I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.0.

This release contains some significant database schema changes, almost every table has some new columns. As with every upgrade, its important that you backup your site and your database before upgrading so that you can get back to a known working condition should anything go wrong. I fully expect the upgrade to go smoothly and my advice about backing up is no different than any other release. I just figure that since the upgrade scripts are touching so many tables it merits emphasizing this precaution.

So why were so many tables modified this time? Well its laying the foundation for some things to come.

Architectural Changes - Guids are Good

Although we are using integer ids on most tables in mojoPortal (which is optimal for performance), we have added Guids (Globally Unique Identifiers) to most tables that can be thought of as supplemental primary keys and foreign keys. Guids are guaranteed to be unique across machines. It seems almost impossible but supposedly you can generate Guids all day and never make the same one twice or conflict with ones generated on other machines. So what are the benefits of having these Guids on your tables?

One benefit is that it makes it more feasible if you need to combine data from 2 mojoPortal sites into one site. It still would require some custom query work, but the basic idea is that the imported data would not get the same integer ids as it had in the previous system, but the relationships between rows could be re-established using the Guids.

The other benefit and perhaps the more important one is that it allows flexible relationships between tables that make it easier to re-use some functionality across features. For example, I plan soon to implement some things like Content Rating and Content Versioning. So for example I will need a ContentHistory table for the versioning so I can store a copy of every change to a content instance. Instead of implementing this versioning just for the Html Content feature, I'm implementing it in a way that multiple features can use it. So instead of having joins between the ContentHistory table and the HtmlContent table, I will store the history using the Guid that identifies the Html Content instance. It will be able to retrieve its history by passing in its Guid. I could then re-use it in the Blog feature if I want because blog items have their own Guids and can retrieve their history by passing in a Guid. Same thing for the event calendar feature. So basically the ContentHistory table doesn't care which features store their history in it and doesn't have any hard foreign key relationships, but instead loose relationships by virtue of Guids. So the ContentHistory table will have a column named ContentGuid which can relate to the Guid columns of any feature specific tables.

Consider the ContentRating table, again it will have a column named ContentGuid, but I could pass in any feature instance specific Guid, or I could even pass in a page Guid and have ratings at the page level or content instance level. I'll be able to re-use it in Blogs, Html Content, Events, Forums, or anywhere else I need to use it. It will of course be up to the feature or page or whatever to know how to retrieve its ratings or history using its own Guids.

I have not yet implemented  Content Ratings or Content Versioning, but with the Guids in place I can now implement it once and use it in flexible ways across various features. You won't notice anything in the user experience yet from this addition of Guid columns, but the value of this will be more apparent in future releases. These are just examples too, there are actually a lot more things like tagging, meta data and other sub systems that I want to be able to re-use across features and the use of Guids will make that much easier to implement.

Also, this release introduces SubSonic into our architecture which will make it much easier going forward to support all the different databases. See my previous post for more information about the use of SubSonic in mojoPortal.

Blog Enhancements

Its now possible to have a google map in your blog posts by entering a location. Not sure how often you will find that useful, but its there if you need it. A more exciting enhancement to the blog is support for Odiogo, a free service that can generate audio podcasts from you posts automatically. To use it all you have to do is enter your Odiogo feed id and podcast url into the blog settings. Both of these enhancements were pretty low hanging fruit, that is, easy to implement.

Event Calendar Enhancements

Its now possible to enter a location for an Event and have a google map appear in the event details page. The google maps api key now can be stored in Site Settings for all google map enabled features.

Forum Enhancement

A small but useful enhancement is the ability to view threads by user. For any user that has made forum posts now a link to "View Posts" appears below their forum signature as well as on the member list and profile pages.

A New Image Gallery

I blogged about this new feature here.

More work on WebStore

I've been working a lot recently on getting the WebStore feature working on MySql for two reasons. One is so that I can demo it at the MySql Conference. The other is so that I can open up a store on this site to sell premium features. Its very challenging making a living as an open source developer when you give away your products. I do ok when I get consulting work but that is sporadic and not all the work I get has any benefit to the mojoPortal project so sometimes its actually slowing down progress of the project when I take consulting work. Most of the actual progress is still happening when I'm working for free on my own time. So I'm hoping that I can come up with some premium features that you would be willing to pay for. The core of mojoPortal will always remain open source but I need to get some revenue stream going so that I can afford to keep working on improving the core features. I'm also going to roll out a corporate benefactor program soon to make it easier for companies who are building their infrastructure on mojoPortal to get involved in supporting the project financially and influencing the direction of progress.

The WebStore feature should still be considered very experimental, but as I get it running on this site and begin to use it in actual commerce, it will get polished up more quickly and soon be in a condition for others to use.

This release also includes fixes for various bugs posted in the forums since the last release.

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

New Tutorial Videos

• How To Manage The Site Hierarchy - creating pages, moving them arround, managing parent child relationships between pages.
• How To Publish Content on Multiple Pages.

Recently I came across Odiogo, a service that generates audio podcasts from your blog posts automatically. Considering its text to speech technology, I was surprised how good it sounds. I mean you can tell its Mr Roboto but the voice and speech are impressively more natural sounding than any other text to speech things I've heard so far.

Their business model is to place audio ads inside the generated mp3s which makes sense as a way to offer the service free. Pretty cool idea they have going if you ask me.

So I signed up last week and within some hours I had an account and a link to the podcast page they generated for my blog.

Today I got around to integrating it into the mojoPortal blog to make it easy, so all you have to do is enter your odogio feed id and your podcast page url. They have some javascript that sets up a "Listen Now" button right in your post which is very nice. Those of you reading this from a feed reader will have to visit this site to see the listen now button or visit the podcast page linked above to go directly to the podcasts.

