I'm very excited to announce that mojoPortal can now be optimized very well for major smart phones like iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

Actually I have 3 related things to announce.

• mojoPortal 2.3.6.7 is now available on our download page.
• We have a new product available now, named Mobile Kit Pro (requires mojoPortal 2.3.6.7), that includes a custom menu we implemented just for smart phones and a skin optimized for smart phones.
• Updated versions of Form Wizard Pro and Event Calendar Pro with compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.7 and Mobile Kit Pro.

See the Mobile Kit Pro product page for full details. You can also check out this site or our demo site using an iPhone, Android phone, or Windows Phone 7. My goal with Mobile Kit Pro is that you could just drop it in and set it as the mobile skin, and it would just work with most of your existing site content. In those few cases where you may have some content that doesn't work well even with Mobile Kit Pro applied, the new features in mojoPortal make it possible for you to make custom mobile specific versions of some content if you needed to or just leave some content out of the mobile experience. Of course this is the first release of Mobile Kit Pro and there will be free upgrades for future versions, so those who purchase it can provide feedback and impact the future of the product.

What's New in mojoPortal 2.3.6.7?

A lot of the work to make Mobile Kit Pro possible went into mojoPortal itself. We went through most of the features and in cases where the markup didn't lend itself well to the small screen size, we implemented alternate markup and made it possible to configure the use of the alternate markup from the theme.skin file. We also made a lot of different things about the rendering configurable from the theme.skin file, in some cases it is possible to override specific feature instance settings from the theme.skin. Even things like posting in the Forums from your smart phone should be a reasonably good experience.

Support for mobile specific skins, there is a new drop down list in Site Settings where you can specify the Mobile Skin for the site.

Simple but configurable mobile user agent detection is used to apply the mobile skin, see the Mobile Kit Pro product page for details.

Any page and any content instance in mojoPortal can be marked as for WebOnly, MobileOnly or the default All so that you have the ability to make mobile specific versions of your content if needed or leave out specific content from the mobile view if it doesn't work well on small screens. You will see a new dropdown list for this in Page Settings and on the General Tab in Feature Settings.

Some work has been done to combine javascripts as much as possible for better performance.

• Added support for the Google Plus Button in the Blog
• Upgrade to CKeditor 3.6.1
• Upgrade to TinyMCE 3.4.3.2
• Updated the CDN versions of jQuery and jQueryUI to the latest versions.
• Updated translations, thanks to all of our translators!
• A few bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

I think this is probably one of the most exciting announcements I've made since the beginning of the mojoPortal project, at least I'm very excited about it. It is very in keeping with our slogan "Advanced Web Sites Made Easy". Now mojoPortal can be a framework for developing custom mobile web applications as well.

Updates for Form Wizard Pro and Event Calendar Pro

As mentioned above we also did some work in Form Wizard Pro and event Calendar Pro so that they could also be optimized for mobile. These updates also require mojoPortal 2.3.6.7. They are free upgrades for existing customers, just sign in to the site as the user who purchased the product(s), and then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page, and then click "Order History".

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

Event Calendar Pro 3.4

Compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.6.
Added support for using Bing Maps as an alternate to Google Maps.

Form Wizard Pro 2.6.0.1

Compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.6.
Fixed bug in email notification where if more than one email address was configured for notification it failed to send the email. This bug was introduced in version 2.6.

Web Invoice Pro 1.7.0.1

Compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.6.
Added the ability to mark an invoice as paid in case payment came in through a different channel than online.
Fixed a bug where the payment due date was always 30 days after the invoice date even if you specified a different due date.

These are free upgrades for existing customers. If you previously purchased any of these products you can sign into this site (using the account that you used to purchase) and click the "My Account" link at the top and then "Order History". From there you can always download the latest version of the products you purchased.

Note that all of these updates require mojoPortal 2.3.6.6, so make sure you upgrade mojoPortal before updating or installing these add on products.

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.6.6, available now on our download page.

I know it might seem unusual to make a new release on a Sunday on a holiday weekend, but it just worked out that the new release was ready today and since it has some updates that community members have been waiting for I thought I should make it available as soon as possible.

What's New?

• Added a new prompt in edit screens to prevent accidently leaving the page if there are unsaved changes in the editor. I know I have experienced occasions myself where I was working on a long blog post or article, and by some strange combination of keystrokes it canceled out of the editor and jumped back a page and lost my work. The new prompt will prevent that.
• Made it possible to browse and preview skins from page settings and/or user profile when per page skins or per user skins are enabled.
• Users in roles that can manage skins can also have access to user specific skins even if it is not enabled for users in general. This makes it possible to work on skin changes or new skins more easily before assigning the skin to the site in general.
• Added support for the new google analytics feature that allows Tracking Page Load time, this is now enabled by default. Once you start capturing this data it is available in a new Site Speed report in the new version of Google Analytics.
• Our homemade tweet this link stopped working recently after some changes at twitter, so we updated to the official widget. This works much nicer now because twitter now has their own URL shortening service to automatically shorten URLs when using their widget.
• Upgrade to CKEditor 3.6
• Added unit sales to some commerce reports.
• Miscellaneous minor bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.
• Updated translations thanks to our awesome translation team!

