Clock v4.0 is Released!

It’s been 13 years since it’s first version, which was in use at Selly Oak Trust School. It’s had many additional features added since then, and in it’s recent 2023 update! It’s now got Roman numerals, a User Guide built in (but also available as a PDF) and it now announces the time when you ask, when running in Time now mode.

But most importantly, it’s now packaged up into a Microsoft Installer Package, which can be network installed, or run as a standalone and can be downloaded via the Store.

Works on any version of Windows from, (cough) XP through to 11! Even runs on the ARM64 version!

It can run via WINE on macOS or Linux, but the Speech Library hasn’t been fully implemented, so it won’t have speech support. So best to stick to Windows for all the bells and whistles.

Store

The PTR.Systems Store is now live! Although it doesn’t have any products on there yet, and even when they do appear, they are most likely to be free!

WordPress and Windows

PTR Sites Logo

Well, continuing on with WordPress and exploring the multi-site network installation, I’ve discovered that WordPress and Windows, just don’t get along at all!

Error 500 pages are caused every time Jetpack is upgraded on a Windows server, I believe it’s a Timeout issue as this is a large Plugin, whilst the smaller plugins don’t seem to have a problem.

PTR Sites, WordPress hosting made easy.

So, based on this, PTR Systems has purchased an additional Linux host, dedicated to a Network WordPress installation, which we’re currently setting up as a subdivision of PTR Systems, called PTR Sites.

So, all PTR Systems’ WordPress hosted sites are being migrated slowly but surely to the new Linux host. It’s much quicker and offer’s new features like Clef login.

This site is also hosted under the same PTR Sites network installation, and we’re looking at getting a collection of the best plugins together so that if you’re a small business that wants a simple blog site, WordPress is here for you, when you get larger and you now want a shop, WooCommerce is there for you, along with Storefront. When you build up a community and want people to login and share info, we’ve got BuddyPress for you, and if you need a forum, we’ve got bbPress for you.

Not to mention the whole network site is backed up using BackWPup to three separate locations daily.

Once the whole network site is setup, along with all the plugins and select themes, there will also be a forum, which will allow shared sites to request a free plugin / theme to be installed, if it meets PTR Systems’ requirements, it will happily be installed, otherwise, we are also looking at single hosted sites too, with full Super admin privileges for people that need a little more power and want a full installation to themselves. There will be a slight premium for your own site, but will still be highly competitive.

Check out www.ptrsites.com for more information, but bear with us, as that site is under construction too.

WordPress 4.4.1 Upgrade

PTR Systems hosts and manages a number of WordPress sites, and they run on a Windows Shared host at GoDaddy.

During the upgrade of one of the sites, the upgrade kept failing. Now as it’s a Windows host, the error message is an Error 500 Server error returned from IIS, not the PHP runtime. So this is pretty useless information.

GoDaddy has the functionality to install and overview your WordPress installations. Thankfully when you visit the overview of the failed installation it shows you error returned from the php runtime, and this information you can use to diagnose your problem!

In my case, the Jetpack plugin was causing the issue, so I simply deleted it from the plugins folder and the site is back up and running, but it states the upgrade has failed, at this point I simply re-installed the upgrade and it worked and then upgraded the remaining plugins.

So, I recommend in the future to make sure all your plugins are up to date, BEFORE you do the 4.4.1 upgrade in case one of your plugins is not fully compatible with 4.4.1. I believe the version of Jetpack I had installed was quite an old version, hence my upgrade issue. Hey, you live and learn!

Please note, the site I was upgrading is not live yet so it didn’t matter that it went down! All my other hosted sites are backed up and these major upgrades are performed on copies of the site then transferred over to reduce downtime, and these upgrades are performed in the early hours of the morning!

Website Construction and Migration

So, I thought it would be about time to start getting the company website setup and updated, but thought it would be a nice idea to transfer all the blog info from my previous mojoPortal site to this WordPress site, so I can have it all in one place, and I may drop my mojoPortal site soon.

Therefore below is my previous Under Construction blog for info on setting up mojoPortal with GoDaddy and issues I had back all those years ago! It makes setting up a WordPress site seem trivial, but I still won’t knock mojoPortal it is a good solid CMS that I still recommend.

Switching to WordPress

Shame to leave mojoPortal behind

Well, it’s been a long and lonesome road! Can’t say there’s been much activity here, and each time I’ve come back time and time again, I’ve noticed little tweaks here and there from the last update I did, quite a while ago now.

But have I loved using mojoPortal and I do still recommend it as a very good, if not excellent CMS system.

The only thing that swayed me towards WordPress is it’s large Community and massive collection of supported Themes and Plugins, and also it’s simplicity. Although mojoPortal is just as simple, WordPress’ Dashboard and responsive design is 2nd to none and seems to be easier to teach people, as there’s plenty of other people teaching people on YouTube, so saves me a job!

Also I’m not much of a designer, I’m more of a developer, so I can easily tweak a design I like and make a Child Theme much easier than I can integrate a theme into mojoPortal.

But, my WordPress site is up and running, again it’ll be updated as often as this one! Hopefully slightly better!

Moving to Plesk hosting

Well, it’s been a long journey, but generally trouble free.

As I’ve moved from such an old version, it was still running on .NET 3.5, so the first thing was to create the add the new domain to Plex, which is now ptr.systems and set it to use .NET 3.5 rather than the default .NET 4.5.2.

Now copy everything across! Which took a while, due to the large number of small files, but we got there.

