Last Updated: 2/9/2006
My vision for the future of mojoPortal is ultimately to be a platform to run a business by providing a powerful but simple to use content management and virtual office system for easily building interactive collaborative web sites and applications for almost any purpose. mojoPortal will also be easily extendable so that you can develop your own custom features to support your specific business needs. mojoPortal will continually add the non-differentiating features that every company would use to achieve this vision. You will be able to focus on your business logic and take advantage of the framework for authentication, authorization, navigation, skinning and other features of the infrastructure. Some of the features I have in mind are messaging, project management, issue tracking, time tracking, contact management, schedule and appointment management, and task management. Wherever possible I will use best of breed open source implementations that are freely available and fill in the gaps where needed. Any code not written directly by me will be listed on the Credits page. For me, this is an art project that I hope will one day be both widely used and well regarded.
I forsee in the future with the adoption of standard xml based document formats for standard office applications, it will be possible to create web based editors for these documents. We are beginning to see the possibilities for rich web user interfaces with javascript and asyncronous web requests using xml over http already. Applications like google mail and the new yahoo beta mail show that an office like experience can be achieved in a web browser. We are beginning an exciting era for the web.
If you want to contribute effort to the project just start sending me Subversion patch files for consideration. I will review them and if I agree with the changes will commit them, otherwise I will start an email exchange with you to either work through whatever issue makes me reluctant to include your change or at the very least explain why I don't want to include your change. With the convenience of Subversion's patch file feature most developers will not need commit access to contribute. Those who consistently contribute high quality patches that don't require modification will be considered for commit permission.
If you don't know what Subversion is, see the download page for links to help you get up to speed.
I'm especially looking for users to QA the site and provide feedback, specifically I would like to have at least 1 person for each of the data layers who would take some ownership to test each version and/or upgrades prior to release. Any good designers with CSS skills who would like to produce some better skins please do! mojoPortal has no hard coded labels, all labels come from a Culture.config file. Anyone who creates Culture.config files for other languages than english, I ask you please send me a copy of your translation so I can make it available for download. There are also some other files that require localization. I would like to find people who would maintain the localized files for various cultures and keep them updated as mojoPortal evolves. Even reporting bugs is a very valuable contribution so please post them in the forums.
I am developing mojoPortal on a Windows machine using VS.NET 2003/2005 and deploying on Suse 10 to test.
Currently I'm not aware of any development tools that let you easily debug ASP.NET under GNU/Linux, but perhaps in time these tools will mature. MonoDevelop looms on the horizon with promise. From what I understand, its the mono debugger that is holding things back for the moment. They are working on making it app domain aware which is needed for web app debugging.
Dean Brettle has been able to compile and develop mojoPortal and also is developing his own NeatUpload project which is used in mojoPortal, using MonoDevelop. He is working without the ability to debug and is using log4net to log runtime information to help him work things out (at least I think thats what he's doing)
For most people, if you want to help with the development you will need VS.NET under Windows. If you also have a GNU/Linux box to test on that is ideal.