This month's mojoPortal sightings include Clearview, the UK's leading regional glazing industry magazine.

and Total Waste Managers Ltd

Both sites were designed by DM2 Creative Marketing Communications in the UK, the same designers who came up with the latest design for this site.

We'd love to hear about the sites you are bringing online with mojoPortal. If you have a high profile site or a design that you're particularly proud of, or a site showing custom features you've built on mojoPortal, let us know, maybe we'll feature your site(s) in a blog post.

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More and more people are accessing the web using smart phones and tablets and while much progress has been made to provide a good web experience for those devices, until now one major shortcoming has been the lack of support for use of web based WYSIWYG editors like CKeditor and TinyMCE. The problem has been that while the WYSIWYG editors would display ok, they did not trigger the keyboard input so they were not usable because clicking/touching them did not put the focus in the editor and did not bring up the keyboard. The best solution we could come up with was to force the use of a plain old textarea which would trigger the keyboard but required entering raw html making it more tedious to use and requiring knowledge of html from the user. We tried to make it a little better by using MarkitUp to at least provide a toolbar with some helpful html elements as shown below in this screen shot from an old iPhone 3.

HTML 5 actually defines a contentEditable attribute which is intended for use in making web pages editable but it wasn't supported in previous versions of IOS/Mobile Safari until now with the recent release of IOS 5. Fortunately for us the makers of the popular open source WYSIWYG editors have been working on this using the beta versions of IOS 5 so that now since the official release both of these editors can work in iPhones and iPads that have IOS 5. Shown below is a screen shot of TinyMCE used in iPhone 4S.

We've modified mojoPortal to take advantage of this and not force the plain textarea if we detect an IOS 5 device. This change is already in our source code repository and will be in the next release of mojoPortal. You can also try it out on our demo site using your IOS 5 device. For other devices we still use the textarea approach but I suspect that over time we will be able to enable the WYSIWYG editors for even more devices.

I'm very excited that this major limitation has been overcome in IOS 5 and especially for iPad which is a great web browsing experience and now is even better since you can actually edit your content easily. Huge kudos to the developers of TinyMCE and CKeditor for their great work in supporting mobile devices.

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I've just uploaded a new release of Form Wizard Pro version 2.6.0.4. Like the previous version this release requires mojoPortal 2.3.7.0 or higher.

As always it is a free upgrade for existing customers who have purchased Form Wizard Pro (sign into this site as the user who purchased, then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page then "Order History").

For those who don't know, Form Wizard Pro makes it very easy for you to create custom forms and simple surveys on your site with drag and drop arrangement of the questions. It can be used for a variety of things such as custom contact forms, quote requests, job applications (it supports file uploads), simple surveys (multi page forms), etc. You can browse the submissions as a grid or page through them one at a time and you can export to Excel or Word. You can also import and export questions or even complete form definitions. Give it a try on our demo site.

What's New in This Release?

• New setting to enable question aliases. Question aliases allow you to use a shorter question name in the grid views and data exports. This can be very helpful since long question text can be unwieldy as a column heading in a grid.
• New setting to enable option aliases for list type questions (checkboxes, radio buttons, drop down list question types). Similar to question aliases, you may want to display a longer value to the user but use a shorter value as the actual result. For example you may show a list of stores and display the street address which is more understandable for the user who is submitting the form, but internally you may want to use store numbers as the actual submitted result.
• A way to visually group questions. We added a new setting for "Flatten Pages as Groups", if chedcked then what would normally be a multi page form will have all the questions on a single page, but the questions will be grouped into divs with a CSS class="qgroup qgroup1" where the numeric part of the second class is based on the page number. This way you have a class that can be used to style groups consistently or style specific groups differently.
• It is now possible to override the text on the "Submit" button.
• Vertical layout instead of grid layout when exporting to Word.

The sales of our add-on products is what makes the continued development of mojoPortal possible. Why not make your site even better and support our work?

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.7.0, available now on our download page.

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 web farm documentation online now, 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 are just architectural changes that 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

Updated Add On Products

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 of the AjaxControlToolit as mojoPortal. So you'll need to upgrade these products at the same time as you upgrade mojoPortal. 

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.

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Thanks to our friends at DM2 Creative 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!

Many of you may already know that I am not a designer myself, though I'm a pretty good mechanic when it comes to CSS and I can implement designs that others come up with, I lack any talent for creating designs from scratch. I'm just a developer, I can make it work well but I can't make it pretty, I need others to help with that.

The previous skin that we've used for the last 4 months or so was really something that Joe Davis had only intended as an example skin we could ship with mojoPortal, he never intended it to be the new design for mojoPortal.com, but I liked it and thought it was time for a change since the design we had before that was just some free design I had found on the internet. But after the change we got lots of complaints and only a few people said they liked it and I began to realize that not only am I not a good designer, I'm not really even a very good judge of design. However, I really did not want to go back to the previous design so I asked Joe and Mark to help, and this new design that we've launched today is the result of their awesome help.

Again huge thanks to Mark Asquith and his associates and to Joe Davis for making this site look great!

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