The fun part was the Database, unfortunately, Go Daddy for security reasons will not let you upload a .bak file, which I backed up on the old hosting, so I had to restore it to a local copy of SQL Server 2012 Express, and then Script the database and content and run the script on the new database hosted on the Plex hosting. I did phone support to see if they could easily transfer it their end, but they wouldn’t, but sent me a good help guide to script the database.

Either way, everything copied across, so ran the /Setup and, Error 🙁 So adjusted the Web.config to show Errors and discovered it was an issue with having DotNetAuth.dll in the /bin file, simply deleted it and it worked.

So, next I downloaded the latest version which had both .NET 3.5 and .NET 4, which happened to be 2.4.0.3.

I first uploaded the .NET 3.5 version and ran the /Setup, then I uploaded the .NET 4 version and set the hosting to .NET 4.5.2 and reran the /Setup, just for good measures!

All working fine, so finally uploaded the latest version along with the extra-skins!

New update and e-mail settings

Well, it’s been a while, but every things been working fine and dandy, but e-mail has never been able to send from the site, so I decided to update to the latest version and check my e-mail settings.

Updating to the new version was as simple as ever! First, use Go Daddy’s admin website to backup the MSSQL Database, then FTP the site back to my workstation for a backup. Then download the new version of mojoPortal for .NET 3.5 and unzip it!

Now I opened the user.config.sample file and added all the settings in my user.config file from my backup, plus added the following lines for e-mail support on Go Daddy hosting:

<add key="SMTPServer" value="relay-hosting.secureserver.net" />
<add key="SMTPRequiresAuthentication" value="false" />
<add key="SMTPUseSsl" value="false" />
<add key="SMTPPort" value="25" />
<add key="SMTPUser" value="" />
<add key="SMTPPassword" value="" />

Now save this as user.config and that’s that file done! Open the Web.config file, and here, you’ll notice the medium trust has become default now, not full trust, so you no longer have to do any renaming of files, just change the mailSettings below for mail to work with Go Daddy:

  <system.net>
    <mailSettings>
       <smtp from="noreply@domain.com">
           <network host="relay-hosting.secureserver.net" port="25" />
       </smtp>
    </mailSettings>
  </system.net>

Save the file again, then ftp the new mojoPortal installation over the top of the old installation, then run the /Setup scripts to get the new site up and running!

When you are using the Contact web feature you must change the settings to NOT send at the e-mail address entered and to send from an address @domain.com rather than any gmail or hotmail account, as the Go Daddy SMTP relay server will not relay messages with @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, etc… So if you leave that option ticked, you will never receive e-mails from people that enter addresses like that in the From box.

I’m going to be looking at the jQuery used in mojoPortal next and figure out why some themes seem to work great on iPad and some don’t! I’ve also been told there is a problem with the editor on iPad, so I’ll be investigating that next, so if this is also a problem for you, hang tight and I’ll see what I can do!

Multiple Applications on top of mojoPortal

Well, it’s been a while since my last post, but I thought I’d let you know some of the problems I ran into installing DotNetNuke and Joomla on my hosting provider, considering I have mojoPortal as my root site.

GoDaddy has this funky section of Hosted Applications, where you can simply select the application you want and it will install it for you! This includes setting up the database and the application.

So, I decided I would take a look at DotNetNuke and Joomla to compare it with mojoPortal, although I have already made my mind up, that mojoPortal is the best CMS, as it’s fast and very easy to use. Plus it’s written in C#, which is my language of choice, whilst Joomla is written in PHP and DotNetNuke is written in, wait for it… VB.NET, yuk!

So, the first thing I did was set up two net sub domains using the Domain Management tool in GoDaddy, I called them dotnetnuke.ptrsystems.com and joomla.ptrsystems.com and put them in a dotnetnuke and joomla directory, respectively.

I then popped into the Hosted Applications section and installed them into the appropriate sub domains. I shortly got an e-mail telling me they were both set up!

Great, I thought, and it was great for joomla, which worked straight away, especially as this is a PHP website, so doesn’t care much for the Web.config in the root directory! But, DotNetNukewas a different kettle of fish!

To start with, I got a nice Server Error 500! Which, on your own server, you could get a bit more information than just Error 500, but on GoDaddy’s hosting you don’t!

So, how to fix it! Good Question! I had a feeling that the Web.config in the root directory was propagating down to the dotnetnuke directory, therefore the sub application will be trying to find mojoPortal modules which are not in the dotnetnuke application’s directory.

So, I needed to stop this propagation, but how!? Trawling the Internet was proving quite difficult to find, even on the MSDN website, but I finally found a <location> tag option, which stops inheritance to child applications. This is the solution, but when I tried it, it then caused Application Errors, so I moved the <location> and </location> tags to stop inheritance on certain sections of the Web.config file, after lots of trial and error here’s where you need to put it:

...........
      </appSettings>
      <location path="" inheritInChildApplications="false">
            <system.web>
...........
            </system.codedom>
      </location>
      <runtime>
...........

So, basically you need to enclose all the tags in the <location> tag, except for:

  • <configSections>
  • <appSettings>
  • <runtime>

After this was done, both mojoPortal and DotNetNuke work excellent together, and I’m assuming any ASP.NET application I intend to host under mojoPortal will also work!

My next move is moodle! Unfortunately, GoDaddy believe this will only work on a Linux server so their Application Hosting section wont let me install it on my Windows hosting, but where there is a will, there’s a way, so I’ll let you know how that gets on next!

Until then, I’m busy living the last days of my 20s! So might be a while before my next post! Until then, take it easy and I hope this helps anyone that wishes to host applications under a mojoPortalparent site!