Going Mobile with mojoPortal

I'm very excited to announce that mojoPortal can now be optimized very well for major smart phones like iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

Actually I have 3 related things to announce.

  • mojoPortal 2.3.6.7 is now available on our download page.
  • We have a new product available now, named Mobile Kit Pro (requires mojoPortal 2.3.6.7), that includes a custom menu we implemented just for smart phones and a skin optimized for smart phones.
  • Updated versions of Form Wizard Pro and Event Calendar Pro with compatibility updates for mojoPortal 2.3.6.7 and Mobile Kit Pro.

mojoPortal.com shown in Mobile Kit Pro mojoportal.com showing the menu in Mobile Kit Pro

See the Mobile Kit Pro product page for full details. You can also check out this site or our demo site using an iPhone, Android phone, or Windows Phone 7. My goal with Mobile Kit Pro is that you could just drop it in and set it as the mobile skin, and it would just work with most of your existing site content. In those few cases where you may have some content that doesn't work well even with Mobile Kit Pro applied, the new features in mojoPortal make it possible for you to make custom mobile specific versions of some content if you needed to or just leave some content out of the mobile experience. Of course this is the first release of Mobile Kit Pro and there will be free upgrades for future versions, so those who purchase it can provide feedback and impact the future of the product.

What's New in mojoPortal 2.3.6.7?

A lot of the work to make Mobile Kit Pro possible went into mojoPortal itself. We went through most of the features and in cases where the markup didn't lend itself well to the small screen size, we implemented alternate markup and made it possible to configure the use of the alternate markup from the theme.skin file. We also made a lot of different things about the rendering configurable from the theme.skin file, in some cases it is possible to override specific feature instance settings from the theme.skin. Even things like posting in the Forums from your smart phone should be a reasonably good experience.

Support for mobile specific skins, there is a new drop down list in Site Settings where you can specify the Mobile Skin for the site.

Simple but configurable mobile user agent detection is used to apply the mobile skin, see the Mobile Kit Pro product page for details.

Any page and any content instance in mojoPortal can be marked as for WebOnly, MobileOnly or the default All so that you have the ability to make mobile specific versions of your content if needed or leave out specific content from the mobile view if it doesn't work well on small screens. You will see a new dropdown list for this in Page Settings and on the General Tab in Feature Settings.

Some work has been done to combine javascripts as much as possible for better performance.

  • Added support for the Google Plus Button in the Blog
  • Upgrade to CKeditor 3.6.1
  • Upgrade to TinyMCE 3.4.3.2
  • Updated the CDN versions of jQuery and jQueryUI to the latest versions.
  • Updated translations, thanks to all of our translators!
  • A few bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the last release.

I think this is probably one of the most exciting announcements I've made since the beginning of the mojoPortal project, at least I'm very excited about it. It is very in keeping with our slogan "Advanced Web Sites Made Easy". Now mojoPortal can be a framework for developing custom mobile web applications as well.

Updates for Form Wizard Pro and Event Calendar Pro

As mentioned above we also did some work in Form Wizard Pro and event Calendar Pro so that they could also be optimized for mobile. These updates also require mojoPortal 2.3.6.7. They are free upgrades for existing customers, just sign in to the site as the user who purchased the product(s), and then click the "My Account" link at the top of the page, and then click "Order History".

 

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Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.