I've just released mojoPortal 2.2.4.6-b, its available now on the download page.

Nothing changed in the core schema thats why the version only changed to -b. However there are some changes that make it worth the effort to upgrade.

The Poll Feature by Christian Fredh and the Survey Feature by Rob Henry have been revamped to make them a little more user friendly and more consistent with other features. These are 2 very cool features which up till now I haven't used much myself because this site is running on MySql and they were only implemented for MS SQL. Rob actually implemented most of the MySql layer for the Survey recently so I picked up where he left off and finished it then went on and implemented MySql for the Poll as well. You can try them out on this site, the Poll is here and the Survey is here. Go ahead and try them, I'd be interested in your answers to some of the questions I created.

Another new feature is the link browser in the FCKeditor is now implemented so you can browse and link to pages in the site or files in the file system more easily.

As always back up your site and db before upgrading. You'll want to be sure and get the new Web.config file, don't try to keep the old one, just restore any customizations from the old one to the new one.

Although the core schema didn't change you still need to visit the /Setup/Default.aspx page after uploading the new files so it can upgrade the Poll and Survey.

Other than these new features there are only a couple of minor bug fixes. The SQLite blog bug is fixed and it was the worst one reported since the previous release.

Also wanted to mention as noted in Miguel's blog, mojoPortal is also available in rpm format for a few flavors of Linux. The root folder is here, you can drill down through the different distros to find the correct package. This is all thanks to the magic of the OpenSuse Build service and Joseph Hill who initially set it up for mojoPortal. The rpms don't have the very latest release but they are easier to install. I plan to get involved in keeping them up to date after I learn how.

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.4.6.

Its been over 3 months since the last packaged release which is a bit longer than usual, my general motto is release early and release often but I had set a goal for this release to include the Newsletter which took a little longer than anticiapted. I was also side tracked on some other projects and of course we had several major holidays and family events to sidetrack me too. As a result this is a significant new release with a lot of new goodness.

Whats New?

Newsletter is a feature that a lot of users have been asking for. Now I hope you will all login to this site and opt in to our new mojoPortal News. I plan to send newsletters about once a month but I suppose it will depend on how much news we have each month. Thanks to those of you who signed up for the testing list and provided feedback!

Google Maps is one of the things I got sidetracked on as a need for it came up in a customer project. After meeting the customer needs I dressed it up a little more and made a new mojoPortal feature that makes it easy to put google maps in your site with various options for showing satelite, hybrid, and driving directions.

A feature to allow banning ip addresses is now included. I periodically review my logs and see evidence of malicious traffic and decided it was time to block some of those. A new feature has also been added to capture users ip addresses so that if a site has any troublesome users they can be banned.  Of course they may come back using a different ip address but every little bit of defense helps. Another benefit of capturing ip addresses is that there are ways of determining approximate logitude and latitude based on ip addresses and this presents a possibility to create cool features to plot community members on a map. So this will lead to some other cool features in the future.

We have a new Simplified Chinese translation as well as updates to the Russian, German, and Swedish translations contributed by the community. Thanks to all!

In the Blog, as soon as you create a post with a future date a new "Edit Drafts" link appears to make it easier to keep track of posts you are working on but aren;t ready to publish.

This release contains updated version of FCKeditor (v2.5.1) and ExtJs (2.0) toolkit.

The Site Settings, Page Settings, My Account (User Profile), Manage Users pages have all been updated to use Tab Panel layout provided by ExtJs. I'm also using the ExtJs grid in several places. I've been writing .NET wrapper controls to make it easy to use these things.

Rob Henry and I both did a bunch of work trying to fix FxCop violations to bring the code into FxCop rule compliance. Very few projects pass all the FxCop rules. Not passing them doesn't mean the code is bad but following the Framework guidelines developed by MS is a good practice. We used CodeIt Right to help identify and fix a lot of them but there is still a good ways to go. I spent 2 solid weeks on it. Some of the changes were breaking changes so those of you with custom features that haven't been working with the code from svn may need to revisit your code and compile against the new version. The breaking changes were just due to renaming some things and can be fixed easily by careful find and replace of .SiteID with .SiteId, .PageID with .PageId, and .ModuleID with .ModuleId. Does the code work any different or better due to these changes? No but it makes FxCop happier and I think adherance to the framework guidelines is one metric of code quality that is easy to measure. I would not overwieght this as the most important thing though.

I also noticed Rob recently implemented a MySQL data layer for his Survey feature. I haven't had time to test it yet but plan to soon.

I spent a chunk of time working on performance improvements using RedGate Antz Profiler and MS ACT load tester. ANTS is a great tool for finding slow places in the code. So I was finding such methods to optimize then load test to verify performance improvement by the optimization. I was able to make some significant gains in requests per second on my test machine using this process.

I'm including the e-commerce feature in the MS SQL release this time. It still needs a lot of work on the customer facing side but it can sell download products processing credit cards through Authorize.NET. I'll be doing more work on this in the near future and plan to implement Paypal and Google Checkout providers soon. For now consider it experimental but if you want to experiment with it feel free.

