Hello mojoPortal Community, its that time of year again and Packt Publishing has started their annual Open Source Awards and with your help we'd like to compete in the Open Source CMS Category.

The first stage is the nomination stage and it requires a lot of nominations to get to the next stage which is voting, so we need your nomination. Please head on over to the Open Source CMS Nomination page and nominate mojoPortal! The competition is very tough every year so every nomination counts. 

The schedule for the contest is:

August  1 | Nominations Open
September 9 | Nominations Close
September  19 | Voting Begins
October 31 | Voting Ends
November 7 | Winners Announced

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Imagine Cup 2011 Multimedu - PEARLS Team

Please join me in congratulating these guys on winning 3rd place in the 2011 Imagine Cup in Greece with an application they built on top of mojoPortal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XClqjmjXw24
Note that the audio portion of the video is in Greek, but if you enable closed captioning it has English captions.

A description of the project from Panos Kakoulidis:

Multimedu is the first complete system that allows students with special needs to have access to the multiple capabilties of the Internet, intergrating them to the academic and the wider community.

System consists of 4 interconnected subsystems that support the significant processes of learning and participation:

1. DICTIONARY
2. MULTIMEDIA LIBRARY
3. PARALLEL PRESENTATIONS
4. SOCIAL NETWORKING

Dictionary is a multilingual catalog of terms which is updated by the active contribution of the users. On each term, multiple descriptions are offered in the form of text, picture and video in sign language. Moreover, there is text-to-speech support.

Multimedia Library is a hosting space for every kind of archives with educational content (video-recorded lectures, notes, presentations etc) which are accessible not only to the students with special needs but to everyone.

Parallel Presentations is an online system which offers the ability to attend on lessons, labs and seminars to all users, including people with sight or hearing problems by supporting them with videos in sign language, text-to-speech, access to Dictionary etc. Furthermore, it supports distance learning with active participation and lesson recording.

Last but not least, Social Networking support promotes mass participation and communication. This is achieved with user's profile and contacts, user groups, multimedia private messages and forum. 

Based on viewing the video, I would describe the system as a learning management system that supports users with special needs by making it possible to have multiple ways of presenting the same material and a social networking aspect that enables crowd sourcing the creation of material in various formats to support the needs of the users.

It is always rewarding to see the things that people build on top of mojoPortal. By not building from scratch they saved a lot of development time and were able to focus much sooner on the functionality they wanted to build. They have plans to bring the system online in the future, so we will post about them again once it is possible to see the site, but for now you can get a pretty good idea of what they have built from the video.

California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST)

We've featured this site before, so I'm leaving out the image, but I thought it was worth mentioning again because they let me know about an award they won and an even bigger award that they are in the running for. Quoting Linda Sabella, Information System Analyst with POST:

I just thought you might like an update on our submission of our Mojoportal site for a “Best of California” award.  We did win an award.  We won for custom software that our programmers built on top of Mojoportal that allows peace officers to access records and course catalogs. Awardees listed here http://www.centerdigitalgov.com/survey/2581

After the awards closed, the State of California CIO, impressed by our use of Mojoportal,   recommended our site for a national award.  This submission is specifically for our use of a  content management system.  We have submitted the paperwork and will let you know if we are successful in winning an award. Website http://www.nascio.org/awards/2011awards/

mojoportal has been a great asset to us.  Thank you for all of your efforts.

The Space Needle 50th Anniversary site

For those who don't know, the Space Needle, is a monument in Seattle Washington that opened just in time for the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair and has become "Seattle's favorite icon".

A few sites were submitted by Bibiana Garcia Zapata of Colombia

I'm the leader of a community in Internet named Avanet, we found mojoPortal and now We are so happy. We help others to mount their sites with mojo in our hosting with the multiple sites feature, :) It allows us to help and promote our slogan "digital altruism", our additional projects are

Our site is www.avanet.org
and these are the projects that we help
http://www.barcampmedellin.org
http://www.anti-depredadores.org
http://senageeks.avanet.org
http://www.nexos.net.co/

Thanks to all the community members who keep us informed of the sites they are building with mojoPortal! If you've done something interesting with mojoPortal we'd love to hear from you, and maybe we will feature your site in a blog post.

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Back in August we tried out what was then a fairly new service, Amanuens, that makes it easy to crowd source translation. We tried it with several translators, but at the time it seemed confusing and difficult to use so we stopped using it for a while. Since then Amanuens has made a lot of improvements to the usability and now we have used it successfully with a small group of translators and it seems very much easier. So if you are interested in translating mojoPortal into a new language or updating an existing translation, let us know on this forum thread and we can see about setting up an account for you to help with translation. The Amanuens service makes it easy to translate the .resx files used for all labels and buttons, and these are the most important files to translate, but there are also message templates and help files that are just plain text files. These files are not supported by Amanuens so we still work by having you send those in a .zip if you translate them.

mojoPortal is currently translated at least partially in 24 languages, though many of them have not been kept up to date over time. The English resources are always the most up to date, and Italian is also kept very up to date by Diego Mora. Most other languages are only partially complete so we could use some help in getting them updated. Translated files in Amanuens are automatically synced and committed to our source code repository each morning, so it is a very efficient process.

Amanuens provides this excellent service free for open source projects and it is really working out well for us so far, so I thought I should give them a shout of thanks with this blog post. It isn't just a service for .NET applications, they support all kinds of technologies and they integrate with all kinds of source control systems. You can even hire translations directly through their service. Anyone who is working on a project that needs localization should take a look at Amanuens.

Thanks especially to our translators who volunteer their time to keep our translations updated!

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I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.5.8, available now on our download page.

Whats' New?

• A new Flickr Gallery feature
• A new User Sign In Module that can be put on a content page such as the home page
• A new scroller setting in the Feed Manager to enable a scrolling news ticker
• Some improvements to the List/Links feature including a new introduction that can be used to place html above the list and a new option for non-ajax paging
• Thanks to Jamie Eubanks for implementing a way to use both database authentication and LDAP, there is a new config setting for fallback to LDAP if database authentication fails. This allows scenarios where your internal users such as content authors can login with their LDAP credentials while still allowing public users to register and sign in with database credentials.
• A new option to disable CSS caching while designing by clicking a button that sets a cookie to disable it. The previous way of of disabling it from config still works but this new way may be more convenient. You will find the button under Administration > Advanced Tools > Designer Tools
• Upgraded to CKeditor 3.4.2
• Updated Italian resources thanks to Diego Mora
• Bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the previous release including several fixes in the SQL CE data layer and the Firebird data layer.

mojoPortal User Group Tonight

This is kind of short notice but there is a meeting of the mojoPortal online user group tonight.

David Dean will be giving a short session on how to create a control that gives you greater flexibility with your mojoPortal template. The nice thing about this learning session is that David will take everyone through how to create a custom module and install it using the mojoPortal installation system. At the end of the meeting a link to the source code will be provided so users can install this flexible component in any mojoPortal installation. Seats in the virtual room are limited so sign up now to reserve your spot.

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