I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.7.0, available now on our download page.

Since the last release, the focus of our work has been on improved web farm support. We've completed abstraction layers for the file system and for caching, and we've implemented a log4net appender that can log to the database. We are still working on various providers that can plug into the new abstraction layers and other improvements, so our work on web farm support will continue into October. We've almost completed our support and guidance documentation for Windows Azure, we have some of the web farm documentation online now, but we will be completing that work and making an announcement about it soon. After that we will turn our efforts to more traditional types of web farms using the Amazon EC2 cloud, and the Microsoft Web Farm Framework.

So, for now much of the web farm improvements are just architectural changes that won't be things users will notice. Other highlights of this release include:

• Implemented an option to log errors and informational logging to the database instead of the file system
• Upgraded to TinyMCE 3.4.5
• Upgraded to CKeditor 3.6.2
• Upgraded to the latest AjaxControlToolkit
• Updated to latest version of Recaptcha library
• Updated the google maps to use the new v3 API, thanks to Jamie Eubanks for his work on this
• Added Whois ip address lookup dialog in most places where ip addresses are displayed

Updated Add On Products

The update to AjaxControlToolkit required us to also make new releases of Event Calendar Pro, Form Wizard Pro, and Web Invoice Pro, because these features use the AjaxControlToolkit and they need to use the same version of the AjaxControlToolit as mojoPortal. So you'll need to upgrade these products at the same time as you upgrade mojoPortal. 

Event Calendar Pro 3.4.0.2 includes new links to allow users to easily add events to Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Windows Live Calendar, and Outlook/iCalendar. We also added a new text area that can be shown during event registration to capture additional information from users who register or purchase tickets for events. You can provide instructions that will be shown above the text area to let your users know what additional information is needed. As mentioned above this version was also updated to use the latest version of AjaxControlToolkit to keep it compatible with the latest version of mojoPortal.

Form Wizard Pro 2.6.0.3 includes a minor improvement to allow file uploads to be configured as optional instead of required. It also was updated to use the latest AjaxControlToolkit for compatibility with mojoPortal 2.3.7.0.

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Thanks to our friends at DM2 Creative and i7MEDIA, mojoPortal.com now has a much nicer new design. Mark Asquith and the talented team at DM2 Creative came up with the design and Joe Davis of i7MEDIA did the conversion from a .psd file to a mojoPortal skin and also did lots of styling work for the features. I really love the new look and can't thank those guys enough for their great work. I hope you like it too!

Many of you may already know that I am not a designer myself, though I'm a pretty good mechanic when it comes to CSS and I can implement designs that others come up with, I lack any talent for creating designs from scratch. I'm just a developer, I can make it work well but I can't make it pretty, I need others to help with that.

The previous skin that we've used for the last 4 months or so was really something that Joe Davis had only intended as an example skin we could ship with mojoPortal, he never intended it to be the new design for mojoPortal.com, but I liked it and thought it was time for a change since the design we had before that was just some free design I had found on the internet. But after the change we got lots of complaints and only a few people said they liked it and I began to realize that not only am I not a good designer, I'm not really even a very good judge of design. However, I really did not want to go back to the previous design so I asked Joe and Mark to help, and this new design that we've launched today is the result of their awesome help.

Again huge thanks to Mark Asquith and his associates and to Joe Davis for making this site look great!

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This month's mojoPortal sightings includes the ChurchTeams.com site designed by TRIAD Communications, as well as the TRIAD Communications site itself which they have recently re-done using mojoPortal.

TRIAD Communications, based out of Cuyahoga Falls Ohio, has done quite a lot of really nice designs with mojoPortal and we've featured some of their sites before. 

Also this month we'd like to highlight Aquest IT based out of Greensboro, NC. They also have done quite a few sites with mojoPortal including their own.

They also implemented 99Blocks Magazine, Downtown Greensboro's Magazine.

Greensboro is not far from mojoPortal headquarters here in Charlotte, NC, so it is nice to see designers nearby using mojoPortal, and a good testament to mojoPortal to see design firms that not only use mojoPortal for their customers but also for their own sites.

We'd love to hear about the sites you are bringing online with mojoPortal. If you have a high profile site or a design that you're particularly proud of, or a site showing custom features you've built on mojoPortal, let us know, maybe we'll feature your site(s) in a blog post.

Don't forget if you haven't already, please vote for mojoPortal in the 2011 Open Source CMS Awards. Thanks to your nominations we are a finalist and now we need your vote.   

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Thanks to your nominations mojoPortal is a finalist in the 2011 Open Source Awards in the Open Source CMS Category!

That means we've made it to the next phase of the contest which is voting, so now we need your vote! The competition is very tough every year and the finalists are all excellent contenders with larger communities than ours which makes it easier for them to get votes, so we are definitely the underdogs in this contest and we really need as many of our community members to vote for mojoPortal as possible. The voting phase is open from now until October 31, 2001, then the judges weigh in and the final winners will be announced on November 7, 2011. I know that voting seems like the same thing as nominating but nominations were just the first phase. Thanks to you we got enough nominations to make it to the finals but voting is even more competitive and we need your support now more than ever! So go vote for mojoPortal today!

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