mojoPortal 2.4.0.4 is now available on our download page.

In one sense this is a minor upgrade with a few improvements but this is also a significant release in that it marks a change in our target framework from .NET 4 to .NET 4.5. Since mojoPortal is now compiled against the .NET 4.5 framework, any code that depends on it must also be compiled against the newer framework, so we have also released corresponding compatibility updates for all of our add on products.

In terms of web hosting, you can host either .NET 4 or .NET 4.5 compiled code under .NET 4.5 hosting and most hosts should probably be updated to .NET 4.5 by now. .NET 4.5 is really still the .NET 4 framework with some additions, it is considered an in place upgrade of the framework, so it may not be easy to know for sure whether your hosting has been updated to .NET 4.5 or if it still is running an older .NET 4 framework.

If you do get errors about the framework version after deploying the upgrade, we have a separate download with replacement Web.config and bin folder which has a version of the dlls compiled for .NET 4. Using these files should get things working again if you are still using .NET 4.

We have a similar package of replacement files that should in theory also support  .NET 3.5 but at this point we are not officially supporting .NET 3.5 any longer and we hope very few people download that package.

Changing our target framework to .NET 4.5 allows us to start moving forward with the use of some of the great new things that the .NET team has been working on such as Web API. In fact this release has a new plugin system that allows features to plugin their own Web API Routes, and we implemented a small custom web api in our forum feature to handle moderation before sending posts to the forum subscribers as discussed below.

Forum Improvements

This release includes a new per forum setting for Roles That Can Post. We've had several requests for making read only forums and also for limiting posting by role so that only premium members could post. This is useful for example if you are selling site membership levels with Site Membership Pro.

It is now possible also to configure the forums such that notification email is not sent until a moderator approves the post for sending to the list. We really needed that on this site because we have our forums configured to include the post message in the notification email and we had several occasions where someone would register late at night and post a few spamy forum posts that got emailed to our subscribers and this in turn hurts the reputation of our email system. Note that the settings for this are per forum and you must add the moderator emails in the settings so that the moderator gets notified of the new post. The moderator will see new link buttons on the post for either sending the post to the list or marking it as sent so that it does not get sent to the list. There is also a setting to allow users that are marked as "Trusted" in the user management page to have their posts sent to the list without moderation so that you can avoid delays for posts from your active trusted community members.

There are also new settings per forum that control whether new posts get included in the google site map for the forums by default or whether new posts get a NOINDEX meta tag added by default. On this site we've found that forums can be a mixed bag in terms of SEO value, some threads may have worthy content and others may not. You can always edit a thread after the fact to set whether it is included in the google site map or whether it gets a NOINDEX meta, these new forum level settings just control the default for new posts.

This release also includes upgrades to CKEditor 4.4.3 (from 4.3.4) and TinyMCE 4.1.2 (from 4.0.21). We've also included the new moono-dark skin for CKEditor which you can enable by adding this in user.config:

<add key="CKEditor:Skin" value="moono-dark" />

If you have a dark site skin you might like that better than the default editor skin.

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UPDATE 2014-09-10

We have been receiving some reports of problems with mojoPortal 2.4.0.4 under .NET 4 hosting. At this time we do not have a solution for those problems (except to migrate the site to 4.5 hosting) so we do not recommend anyone to upgrade to mojoPortal 2.4.0.4 unless you have .NET 4.5 hosting. It can be difficult to determine whether your hosting is 4.0 or 4.5 because 4.5 is really like a service pak for 4.0 that has been out for 2 years now, and if you look under Administration > System Information it will say version 4.0..... even if you are hosted under 4.5. So the best thing to do is ask your host if you have 4.5 or not, and if possible move your site to 4.5 hosting before upgrading.

The problem with our 4.0 build seems to be that even though we target 4.0 in Visual Studio when compiling it, it ends up being compiled for 4.5 because when 4.5 is installed it replaces 4.0. Visual Studio is supposed to use a reference version of 4.0 when compiling projects that target 4.0 but in practice sometimes it does not work and we think this may be the problem with our build. We do not have any machine with Visual Studio that don't also have 4.5 installed so we cannot be sure that our build is really targeting 4.0 as it should. If someone has a machine without 4.5 installed and they have Visual Studio 2013 Pro then they could compile their own build that targets 4.0, but going forward we are not confident that we can produce such builds.