I just upadated the mojoPortal demo site with the latest code. I've been doing some more work on the ExtJs controls and using them in the Site Office feature. The idea of Site Office is that the core of it will be a UI framework for intranet style applications. Currently we have a plugin model for content management features used in the public side of the web site. Site Office will have its own plugin model that makes it easy to build features that plug in. A feature will have a section in the Menu and clicking the navigation links will open the feature page/control/view in a new tab in the center pane of the layout.

You can check it out here: http://demo.mojoportal.com/SiteOffice/Default.aspx and can login with admin@admin.com and password = admin.

I have some not yet working features setup that do open in the new tabs but the features don't yet work. I'm really just looking for feedback on the layout. Notice how you can hide panels and resize them. Feel free to click the links and see how it works. Especially cool is if you open a lot of tabs the tabs become scrollable. If you make the side panels wider it doesn't take as many tabs to be able to see the tab scrolling.

Currently the Welcome tab which is always present shows the home page of the site. I plan to make it configurable so you could have a special intranet home page that is the default page shown there. Note that you can navigate the site inside this tab.

Notice also that if javescript is disabled in your browser it still can show the feature views when you click a navigation link, its just not as rich an experience. Being able to work without javascript is just one accessibility requirement. I'm particularly interested in any other accessibility issues that can be identified and resolved so that the Site Office UI framework can be accessible from the beginning so if you have any expertise on accessibility and you see problems do let us know.

I think these ExtJs layout controls go a long way towards a rich user interface for office/intranet style applications. I'm still pondering what can go in the right side and bottom panels. Mabe help could go on the right side. Lots of possibilities really.

Hey mojoPortal Community, exciting news!

We've been invited to The 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo. This would be a great opportunity to help promote mojoPortal. Anyone who is interested and able to get to this conference please contact me. It would be great if we could assemble a small team and take turns manning the booth and visiting the sessions.  joe dot audette [at] gmail dot com

The most difficult part will be figuring out how to afford to get there and pay for lodging. If anyone would like to donate to help us we would be grateful. See the PayPal link on the left of the home page if you can help. I need to confirm within the next 2 weeks or the free booth will go to another project.

Below are the details from the email I received from MySQL:

"The 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo will take place on April 15rd-18th in Santa
Clara, California (see http://www.mysqlconf.com/ for more details).

As for the last conference, we are arranging a "DotOrg-Pavilion" where we would
like to give Open Source Projects related to or based on the MySQL Server or
other MySQL Products an opportunity to showcase their work.

MySQL AB will provide the booth space (incl. electrical power and Internet
access) as well as free attendance to the conference and exhibitor hall for up
to 4 people per project. In addition, we will provide one full, (shareable)
conference pass per project, that permits access to the tutorials as well as
all other sessions of the conference.

What you will need to bring/prepare:

- Your own computers/demo equipment
- Banners, flyers, other marketing material (e.g. Demo-CDs, Merchandise)

I was wondering if you or somebody else from the MojoPortal Community would be
interested in representing and demonstrating your project there. If you would
like to learn more about this, please contact me directly or the MySQL
Community Relations team at community@mysql.com."

UPDATE 2007-12-02:

Its official we're going to have a booth at this conference and I will be there demoing mojoPortal both on Windows and Linux using MySQL.

If anyone lives close enough to make it to Santa Clara and could help me man the booth it would be great. Its going to be difficult if I have to man it all by myself. We can get passes to the event for up to 3 more people so getting in is free. Plenty of time between now and then so I'm counting on recruiting some help. Let me know if you're interested in helping.

Huge Thanks to Todd Stone who donated $100 through PayPal to help make this possible!
We still could use some help raising funds to make this trip and jazz up the booth.

I'll be bringing 2 good laptops, one for demoing on Windows and one for demoing on Linux with Mono. I'm going to look into renting a couple of reasonably large monitors somewhere local to the event (unless someone local wants to volunteer to lend them) as I can't see trying to bring them.

This will be an exciting chance to bring  more visibility to mojoPortal and I plan to make the most of it.

Since Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET framework 3.5, I like most passionate geek developers could not wait to try it out. I was under the impression that projects and solutions from VS 2005 would be compatible so I figured great I can benefit from the new javascript debugging features and over time tiptoe into using Silverlight and some other new things in the 3.5 framework.

However, when I tried to open the mojoPortal solution in VS 2008 the first thing that happens is the project conversion wizard starts, so apparently the projects and solutions are not backward compatible. I of course immediately cancelled the operation because it said the projects and solution would no longer work with VS 2005 so if I do this that means that no-one can work with the solution unless they have VS 2008.

So we face a hurdle for the project that I'm sure other open source .NET projects will also face. Obviously at some point we must move forward but the question is how long should we wait?

I invite your feedback if you are actively using mojoPortal in your development, how soon will you be getting VS 2008? How long do you think we should wait before making the change and leaving behind VS 2005?

UPDATE: I stand happily corrected!

Thanks to the readers who pointed out that only the solution files changed. This is great news! I'm in the process now of making bakup solution files for VS 2005 and upgrading the solutions for VS 2008. Should have this in svn trunk in the next few hours.

Note for those who don't have VS 2008 you will need to use the alternte solution files which have been renamed like mojoportal-complete-vs2005.sln
mojoportal-core-vs2005.sln
... etc

This means that those of us with VS 2008 can move forward without leaving behind the VS 2005 developers. Though at some point we will need to make the decision to target the 3.5 framework instead of the 2.0 framework I think we can potentially add projects to the solution that do target 3.5, we just can't change the target on projects that are shared in he VS 2005 solution files.

Happy Day! Go get your free 90 day trial of VS 2008 or if you are an msdn subscriber you can get it there.

Hey mojoPortal community, as you can imagine it takes a lot of work to keep the mojoPortal project moving and I can't do everything myself so I thought I would mention something I could use some help with in case anyone out there has the time and interest.

This request is especially directed at those who are using mojoPortal on Linux with Mono. The Mono project is getting ready for the 1.2.6 release and needs people to help test the release before they ship it. mojoPortal being a complex application is a good thing to test to make sure there aren't major regressions in Mono. I may test it myself but I am pretty swamped and not sure I will get to it in time so if anyone else could help it would be great and would help ensure that mojoPortal works with the next Mono release.

Please, if you can test the mojoPortal 2.2.3.6 release using the Mono pre-release from here:

http://mono.ximian.com/monobuild/preview/download-preview/

Your help would be a great contribution to both mojoPortal and Mono

Thanks,

Joe

Just a quick heads up to users of mojoPortal who may have custom features that use the mojoPortal.Controls.DatePicker

In order to make it possible to use different date pickers in mojoPortal I have now implemented a provider model and now the control is just a wrapper around a provider specific control.

I had to rename the control becuase of a namespace clash when I built the provider model under the namespace mojoPortal.Controls.DatePicker I got an error because you can't have a class named DatePicker and namespace named DatePicker.

Renaming the control is a breaking change but is easy to fix. The new control class name is DatePickerControl instead of DatePicker so anywhere you have used DatePicker you will need to change it to DatePickerControl.

For example <mp:DatePicker... becomes <mp:DatePickerControl...

I have fixed these in all the projects included in mojoportal-complete.sln and will be committing this change to trunk tonight.

Those of you who have custom projects using this control will need to change your code after you get this update. If you have any trouble post in the Developer Forum and I'll try to help.

We've used a .NET control that wraps the jsCalendar javscript date picker for a long time but there are other nice ones available now. Specifically I plan to implement one using the ExtJs toolkit but needed to get this provider model in place first.