the mojoPortal Forums, you'll see my Gravatar.
If you don't have a Gravatar it just displays a generic one:
So, if you are a frequent visitor, go and get yourself a Gravatar. Gravatars are rated like movies G, PG, R, X, by default, mojoPortal is only configured to display Gravatars rated as G, but you can set this in Web.config or user.config:
<add key="GravatarMaxAllowedRating" value="G" />
Its just a minor feature but its a social feature that I think can make a community site more appealing.
Enhanced OpenID Support
We've had support for OpenID authentication for quite a while now, but recently I came across ID Selector, an enhancement for the OpenID login box.
It makes it easy for users to sign in or register using their existing open id enabled account. I've created documentation about enabling OpenID selector in mojoPortal here: http://www.mojoportal.com/using-openid.aspx
Using OpenID or Windows Live ID can increase the number of users who register on your site because they don't have to create any new passwords. Everyone hates new passwords and thats probably one of the biggest reasons people resist registering on new sites, so eliminating that issue can increase registration and participation in your site.
New Developer Extension Points
Actually, I implemented these a few versions ago but just now got around to documenting them.
These are basically plugin systems that let you build and plugin your own handlers so you can execute your own custom logic whenever a new user is created or a new page is created. I'm always trying to dicourage people from modifying the core of mojoportal and put their custom code in external projects. If you make changes in the core code and those changes don't go back into the project you are basically creating a fork and it will be difficult to upgrade to future versions without losing your custom code, so unless you are working on something that is going to be integrated back into the project you should never change code in the core. If you run into something where you think you are going to need to modify the core, let us know in the developer forum and maybe we can suggest a way to accomplish your goal using external projects, or maybe we will consider integrating your change if its appropriate, or maybe your questions will lead us to add new extension points to make it possible to do what you want without modifying the core.
Event Calendar Pro Will Be On Sale Next Week
My first for sale feature will be in the Store sometime next week. The first version is feature complete, and you can try it out on demo.mojoportal.com. I still need to make help files, documentation, training/demo video, marketing text, licensing text, etc etc, so it will take me a few days to get that stuff done. I'll make a detailed post about this feature after its available.