I've been wanting to revamp the Site Settings UI in mojoPortal for a while now. On friday I started doing a little work in the WebStore UI trying to implement tabs for grouping settings. First I implemented a server control that wraps the dojo TabContainer but for some reason I could not get the FCKeditor to display in Firefox inside the dojo Tabs. So saturday morning I tried using the ExtJs project and wrapping a .NET server control around their Tabs and it worked much better.

So I decided to go ahead and use it in Site Settings.

Much better organization than the previous layout. I just updated demo.mojoportal.com with this for anyone who wants a closer look. It will also be in svn trunk by tonight.

I have to say the ExtJs project is very impressive and I think I will focus on using it instead of dojo. Nothing against the dojo project but ExtJs seems more mature, has better documentation and better demos.

Amazingly impressive is their WebDesktop demo. Very cool stuff.

We finally got our mojoPortal e-commerce demo site back online at http://storedemo.mojoportal.com/

Not much work has happened with this project since our initial sponsor went out of business without ever using it. But there has been some interest in getting it moving again and at least some possibility for new sponsorship is in the winds so I thought it would be good to get the demo site running again so people can check it out and help with testing and feedback.

Currently it only supports download products but you can proceed all the way through checkout and you can download the products. It uses Authorize.NET for the payment gateway and is hooked into a test account so you can test it using the card number 4111111111111111 and it will go through. The products in the store are mp3 files of my orginal music which was the only thing I had handy to make download test products with.

More information about the project (though not so up to date) can be found here: http://www.mojoportal.com/e-commercesolution.aspx

and we have special forums for anyone who wants to discuss this project here:
http://www.mojoportal.com/e-commerceforum.aspx

Also don't forget, October 26, 2007 is the last day you can vote for mojoPortal in the PackT Publishing Open Source CMS Awards so if you haven't voted already please show your support and vote for mojoPortal.

The National Recycling Coalition has just gone live with a new sub site for America Recycles Day, which is coming up on November 15.

I was fortunate enough to work on the project with the good folks at DDB Seattle. They did all the design work and my job was achieving their design in mojoPortal and building a couple of custom features like the Take The Pledge and Pass on The Pledge pages. Its nice to be involved in such a good cause. Recycling is something where each of us can make a difference with just a little effort and America Recycles Day is a good time to take a moment and commit to stepping up our efforts to recycle on an individual basis.

Added a couple of interesting new sites to the mojo Sites page this week.

A.Samarian submitted this nice site: http://yaldasazeh.com/ , I can't read it because its in Persian but it looks nice and is a good example of a site using Right To Left layout. Persian text is very beautiful.

Summit IT Solutions also did a great job with the custom skin they made for their site: http://summititsolutions.com/

Know of any more mojoPortal based sites not already listed on the mojo Sites page? Let me know and I'll add them.

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.3.9, available now on the download page.

I was going to wait and try to get finished with the Newsletter feature I'm working on for this release but since I'm getting side tracked with some customer work (which is a good thing) I thought I should go ahead and make a release to get the new skins out there.

This release contains a few bug fixes and 7 new skins as mentioned in my previous post.