MonoX

Please note that this article is obsolete, please read the following article for more information ASP.NET localization settings in MonoX

Localization is one of the areas in which we made a very significant progress during the past few years. First release of MonoX included only a default support for localization: you were able to localize the user interface elements using the standard .resx approach, but you had to open an additional portal for each of the target languages that were required for localization. Content synchronization was rather difficult, so we decided to redesign this feature and introduce a flexible arhitecture with support for run-time localization. This means that you don't have to use Visual Studio or other tools to change localization resource files; everything can be done through the browser-based administration interface.

A single portal instance can support unlimited number of localized sites, where each site has the same structure, but different (localized) content. You can change the navigation hierarchy and modify the layout of every localized page. Each of the existing pages (administration etc.) can be fully localized using the Language management section. Note that MonoX can use both resource (resx) files and a database to store localization values. You can switch between resx and database modes by changing the globalization tag in the Web.config file. The database mode is specified by adding the following attribute to the globalization key:

resourceProviderFactoryType="MonoSoftware.Web.Localization.DBResourceProviderFactory, MonoSoftware.Web.Localization"

This feature gives you a complete control over the localization process, since it would be impossible to localize all resources at run time (both built-in and custom ones) using only a resx approach. It is possible to export values from database to resx files and vice versa, both for a single page/control or for a whole portal at once. Additionally, MonoX uses a translation engines to suggest a correct translation for each localization resource.

The default portal demo at http://monox.mono-software.com has its localized Croatian version at http://monox.mono-software.com/language/hr-HR/Default.aspx 

Designing new portal themes or templates (we use both terms, template is a set of all files needed to give a portal a certain look and feel, while a theme is just an ASP.NET theme) is one of the tasks that our users perform very often. The process is described in the user manual, but sometimes it is difficult to grasp what exactly needs to be done in order to produce a fully functional portal theme, especially if you don't have any experience with ASP.NET themes and master pages. We decided to publish a design template gallery to provide our users with ready-to-use designs that could be used instantly. You just need to unzip the template package in the root folder of your portal and start to use the new page template.

There is just a single Theron template in the gallery at this moment, but it will grow steadily over the next few months. All templates are free for MonoX users.
Please take a moment and study the structure of the package. In essence, a portal template is just a set of images and CSS files placed in the appropriate App_Themes folder. This theme is than applied to the template's master page (placed in /MonoX/MasterPages folder, but could be placed elsewhere). You can than just use this master page for your content pages. Additionally, MonoX allows you to place all control templates in the App_Templates folder to control all visual aspects of the portal controls.

Blog comment spam has been a massive frustration for our users over the last few months. Although the original release of MonoX blog subsystem followed the Google recommendations for preventing comment spam, the guys behind this obviously lucrative business don't really care about "nofollow" tags - they are submitting non-relevant comments agresivelly.
This is going to change with the new, "social networking" release of MonoX later this month. We provide a pluggable, provider-based architecture that enables users to pick one or more public antispam services or develop their own solutions

This week we are finally releasing the new version of MonoX, our portal engine built on top of ASP.NET Web Parts framework. The main idea of Web Parts Framework is to let end users create and configure Web pages by dragging in functional blocks (called Web Parts) and setting properties on these blocks. This configuration happens right inside the Web page, using nothing but a standard Web browser. To change a page in the site, you browse to this page, switch to edit mode and change it. Non-technical users can change the layout of their page by dragging and dropping the web parts to different zones on the page. Each of the parts exposes a configuration user interface to change its behavior and appearance.

We have used a concept similar to Web parts in the first commercial release of MonoX portal framework (published during 2003). It was based on a very popular IBuySpy portal application, and introduced drag and drop and visual configuration features that are now accepted in the new Web part framework. However, the initial version was not using the standard API, as it was not available at that time. Nevertheless, it enabled us and our clients to build very sophisticated portal solutions.

This new version of MonoX fully supports all the features of ASP.NET 2.0 Web part framework. To the best of our knowledge, it is the only commercially available product including this feature, as other portal products use proprietary Web part/module architectures. In addition, MonoX fully support all other standard ASP.NET 2.0 features, including personalization, master pages, themes and provider models, and adds significant additional functionality described in the user manual that is a part of the installation package.

There are a few custom large-scale portals that were built on top of the MonoX v2. EmployIreland.ie is one of them; it includes dozens of custom Web parts and shows how far can you go with MonoX. We encourage all potential users to download the trial version and try it on their local machines - there are so many features that cannot be presented on a public Web site.

With global workforces and customers spread across the globe, organizations need to provide scalable tools for providing massive amounts of information easily, quickly and securely. However, most of our partners can't afford, or simply don't want, to build huge data centers across the world to support this requirement.
This is where Amazon S3 steps in: it provides a simple Web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, and relatively inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of Web sites.
MonoX now includes a data provider that hooks into Amazon S3, allowing users to store their data in the cloud and not on a database or file server somewhere in house. Best of all, this functionality is totally transparent to the end user, and site admins can access it via the familiar file explorer interface that is identical to the standard GUI. Additionally, power users can develop their own file providers for other storage services by extending the FileBrowserContentProvider class and implementing the IFileContentProvider interface.

We have just published a new version of the MonoX portal framework. This release was motivated by new features brought by ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 - MVC-style routing and Dynamic Data. Routing is now fully supported, with additional support for QuestyString parameters.

Another new feature introduces support for declarative QueryString and Form parameter binding. This will save you a lot of time that was previously spent on manual parameter retrieval tasks.

We have just published two new search providers: an Indexing Service search provider and a Lucene provider. You can utilize new providers to bring your portal search functionality to a new level.

MonoX fully supports Windows Live Writer and other similar editing tools that recognize standard MetaWeblog API, not only for the blog publishing tasks, but also for more general portal editing and configuration actions.