I'm very excited to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.4

Its available now on the download page.

The main focus of this release is making mojoPortal more attractive, with the addition of 21 good looking new skins for a total of 34 skins now included with mojoPortal. There were also a few minor bug fixes for things reported in the Forums since the last release.

Those of you upgrading should do a full upgrade, don't try to just upload the new skins as there were code changes needed to support some of these new designs. You should upload all the new files and restore your customizations to Web.config or user.config.

My goals in producing all these skins was to make mojoPortal more popular and also to prove just how skinnable mojoPortal is. You can have a site fully populated with content and dramatically change the look of it with one click by changing the skin. This shows that we really have achieved good separation of presentation from content in mojoPortal. Those of you following this blog have surely seen the screen shots over the last 20 days as I implemented these new skins. 21 skins in 20 days is not bad if I do say so myself. It says a lot about the quality of the rendered markup produced by mojoPortal that one can go and find nice standards based designs and create mojoPortal skins from them relatively easy at least if you have an understanding of html and css. All these included skins can be used as a starting point for further customization to make your own custom skins as well.

I'd like to extend a huge thanks to the great designers who have made their work available. All the new skins in this release are the work of only 7 designers, Andreas Viklund, FreeCssTemplates, Graformix, Denise Mitchinson, snop, styleshout, and arcsin.

As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading and if you have any trouble let us know in the forums.

I've just completed the 20th and final skin of this skinning campaign. Later this afternoon/evening I will be making a release to include all the new skins.

This one is based on freecsstemplates-level2.

I've just completed the 19th new skin of my campaign, mitchinson-golden, which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com

One more to go and I'm finished with skinning for a while!

I've just completed the 18th new skin for mojoPortal, far exceeding my original goal of 10 new skins. This one is named mitchinson-khaki, and the one below is styleshout-coolwater, which I completed yesterday. You can see these skins now on demo.mojoportal.com. I still have 2 more designs that I want to try and make skins with today while I have skinning momentum. Tomorrow I will package a new release of mojoPortal to include all these new skins. I've been working full blast on skins since April 23rd until today. I'm very happy with the results, but ready to get working on other priorities.

I've completed the second skin of 3 for the 11th design of my 11 design campaign, styleshout-envision which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com. Of course since its a public demo site, someone may come along and change it, but you can change it back or checkout the different skins by (key icon) Administration Menu > Site Settings.

Coming up next,

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I've completed one skin of 3 for the 11th design of my 11 design campaign, styleshout-refresh which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com. Of course since its a public demo site, someone may come along and change it, but you can change it back or checkout the different skins by (key icon) Administration Menu > Site Settings.

There are 2 more skins coming, styleshout-coolwater, and styleshout-envision, but they are really just variations on the same design.

This will be in svn trunk later today for developers and will be in the next release of mojoPortal for everyone else.

I've completed the 10th design of my 11 design campaign, which resulted in 2 skins, styleshout-stylevantage and styleshout-citrusisland, which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com. Of course since its a public demo site, someone may come along and change it, but you can change it back or checkout the different skins by (key icon) Administration Menu > Site Settings.

I've completed the 9th design of my 11 design campaign, styleshout-brightsideoflife, which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com. Of course since its a public demo site, someone may come along and change it, but you can change it back or checkout the different skins by (key icon) Administration Menu > Site Settings.

This will be in svn trunk later today for developers and will be in the next release of mojoPortal for everyone else, hopefully available sometime this weekend.

I've now completed 11 skins based on 8 designs of my 10 design campaign. The newest is snop-plasticboy-reflection, which can currently be seen on demo.mojoportal.com. Of course since its a public demo site, someone may come along and change it, but you can change it back or checkout the different skins by (key icon) Administration Menu > Site Settings.

A few of the designs I've made alternate versions of which accounts for 11 skins so far. I really only need 2 more designs to meet my original goal but I've decided to do 1 extra design. The 3 remaining designs will actually result in 6 more skins. These are the designs I've chosen to complete this skinning campaign:

styleshout-brightsideoflife
styleshout-citrusisland and  styleshout-stylevantage (which I consider as variations on the same design)
styleshout-refresh, styleshout-envision, and styleshout-coolwater, which are all variations on the same design in my opinion.

Hopefully, I can complete all of these by sometime this weekend and then ship a new release with all these new skins.

I've completed the 7th skin of my 10 skin campaign, andreasviklund-02, which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com. Of course since its a public demo site, someone may come along and change it, but you can change it back or checkout the different skins by (key icon) Administration Menu > Site Settings.

Actually I made 2 skins from this design and named the second one andreasviklund-02-alt1. The interesting thing about this skin is that it has 2 levels of tabbed menus and then a vertical menu for any pages deeper than that. In my alt1 version I took it a step further and used 3 levels of tabs and then a vertical menu to show anything deeper. This screen shot shows the alt version with 3 levels of tabs and a vertical menu for pages below that.

This will be available in svn trunk later today for developers and will be in the next release of mojoPortal for everyone else.