Those of you who have been using mojoPortal on Mono will be excited to hear of an important milestone reached in the Mono project. Recently in Mono's svn repository (r100264 or newer) has landed support for ASP.NET CSS Control Adapters.

Thanks to the great work of Dean Brettle for implementing this in Mono! Dean has been involved with mojoPortal from the beginning and is also the author of 2 great projects, NeatUpload and NeatHtml, both of which are used in mojoPortal.

The need for Css Control Adapters arises from the fact that the original ASP.NET implementation of some important .NET controls like Menu and Treeview was less than ideal when first released by Microsoft. The problem was that these controls rendered as nested html tables instead of the more semantically correct nesting of ul and li elements. To solve this problem, Microsoft subesquently released the CSS Control Adapters. Since the Mono implementation of Menu and Treeview mirrored the original Microsoft implementation it also rendered as nested tables. Some plumbing was needed in Mono to support the control adapters and Dean stepped up and took on the task.

Because the mojoPortal css was designed to style nested ul and li elements and not html tables, up until now the menu in mojoPortal did not render or style correctly when running on Mono as shown in this screen shot of mojoPortal running on the current Mono 1.9 release:

and now with the latest Mono built from svn:

So I think the next release of Mono will be very exciting for anyone using mojoPortal on Mono.

Again, huge thanks to Dean Brettle, Marek Habersack, and anyone else who may have had a hand in getting this done!

Update 2008-04-10 1:46PM EST - Dean mentioned that: "Owen Brady (aka Ocean) deserves a lot of the credit.  I used his code to parse and process the *.browser files."

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.2.

New this release:

AddThis.com button added to blog and to skins to make it easy for others to bookmark and share your site pages using popular bookmarking services. See my previous post for more info.

Contact Form Improvements

The contact form now persists messages to the database so messages are not lost if smtp is not configured. A cool new UI for reviewing messages has been added. It uses ExtJs Window for which I implemented a new .NET WebControl.

The window and the panes are re-sizable by dragging. I also added a Web.config option that should help users who have been reporting problems with contact form messages not being encoded correctly for Russian and other languages.

<!-- leave this blank for ascii encoding -->
<add key="SmtpPreferredEncoding" value="" />
<!-- example for Russian encoding
<add key="SmtpPreferredEncoding" value="koi8-r" />
-->

New Skin - extjsViewport1

I also implemented a new skin based on the ExtJs complex layout example, its named extjsViewport1.

I'm really just scratching the surface so far, I think it will be possible to have feature instances collapse accordian style and the possiblity to drag and drop feature instances to re-arrange content on the page. So far just some foundation work is done, but it is usable.

As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading and if you have any troubles post in the forums and I will try to help.

I'm sure those of you out there reading this blog also read a lot of other blogs and have noticed over time the chickletization of blog pages with little icons for all the different bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and Digg, and on and on with the ever growing plethora of other services. I was starting to feel that the mojoPortal blog was a little behind the times in this respect. Then I noticed on TechCrunch, the use of the AddThis.com widget. After looking into the integration I could see that it was relatively low hanging fruit to implement a .NET control that makes it easy to add the AddThis button.

Use of the .NET control in markup is like this:

<mp:AddThisButton ID="at1" runat="server"
AccountId=""
ButtonImageUrl="~/Data/SiteImages/addthisbookmarkbutton.gif"
Text="Share This Using Popular Bookmarking Services"
CustomBrand="mojoPortal"
CustomLogoUrl="http://www.mojoportal.com/Data/mojoportal_box_dropshadow.png"
CustomLogoBackgroundColor="e8e8e8"
CustomOptions=""
UrlToShare=""
TitleOfUrlToShare=""
/>

If you leave the UrlToShare and TitleofUrlToShare blank it automatically uses the current page which makes it easy to add it to the layout.master file of your mojoPortal skin so it appears on every page.

In the blog we databind those properties to the title and url of the blog post.

