Hi All,

I've made a preview of the next release available for anyone who would like to get the new features early and help test for the official release.

Its available now (only for MS SQL) on our Novell Forge Download Page, mojoportal-2-3-1-8-preview-mssql-deploymentfiles.zip

Whats New?

New Side Show with transition effects built into the Html Content Feature making it easy to animate image and content rotation.

The andreasvicklund-02-alt1 skins also shows how to rotate content in the skin.

New Twiiter Profile Widget to show your tweets (or anyone's) on your site.

New Twitter Search Widget to show tweets about a particular topic or keywords.

New configuration file mojoTinyMCE.config which you can copy and override from user.config to use a custom file giving more control over plugins and toolbars.

Change feature settings link from gear icon to text link by default to improve user friendliness. If you like the old way you there is a config setting you can override to use the icon as in the past.

Fixed issue where security settings changed in the master site did not propagate to the other sites in when using related sites mode.

Added a config option to force user uploaded avatars to be square rather than keep the aspect ratio of the original image.

Added a config option if you only want admins to be able to upload user avatars.

Fixed bug in newsletter where members of Newsletter Admins role could not send newsletters.

Added a config setting to allow control over how large the search results fragments displayed are.

Please let me know any feedback. I'm already running this version on mojoportal.com and on demo.mojoportal.com

Best,

Joe

Hi Joe,

It depends if it proves beneficial to do so. If very many people actually test the previews and provide feedback then it will help make the official release better. Its a way to get new features and bug fixes out to those who are interested in them sooner, kind of like a nightly build but more on an ad hoc timetable. 

With the 2.3.1.7 release I ended up updating the release packages a few times right after the release to fix some issues that came to light right after the release. They were small fixes but I wanted to make sure the 2.3.1.7 package was really good before submitting it to the web app gallery. The majority of our downloads come from the gallery so I try to make sure its a very solid build before submitting it. The current release at the moment in the gallery is 2.3.1.0 which was a solid release but we've added so many good things since then it was time to get a new release into the gallery. I waited a bit after the 2.3.1.7 release to make sure any bugs got shaken out before submitting. If people help test preview builds it may make it easier to keep gallery submissions up to date more frequently. Hopefully the 2.3.1.7 build will go live in the gallery next week. Yet I'm already at another stable point with a few new cool features like the content slide show and the twitter integration so I wanted to make that available as soon as possible to those who are interested in those features so I decided to try a preview release soft announced in the forums while I consider whether there are other little things I could complete for this release. There are some bigger things coming up next that will take longer so it also seems like a good idea to get a release out before I get going on those things. These cool little javascript things like the content slideshow and the twitter widgets are easy to add quickly compared to features that require new tables and schema changes. And even though they are easy to implement they seem like valuable/high impact features that users will be glad to have. 

Best,

Joe

I meant to add as well that the module "Settings | Edit" links instead of icons looks better and is indeed easier to use. More intuitive.

In some ways you could almost apply the same logic to the master admin icon bar in the header. Or make it a site-wide setting to use icons or text labels. For new end users I feel a link that says "page settings" is quicker to figure out than a tiny icon that sorta looks like gears. Same with the page pencil, "page modules" might be easier, or "add new page" and "site settings" for the other options up there.

Hard to say, just food for thought. But I like the direction so far.

You're like a god, some mythical spartan reborn to save web designers everywhere and bring balance to the force..... bless you sir.

Hi All,

I've updated the 2.3.1.8-preview build again (for ms sql only), you can download it from the Novell Forge Download Page.

It now has image cropping capabilities in the editor image browser as well as when using user uploaded avatars. Now the user can upload a larger image and then crop it to make the avatar. There are config settings to control the maxsize of the original file so it can be reduced before the user gets to crop if its really big.

I've also updated the demo.mojoportal.com site so you can try the new features there as well.

Eric,

I will look into the lingering tmp file issue you reported. I have not seen that issue on my local machine, it does delete the tmp file after resizing. Maybe its a timing issue and it shows it before it gets deleted.

Best,

Joe

Hi Eric,

Ok, I figured out what was happening with the lingering tmp files and why I was not seeing them. It was only happening if the image did not need resizing, it was a logic error where after creating the tmp file we checked its size and if it did not need resizing we were just exiting the method and this would leave behind the tmp file. I have fixed this both on demo.mojoportal.com and in the preview package.

I've also made it possible to make a cropped image larger than the crop selection, so for example if the crop selection is 100px wide and 100px tall, and you specify 200 for the crop width and height, it now enlarges the crop. Of course quality degrades depending on how much larger the result image is vs the crop selection.

I will see about a way to delete files. I could possibly add a delete button similar to how I'm adding the crop link. I guess my only concern is that users could delete files that they did not upload and files which may be in use in some content that they don't know about. Maybe we need to add a separate permission for roles that can delete files so we can control it separately from who can upload.

Best,

Joe