It is now possible to make skins with up to 5 content sections as illustrated in the 5contentpanes skin.

Things are working a bit better on Mono as of late. We still have to compile a special build without WebParts but the MS AJAX Update panel works so we're back to one code base again whereas at the time of the 2.2.3.9 mojoportal release we had to keep the 2.2.3.6 version for Mono due to lack of MS AJAX. The biggest problem we currently have is the lack of support for CSS Control Adapters, but the good news is my friend Dean Brettle has taken on the task of implementing the needed support in Mono. Dean is an awesome developer and the author of NeatUpload and NeatHtml both of which are used in mojoPortal. I think its just a matter of time now and all the mojoPortal skins will look as they should on Mono. I know a number of mojoPortal users who are eager for this so its very exciting.

As always, be sure and back up your site and database before upgrading. Report any problems in the forums and we will try to help.

If you like mojoPortal please help spread the word. We've got a lot of exciting plans for 2008 that I'll blog about soon.

I've been working hard to get the mojoPortal newsletter feature ready and I plan to make a release this weekend. I'll blog more about that later as there are a lot of new things since the last release. For now I just want to mention that I'll be comitting the newsletter feature to svn trunk in the next few hours for anyone who is eager to get it and anyone who might be able to help test it. I've done preliminary testing in all the data layers and it seems to work in all of them.

This first release of this feature should be considered an alpha. I haven't done eveything with it I want to yet but its at a usable point and will improve by use and feedback. Email does not lend itself to testing, I mean you either send an email or you don't send it. I've tested it on short lists and I've tested simulating long lists with some thread sleeping but thats not a very good simulation.

I've just updated this site with the latest build and created 2 Newletters, mojoPortal News which will be a real newsletter and Temporary Test List which I'm hoping some of you will join so that I can better test the sending of mail to the list. I will send to this list a lot while testing and will ask for replies to verify that the mail is received, but once satisfied its working well this list will stop. So please login now and visit the My Profile page to opt in to my lists.

The mail gets sent on a new thread so it doesn't interfere with the UI. There is a new Task Queue Monitor page where you can check the progress. If the application recycles while sending the mail it will kill the thread and therefore stop the process from sending but it is designed to resume where it left off when the application start event is fired.

More work needs to be done in creating some email templates. There are 2 not too great ones included. Email templates are a pain compared to regular html because you can only get consistent styling in different email clients by using in-line style. Trying to use images in the mail is also problematic. I'll be investigating solutions for these challenges to improve future versions.

This first implementation requires the user to be registered in the site to opt into the list, eventually I may make an opt in option for non registered users. I'll be working on and testing the opt out feature tomorrow to make sure its ready for the release.

Happy New Year mojoPortal Community!

To celebrate (boy I really know how to party!), I finally got around to making a video tutorial covering the basics of using mojoPortal.

mojoPortal User Guide Volume 1

One of my resolutions for the new year is to do more video tutorials.
Another is to make another batch of good looking skins. Using free designs I made 10 skins in 10 days several months ago. I still have a bunch of designs I dowloaded before that I didn't get to, I just need to find another week or 10 days to throw at them.

I'm also getting very close to making a release, I know I've been saying that for weeks but some things have gone slower than anticipated. Newsletter is a complex feature. If I don't finish it soon I'll just go ahead and make a release without it as there is lots of other good stuff available now in svn that needs to be set free. Of course anyone working with the source code is smart to be getting the code from svn trunk and not waiting for me to get around to making releases.

If there are particular topics you would like to see tutorials about please let me know. Also any feedback about this one is appreciated. It was just a quick improvised one. I actually did a better longer one first only to realize at the end it wasn't capturing audio. So when I did it again I kept it a little brief.

I am about finished implementing a quick google maps feature. I went ahead and updated this site with the code so I could show it off. You can see it in action here: http://www.mojoportal.com/googlemaps.aspx

It allows you to specify a location, map size, optional to show the map type control (Satellite,hybrid,map), option to show the zoom control, option to open a balloon with info about the location, option to show a local area google search, and a few other options.

I haven't finished implementing the get driving directions, will finish that tomorrow but its exciting enough I couldn't wait to blog about it. Its in my svn sandbox now and will be in svn trunk by later tonight.

It was really very easy, but visual stuff is always exciting and fun to work on.

Those working from the source code using svn trunk, it will be available in the next few hours. After you do svn update, rebuild the solution then visit yoursiteroot/Setup/Default.aspx to install it. Then it will show up like other features that you can put on any page.

Update: 2007-12-09

I got the driving directions working as you can see by clicking the link above. One thing to be aware of is that driving directions won't work on a local network or on localhost using the free google maps API key. As I understand it, if you buy an enterprise license it can work on local networks but the free one only works on public sites. The map seems to work just fine on localhost, its only the driving directions feature that doesn't work on localhost.