If the account id is not set the control doesn't render.

Now we can just let AddThis.com keep track of the emerging services and add them for us instead of having to add a new chicklet every time some cool new service appears.

At the time of this post, this feature is only available from the mojoPortal source code repository, but it will be in the next release coming soon.

Update 5:39 PM: I just discovered that AddThis.com also has a button for RSS subscriptions so that one button can offer all the popular services. So I will be implementing use of that soon too and doing away with the multiple graphics (chicklets) for RSS subscriptions that we currently have. This is what the new button will look like (there are several options but this is my pick), I'll implement it so that users can choose their own button graphic.

click it to see the rss feed subscription choices. I don't want to have to keep up with all those chicklets either, so AddThis has a great idea here.

Last August (2007), someone commented in my blog, saying something to the effect that they thought the biggest thing holding back mojoPortal was the lack of good looking skins included. Of course this was something I had been thinking too but the comment motivated me to do something about it. Not being a good designer myself but very knowledgable of Html and css I set out to find some free Xhtml compliant designs and implement them in mojoPortal. After a lot of browsing and downloading of designs I spent a period of 10 days doing nothing but implementing skins from the designs. On average I was able to implement one skin a day so I ended up with 10 good looking skins in 10 days.

Since releasing those 10 good looking skins the popularity of mojoPortal seemed to spike upwards fairly dramatically so I concluded that the time spent implementing those skins was well spent and the lack of good looking skins prior to that probably really was holding us back in terms of popularity. Those skins have since formed a nice starting point for others to make their own custom skins as I have seen in the wild on various mojoPortal sites.

Currently we ship about 30 skins with mojoPortal, 10 of which are good looking and 20 that are just ok or mediocre, or just outdated looking. So I'm thinking its time to drop out most of the boring ones and do another round of 10 skin implementations to bring us up to 20 good looking skins. I figure we can move the less good looking ones to the community download page so people can still get them if they want them but we will just package the 20 or so good looking ones with new versions of mojoPortal.

So I invite you to help pick out the designs for the next 10 skins that I will implement. Please post links in the comments to this post pointing to the designs you like the best. They have to be free, open source, and Xhtml compliant. Preferably with no tables used for layout and with ul and li elements used for the menu. Extra points for designs with interesting menu styling that is different than anything we have now. When I look at the designs I also consider whether they will make a good starting point for users to make custom skins.

Some places where you can browse good designs:

http://www.opendesigns.org/
http://www.openwebdesign.org/
http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/
http://www.oswd.org/

Let me know of others and I will update this post.

Now is your chance, if you know of a good looking design but not sure how to implement it as a skin yourself, post a link. If I agree its a good looking design I will probably implement it, it just depends on how many good suggestions I get. The 10 that I like best I will implement.

My goal is that when people try out mojoPortal they find it has a lot of good looking designs included so they have a lot to work with in customizing them for their own sites. So please, help me pick some really good looking ones!

I've just released mojoPortal 2.2.5.1, which is a bug fix release for things reported in the forums since the 2.2.5.0 release.

Specifically there was a bug in the Google Maps that caused it to not have the width and height so it made the map disappear.

There was a bug in the new folder image gallery.

There was a bug in the MS SQL version that prevented login if the site was configured for encrypted passwords and login using email.

I've also added better error handling around the search index builders due to a few reports of errors that I was not able to reproduce.

See my previous post for details about new features and enhancements.

I'd also like to mention that I've been working on some new video tutorials.

• How To Manage The Site Hierarchy - creating pages, moving them arround, managing parent child relationships between pages.
• How To Publish Content on Multiple Pages.
• Using the FCKeditor
• Using the FCKeditor - Part 2
• How to ban ip addresses - Sometimes you may see malicious or nuisance traffic in your logs. You can fight back to some degree by banning ip addresses.
•  
• As always, backup your site and database before upgrading and if you have any troubles, post in the forums and I will try to help.