So now its possible to subscribe to this blog in iTunes if you like.

I also implemented the ping to their service page when a new post is added so it can know right away that there is new content to convert from text to speech. It will be interesting to see how long it takes from the time of making a new post to when the podcast is ready.

This feature will be in svn trunk by later tonight for anyone interested in trying it themselves.

UPDATE 2008-03-24:

Since I've been using the Odiogo service on this site, several times I've seen extremely long page loads on the blog, where apparently the Odiogo service goes down and the delay in rendering the page is caused because the javascript coming off the Odiogo server is not available. Finally the request times out and the page loads without the "Listen Now" button. So I've been turning the Odiogo feature off when this happens by removing my Odiogo feed id. This is something I hope the Odiogo folks can figure out and resolve effectively, possibly due to growing pains but I'm not one to keep using services when stuff like that starts happening repeatedly. They either need to improve the availability of their service or let us host the javascript on our own sites so that when the service is down it doesn't kill performance of our sites. So far this has happened twice that I know of and who knows if it happens when I'm not looking so its making me leave the Odiogo feature turned off because I don't have confidence in it.

mojoPortal no longer supports SubSonic.

In the week prior to my vacation I had started working with SubSonic to see if it could be useful in mojoPortal since it has support for a number of databases, I figured it could reduce the work of supporting all these different dbs.

SubSonic is basically a toolkit for interogating databases for their schema and has the ability to generate db specific sql statements for common tasks. It also has a code generation feature so it can generate .NET classes based on database tables. It can be used as an OR mapper, that is, you could use the generated classes as your business objects, you could either inherit from them or use partial classes to bolt on custom functionality on top of what was generated by SubSonic. But for people like me who just never bought into the whole OR mapper thing, the generated classes can just be thought of as data objects that abstract the database table. It can return standard data in the form of IDataReader which is what the mojoPortal business objects like to consume and allows using SubSonic without having any particular dependency on SubSonic in my business classes.

It comes with providers for MS SQL, Oracle, MySql and SQLite and there were some other partially complete providers that I found in the wild. So my plan was, for proof of concept, to take a simple feature like the links module and try to re-implement it for all the dbs by using SubSonic. The short story is, yes I got it working for all 5 of the currently supported databases in mojoPortal. I re-implemented a new SQLite provider using Mono.Data.Sqlite which I already knew works both on Windows and on Linux/Mono. I found a postgresql provider here (thanks to Justin Greene and Maurício Machado) that was usable with a little bit of work. I also found a starter implementation for Firebird Sql (thanks to  Ricardo García) that I was able to complete and get working.

I've since gone on to implement the data layer for the WebStore feature for MySql, mostly using SubSonic. And the things that did use SubSonic are completely re-usable for the other data layers so the bulk of the work is already done for implementing the web store for postgre sql and Firebird.

SubSonic also comes with a thing called the scaffold page which is basically a web page that allows managing data in all of the tables in your database. Just drop it in and it works. I've modified the one in mojoPortal a little for various little issues I encountered and also to add security checks to control access to the page.

Since the code templates used by SubSonic are basically .aspx pages, I got the idea of making a browser based gui for code generation. I implemented that today and got the initial proof of concept done in about 4 hours of playing around. So at the moment its kind of like a poor man's Codesmith in the browser.

At any rate, I made a quick tutorial video about use of SubSonic in mojoPortal, sort of a developers introduction to it. Its pretty cool stuff so I hope you'll have a look.

Before I went on vacation I implemented a new image gallery based on this PhotoHandler project on Codeplex that was pointed out to me by Todd Lewis. We already had a photo gallery feature but its a fairly low frills thing, you have to upload images one at a time. My thinking has been that eventually I'll implement one that integrates with Flickr and some day I may yet do that.

The new one was pretty easy to intgrate into mojoPortal, it allows you to just point it at a folder containing images and it does the rest, creating thumbnails, web size images etc. So the idea with the new one is you organize the photos into folders on your local machine then upload the whole parent folder using an ftp client like FileZilla or whatever you use. The folder(s) need to be uploaded to Data/Sites/[SiteID]/foldergalleries folder, but from there you can nest them any way you want.

I did implement a feature for uploading files but the ftp approach is the sweet spot.

You can see my vacation photos using the new gallery here: http://www.joeaudette.com/photography.aspx

Notice how it makes a thumbnail for the sub folders by amalgamating the images contained in it into a thumbnail

So there are 3 top level folders, ChichenItza, resort, and skyline

Its available now in svn trunk for developers and will be in the next release which will probably be in the next few weeks.

Just got confirmation that I will be co-presenting with Joseph Hill at the MySQL Conference and Expo. The session is titled Cross Platform .NET Development with Mono and MySQL.

"This session provides an introduction to application development with Mono and MySQL, and will discuss the current state of Mono, including its support for databases through ADO.NET and LINQ. We will also take a look at several tools that can be leveraged to ease migration of applications to Mono and MySQL, and explore how one open source ASP.NET application provides support for Mono and MySQL."

I'm very excited about this conference and the opportunity to talk about mojoPortal, Mono, and MySQL. I've known Joseph through correspondence and his involvement with the Mono community since 2003 so I'm looking forward to finally meeting him in person. He's recently joined Novell as the Product Manager for Mono which I think bodes very well for the Mono Project.

In addition to co-presenting this session I'll be manning the mojoPortal booth. I've still got a few available entrance passes for anyone interested in attending and willing to help man the booth. We have one session pass to share between the 4 entrance passes so we'll have to take turns covering the booth and going to sessions. Let me know if you're interested and are able to arrange your own travel to the event.