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

Imagine Cup 2011 Multimedu - PEARLS Team

Please join me in congratulating these guys on winning 3rd place in the 2011 Imagine Cup in Greece with an application they built on top of mojoPortal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XClqjmjXw24
Note that the audio portion of the video is in Greek, but if you enable closed captioning it has English captions.

A description of the project from Panos Kakoulidis:

Multimedu is the first complete system that allows students with special needs to have access to the multiple capabilties of the Internet, intergrating them to the academic and the wider community.

System consists of 4 interconnected subsystems that support the significant processes of learning and participation:

1. DICTIONARY
2. MULTIMEDIA LIBRARY
3. PARALLEL PRESENTATIONS
4. SOCIAL NETWORKING

Dictionary is a multilingual catalog of terms which is updated by the active contribution of the users. On each term, multiple descriptions are offered in the form of text, picture and video in sign language. Moreover, there is text-to-speech support.

Multimedia Library is a hosting space for every kind of archives with educational content (video-recorded lectures, notes, presentations etc) which are accessible not only to the students with special needs but to everyone.

Parallel Presentations is an online system which offers the ability to attend on lessons, labs and seminars to all users, including people with sight or hearing problems by supporting them with videos in sign language, text-to-speech, access to Dictionary etc. Furthermore, it supports distance learning with active participation and lesson recording.

Last but not least, Social Networking support promotes mass participation and communication. This is achieved with user's profile and contacts, user groups, multimedia private messages and forum. 

Based on viewing the video, I would describe the system as a learning management system that supports users with special needs by making it possible to have multiple ways of presenting the same material and a social networking aspect that enables crowd sourcing the creation of material in various formats to support the needs of the users.

It is always rewarding to see the things that people build on top of mojoPortal. By not building from scratch they saved a lot of development time and were able to focus much sooner on the functionality they wanted to build. They have plans to bring the system online in the future, so we will post about them again once it is possible to see the site, but for now you can get a pretty good idea of what they have built from the video.

California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST)

We've featured this site before, so I'm leaving out the image, but I thought it was worth mentioning again because they let me know about an award they won and an even bigger award that they are in the running for. Quoting Linda Sabella, Information System Analyst with POST:

I just thought you might like an update on our submission of our Mojoportal site for a “Best of California” award.  We did win an award.  We won for custom software that our programmers built on top of Mojoportal that allows peace officers to access records and course catalogs. Awardees listed here http://www.centerdigitalgov.com/survey/2581

After the awards closed, the State of California CIO, impressed by our use of Mojoportal,   recommended our site for a national award.  This submission is specifically for our use of a  content management system.  We have submitted the paperwork and will let you know if we are successful in winning an award. Website http://www.nascio.org/awards/2011awards/

mojoportal has been a great asset to us.  Thank you for all of your efforts.

The Space Needle 50th Anniversary site

For those who don't know, the Space Needle, is a monument in Seattle Washington that opened just in time for the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair and has become "Seattle's favorite icon".

A few sites were submitted by Bibiana Garcia Zapata of Colombia

I'm the leader of a community in Internet named Avanet, we found mojoPortal and now We are so happy. We help others to mount their sites with mojo in our hosting with the multiple sites feature, :) It allows us to help and promote our slogan "digital altruism", our additional projects are

Our site is www.avanet.org
and these are the projects that we help
http://www.barcampmedellin.org
http://www.anti-depredadores.org
http://senageeks.avanet.org
http://www.nexos.net.co/

Thanks to all the community members who keep us informed of the sites they are building with mojoPortal! If you've done something interesting with mojoPortal we'd love to hear from you, and maybe we will feature your site in a blog post.

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook

I'm happy to announce the release of Form Wizard Pro 2.6, available now in the mojoPortal Store.

This is a significant upgrade with major new features. For existing customers who have already purchased Form Wizard Pro, it is a free upgrade. You can always get the latest version of purchased products by signing in to the site using the account that you used to purchase, then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page and then click "Order History", from there you can download the latest version of any add on products you have purchased.

Form Wizard Pro is the most popular add on product for mojoPortal CMS (requires mojoPortal 2.3.6.4 or higher) and a great addition to any site. With Form Wizard Pro you can easily create custom forms and surveys on your site and this release adds a number of the most requested new features including:

• Support for File Uploads, you can configure it to allow up to 4 files to be uploaded as part of the form submission. You can even have the files included as attachments in the notification email.
• A new plugin system that allows developers to implement custom Form Submission Handlers to do additional custom processing on the submitted data.
• Support for per question custom CSS classes to make it even easier to style your forms.
• A new setting that allows you to leave the details out of the notification email in case sensitive data is being submitted that you would rather not include in email.
• A new setting that allows leaving out unanswered questions when including the form details in the notification. This can be helpful in saving paper if you are printing the email notifications and have long forms with lots of optional questions.

You can also try Form Wizard Pro on our demo site to see how easy it really is. If you are getting a lot of value out of the free mojoPortal features why not purchase Form Wizard Pro for your site, it will make your site even better and the sales revenue supports the ongoing development of mojoPortal.

Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook