mojoPortal

mojoPortal 2.2.6.7 is now available on the download page. This is primarily a bug fix release. There was a change in the search engine architecture in recent versions that did not work in Medium Trust hosting environments that has now been fixed. ... [More] It seems like a constant battle to avoid medium trust issues, so I started a small document here with some notes for developers about things to avoid that can cause problems under medium trust. http://www.mojoportal.com/developing-for-medium-trust.aspx Its not comprehensive so if anyone else has any suggestions for things to list on this page let me know. Sometimes its surprising when seemingly innocuous things don't work under medium trust. The problem we encountered was when we changed the search engine to use a queue for writing/updating the search index to ensure things happen in correct sequence. We were serializing our task object into a row in the database then our little task service would deserialize it and run it on a new thread in the background. As it turned out the SoapFormatter we were using to do the serialization throws a security exception under medium trust so you can't use it. I had to re-work the code to use the XmlSerializer. Since a lot of people are hosted in medium trust I thought it important to get this fix out quickly. This release also fixes a few other minor bugs as mentioned in the forums. I was surprised how many people are experimenting with our WebStore feature. Several bug fixes and improvements have been made in WebStore. Most of the bugs were only affecting the MS SQL version, whereas the store on this site is runningunder MySqlJoe Audette  ... [Less]

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.6.6 This is a minor upgrade and bug fix release. There is a new option to show or hide any content instance based on whether the user is signed into the site or not. There is a new Traditional ... [More] Chinese translation, thanks to Alex Ho! There are a couple of bug fixes for the MS SQL version of WebStore and a few mnior improvements to a few admin pages in the WebStore. There is a bug fix for a forums error that would occur if anonymous posting is enabled, though I still don't recommend allowing anonymous posting. As usual, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading, and post in the forums if you run into any troubles. UPDATE: I've released a new set of files versioned 2-2-6-6-b, there was a packaging bug in the first set of files and it was missing some .htm files used by TinyMCE editor. I also fixed a few more bugs in the WebStore that were discovered today.Joe Audette  ... [Less]

Universites need a lot of web sites. They have many departments, divisions, research projects, events, etc., and they need web sites for all these things to disseminate information and to enable collaboration and communication between members of ... [More] these various communities. With so many sites to manage, Webmasters at Universities need a good web infrastructure that allows them to easily deploy new sites and extend them as needed. Its only natural that Universites need content management systems and several Universites have selected mojoPortal for their content management needs. Shaun Geisert, Webmaster, Division of Student Affairs, Colorado State University, recently let me know about a number of their sites already using mojoPortal as well as plans to use mojoPortal in another 20 sites going forward. http://www.studentaffairs.colostate.edu/ http://www.ascsu.colostate.edu/ http://csugreeks.colostate.edu/ http://wellness.colostate.edu/ Quoting Shaun: "Before discovering Mojo (I used CMS Matrix, btw), I had researched and/or used a number of other open source .NET CMSs in order to find one whose core framework best meets the needs of our numerous departments.  Since then, I’ve found it to be above and beyond anything else I’ve seen in the open source .NET realm." When I look at all these sites I'm very impressed with the design work Shaun and his team did with all the different skins, they all look really great and it makes me proud to point them out as mojoPortal sites. They also produced a nice user guide document for their users that looks very professional and helpful and they've offered this document back to us as a contribution to the project. I probably need to de-brand it before sharing it so I'm not making it available right away, but will use it as a basis for producing a more generic user guide. To me, willingness to share is a clear sign that these guys "get" open source, and I'm really glad to have them in the mojoPortal community. Another example of mojoPortal in use at Universities is the School of Health and Social Care at University of West England, Bristol. http://hsc.uwe.ac.uk/school/ They supported our efforts last year to implement multiple sites on a single installation using folder names, so anyone using that feature today can thank them for their good participation in the community. Quoting Matt Cownie: "we've had a tremendous amount of utility from mojo and its saved us an awful lot of donkey work." Matt is a great guy, I really enjoyed working with him on the multi sites feature last year. A third example is the site for the Glasgow Clinical Trials Unit. http://www.glasgowctu.org/ Its really great to see mojoPortal catching on in Universities and other large organizations. We've got a lot of plans for continued improvements in mojoPortal and we hope to see more and more adoption.Joe Audette  ... [Less]

Universites need a lot of web sites. They have many departments, divisions, research projects, events, etc., and they need web sites for all these things to disseminate information and to enable collaboration and communication between members of ... [More] these various communities. With so many sites to manage, Webmasters at Universities need a good web infrastructure that allows them to easily deploy new sites and extend them as needed. Its only natural that Universites need content management systems and several Universites have selected mojoPortal for their content management needs. Shaun Geisert, Webmaster, Division of Student Affairs, Colorado State University, recently let me know about a number of their sites already using mojoPortal as well as plans to use mojoPortal in another 20 sites going forward. http://www.ascsu.colostate.edu/ http://csugreeks.colostate.edu/ http://wellness.colostate.edu/ Quoting Shaun: "Before discovering Mojo (I used CMS Matrix, btw), I had researched and/or used a number of other open source .NET CMSs in order to find one whose core framework best meets the needs of our numerous departments.  Since then, I’ve found it to be above and beyond anything else I’ve seen in the open source .NET realm." When I look at all these sites I'm very impressed with the design work Shaun and his team did with all the different skins, they all look really great and it makes me proud to point them out as mojoPortal sites. They also produced a nice user guide document for their users that looks very professional and helpful and they've offered this document back to us as a contribution to the project. I probably need to de-brand it before sharing it so I'm not making it available right away, but will use it as a basis for producing a more generic user guide. To me, willingness to share is a clear sign that these guys "get" open source, and I'm really glad to have them in the mojoPortal community. Another example of mojoPortal in use at Universities is the School of Health and Social Care at University of West England, Bristol. http://hsc.uwe.ac.uk/school/ They supported our efforts last year to implement multiple sites on a single installation using folder names, so anyone using that feature today can thank them for their good participation in the community. Quoting Matt Cownie: "we've had a tremendous amount of utility from mojo and its saved us an awful lot of donkey work." Matt is a great guy, I really enjoyed working with him on the multi sites feature last year. A third example is the site for the Glasgow Clinical Trials Unit. http://www.glasgowctu.org/ Its really great to see mojoPortal catching on in Universities and other large organizations. We've got a lot of plans for continued improvements in mojoPortal and we hope to see more and more adoption.Joe Audette  ... [Less]

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.6.5! Its been 2 months since our last release and a lot of good progress has been made. What's New? Upgrade to the newest version of MySql Connector Upgrade to FCKeditor 2.6.2 Upgrade to the ... [More] latest version of NeatHtml Usability Improvements for google map enabled features and improvements to the search architecture as mentioned in this previous blog post. A number of bug fixes as reported in the forums since the last release. WebStore Improvements - the web store now supports selling download products using Authorize.NET, PaPal, and Google Checkout A new plugin system for handling PageCreated events so developers can write their own handlers that execute after a page is created - not yet documented A new plugin system for handling UserCreated events so developers can write their own handlers that execute after a nw user is created - not yet documented. As always, be sure and backup your database and site before upgrading, and if you run into any problems post in the forums and we will try to help. The Semi Grand Opening of the mojoPortal Store I call it semi grand because no real products are available yet, all you can do in the store is buy me a beer at the moment. I expect to have my first product, Event Calendar Pro available by the end of July. You can see what I have so far for the Event Calendar Pro feature on the demo site http://demo.mojoportal.com/events.aspx. I decided to go ahead and open the store now because I thought it might interest others who want to use the mojoPortal WebStore to sell download products. The WebStore feature is very rudimentary now but it will be getting more love as I improve it to meet my own ecommerce needs. I will try to update some documentation on the WebStore soon. The one tip I will mention is you configure "Products" then you configure "Offers". Products are not sold directly, but by Offers. An Offer can have 1 or more products and price is set at the Offer level, not at the product level. The Product Catalog is very bare bones, we don't have categories yet so its really only good for a short list of products. I've also opened up a store on CafePress to sell mojoPortal merchandise: http://www.cafepress.com/mojoportal. A great way to support mojoPortal, each item purchased contributes $5 to the project. I'll announce the real Grand Opening of the mojoPortal Store as soon as our first product is available.Joe Audette  ... [Less]

Hey friends and supporters of mojoPortal, its that time of year again. The nominations are open for this year's CMS Awards. Last year we did very well and won the Non-PHP category. This year I think its an even bigger challenge and the competition ... [More] will be very tough. The first step to getting into this year's competition is to get nominated so please nominate mojoPortal. You can nominate us for Overall Winner, Most Promising, and Best Other (Non-PHP). This year they also have an MVP award for "an individual that deserves recognition for the contribution to the development and running of an Open Source Content Management System". If you like the way I'm running the project and the work I'm doing or I have helped you in the forums please consider nominating me (Joe Audette). Please Click Here To Nominate mojoPortal For the 2008 CMS Awards We really need as many nominations as we can get so please nominate us today and help spread the word!Joe Audette  ... [Less]

One of the great things about working on an open source project like mojoPortal, is finding out about the success stories from other people using your work. I started my day today on a positive note because of this nice email from Aaron Cardoz: ... [More] Hey Joe,   Hope all is well at your end.   just a small thank you and whoever has worked on the development of mojoportal.   It is a true success story.   Well, just wanted to list two successful websites made using mojo.   https://www.lillahusetcpd.com   and www.rajasthanroyals.com heard of the recent success of the IPL league, cricket in India. This is the winning teams website. Both of these have been designed and developed by my team.   my corporate intranet is also developed around mojo completely and is awesome.   Thanks once again for time and dedication that has been put into this outstanding open source application.   Aaron Cardoz Thanks Aaron! You made my day. You did a great job yourself with the design of these sites. Its very nice to know that mojoPortal is being used for the site of the winning cricket team!Joe Audette  ... [Less]

Back in October of 2006 when I first launched my company, Source Tree Solutions to work full time on mojoPortal, I had kind of a fuzzy business plan with the main idea being that I would make revenue by offering consulting around the free mojoPortal ... [More] product. I guess in my wide eyed optimism I thought that doing this kind of consutling would improve mojoPortal and in fact it did to some extent. A few customers actually sponsored development for things that improved mojoPortal for everyone. But most of the consutling was really for things that were not of any general benefit beyond the customer's needs, so in some cases I felt like taking on this work was actually slowing me down from progress on improving mojoPortal. Forming a business around consulting means you always have to be taking on more projects to keep the business going because you don't make any money unless you are doing billable work. Now I am in the process of shifting my strategy to sell some premium features on top of the free mojoPortal core product. I think that selling some products in order to generate revenue will be better because it will pay for the free time I need to keep improving the mojoPortal. Consulting will remain a part of my business model but my plan is to keep it very limited goig forward. So with this changing strategy in mind I've been working feverishly to get my first product completed so that I can open up a Store here on mojoPortal.com in early July and begin selling it. The first feature for sale will be a more advanced Event Calendar that allows selling tickets to events. Following that I plan to build a Form Wizard that allows users to easily create forms to capture arbitrary data. I also plan a Fund Raiser feature and an add on package for Web Farm support. I have a lot of ideas for premium features, but my main goal is to just get enough revenue rolling in to allow me to keep improving the core. There are a lot of planned improvements for the core that I'm eager to complete, like built in support for tagging, comments, and content versioning so that they can easily be enabled for any feature with little effort. Eventually I'd like to open the store up so that other developers can also sell products there too, so that it can be a market place something like snowcovered.com which sells add ons for DNN. One of the reasons I chose to implement a commerce enabled feature as my first product was so that I could figure out which pieces of the commerce architecture need to b re-usable. We already have a WebStore project that I will be using to sell my premium products and this WebStore is one of the free open source features of mojoPortal. So far the WebStore is very rudimentary, it can only sell download products and its really a bare bones implementation for the product catalog at the moment. The project was originally started under a sponsorship by BrainBeacon but was never completed fully because they went out of business before ever opening a store. Its hard to really polish up a complex feature like ecommerce unless you are actually using it for business or supporting a customer who is using it. So using it to sell my own products will lead to a lot of improvement in the WebStore feature. I've been doing a lot of re-factoring in the WebStore to get the re-usable pieces built into mojoPortal core so they can be used across features. For example, Country List, State List, Currency List, Language List and their administrative features were originally in the WebStore projects but I've moved them into the core of mojoPortal because they will be needed by other features. Support for Payment gateways like Google Checkout and PayPal are also being moved into the core so they can be re-used by any feature that wants to implement ecommerce. Since my first product will be an Event Calendar that allows selling tickets it will need to leverage a lot of the same ecommerce code that the WebStore does. Rather than re-implement it in every feature it has forced me to think about the best way to make most of it easily re-usable. Implementing this more advanced Event Calendar has also led me to other improvements in the core of mojoPortal. For example one of the features in my new Event Calendar is support for recurring events. When you create a recurring event it actually creates event instances going out x number of years. Since  events are also searchable using the site search, you have to update the search index for each created event as well. What I found was that creating events in rapid succession due to recurrence could lead to some problems due to the way I was handling the indexing of items. The indexing was triggered by the saving of the event then code to update the index was spawned on a new thread so that it doesn't block the UI. Under some circumstances the writing to the index was not in the proper sequence and errors could occur. So I implemented a queue in the database so that items to be indexed could be queued and then processed in batch on a background thread while keeping the sequence correct because everything is processed in queue sequence. Another thing that got improved in the core as I implemented this new Event Calendar is module settings, which is just a place to store feature specific settings for instances of a feature. In a number of the mojoPortal features we have support for google maps, but some of the settings needed for google maps were not well supported by module settings. For example the google maps api defines some constants for the Map Type like G_NORMAL_MAP, G_SATELLITE_MAP, G_HYBRID_MAP, etc. When I first enabled support for specifying the map type, it was done in module settngs by entering the constant in a textbox like this: pretty yucky and not user friendly since its easy to put something incorrect there and nothing to tell the user what is acceptable. So as much as this bothered me I could not conceive of shipping a paid product with this kind of setting so I implemented ISettingControl as a way to introduce a possibility to use a custom UserControl for this setting and now for all features that use the google map the setting looks like this: much better implemented as a dropdown list! Actually not shown in the screen shot is I also implemented a dropdown for the zoom level so that it is limited to the range of acceptable values. So, in short, developing features to sell has made me think more deeply about what is needed in the core of mojoPortal to support 3rd party feature development more easily, because its made me think more like a third party. I haven't blogged much this month because I've been so busy working to get this feature completed and to get the store opened, but thught I should go ahead and post this to let people know what I'm doing. Several people have asked recently what happened to the store demo site as it is currently off line. I will have that site back up soon. I just have a little more re-factoring of the WebStore code to do and I will setup the demo store again. I'm very excited about the new store opening soon and will announce it here in the blog as soon as its open. There will also be anew release of mojoPortal soon with the improvements I've mentioned above as well as a few bug fixes and skin tweaks to better support Firefox 3.Joe Audette  ... [Less]

Just a quick post to point out some new documentation for mojoPortal developers. Setting Up Your Projects - has notes about how to work with mojoPortal from our repository and your own code from your own repository. Using The Installation System - ... [More] talks about how to leverage the mojoPortal installation system to install your own features. Using The Task System - discusses a little framework we have for managing long running tasks on a background thread. You can implement your own and plug them in. I built it for sending the news letter emails. It can chug through a long list effectively because it can resume even if the thread is killed by recycling the app pool. When the app starts again it picks up where it left off.Joe Audette  ... [Less]

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.8, its available now on the download page. New This Release Friendly urls for the blog as mentioned in my previous post. The Folder Image Gallery now works in Medium Trust Bug fixes for SQLite ... [More] and pgsql and other various minor bugs as reported in the forums since the last release. As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading, and report any problems in the Forums.Joe Audette  ... [Less]