Hey friends and supporters of mojoPortal, there's only one week left so if you haven't already please take a moment to nominate mojoPortal for the 2007 Open Source CMS Award by PackT Publishing.

It will take a lot of nominations even to get accepted into the contest so every vote counts. We are competing against projects with much larger user bases and much larger communities so mojoPortal is kind of an underdog. If we don't get enough nominations we won't even be in the contest.

There are 3 categories in which to nominate mojoPortal:

Overall Winner, Open Source CMS Award

Most Promising Open Source Content Management System

Best Other (non PHP) Open Source Content Management System

Please nominate mojoPortal in all 3 of these. Nominations are allowed through August 31, 2007

I've begun work on adding support for Open ID and also for Windows Live ID in mojoPortal. I hope to have both fully working and committed to svn by the end of the week.

The Web has long needed some kind of single sign on solution and I am glad to see solutions like these available. The convenience for users is that sites that support these authentication services will be able to let users register and login without having to create yet another user name and password.

In mojoPortal, these will be supplemental authentication methods that can be enabled or disabled at the site level. They will work in addition to the regular email-username/password scenarios. Windows Live ID requires getting a Windows Live Application ID and Secret Key for your site so I have already added a place for this in Site Settings.

For the Open ID support, I'm using DotNetOpenID, and for Windows Live ID I'm using code based on the samples in the SDK.

I've just implemented a provider model for the CAPTCHA used in the Blog Comment Form and Email Contact form. I'm sure you are all familiar with the use and purpose of CAPTCHAs in reducing comment spam. As spammers get ever more sophisticated we seem to need ever stronger measures to defend against their spam. So I figured by implementing the provider model it will be easier for new CAPTCHAs to be used in mojoPortal over time as they become needed or available. You can select which CAPTCHA to use in Site Settings.

Currently I have implemented 3 providers.

The Simple Math Captcha:

The Subkismet Captcha:

and finally

reCAPTCHA, from Carnegie Mellon

The idea of reCAPTCHA is to use the human effort in solving the CAPTCHA to help improve the quality of books scanned with optical character recognition by finding and fixing the mistakes. To use reCAPTCHA you need to get an account and set the private and public keys in mojoPortal Site Settings.

As you can see I've updated this site to the latest code from svn and using reCAPTCHA for this blog.

For reCAPTCHA I used the Controls by Adrian Godong and Joseph Hill from here:

http://recaptcha.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/recaptcha-plugins/dotnet

I'll leave it to someone else if they want to implement a provider for HotCaptcha ;-)

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.3.4, its available now on the download page.

New this release:

Setup System

A lot of work has gone into the Setup routine this version to make things much smoother for installation and upgrade. As I mentioned in my previous post, setup is now driven primarily by xml config files so that third party developers can easily make their own features participate in the setup process and you can even leave out built in features. I had mentioned in the previous post that I didn't have automatic schema creation and upgrade working in Firebird Sql, but now I have got it working so creation of the database objects is fully automated for clean installation and upgrades in all data layers. You just create a database, set the connection string, make the Data folder writable by the web process. Then navigate to yoursiteroot/Setup/Default.aspx and the setup process does the rest.

The initial pages that get created are also driven by xml config files so you can specify what pages to create when packaging builds of mojoPortal based applications and you can put instances of features on the page. There are also xml files that allow adding additional items to the Administration Menu. You can even customize the Setup page with your own branding in the header.

Google SiteMap Generator

Also as mentioned in a previous post, we now have an automatic google site map feature.

Other improvements...

Added an Error log viewer in the Administration Menu
Changed the Child Page Menu rendering to be more like a Site Map of pages beneath the parent.
bug fixes for bugs reported since last release

As always be sure and back everything up before doing an upgrade and post in the forums if you run into difficulty. When you upload the new files to the web I suggest you upload the Setup folder first before uploading the rest of the files. That way you can be sure all the setup scripts have arrived on the server before the Setup routine gets invoked.

A new Poll feature has landed in svn trunk contributed by Christian Fredh. It allows you to create and manage polls easily.

Currently it only supports MS SQL, but I plan to implement the other data layers soon based on the MS SQL version.

Great Work Christian!