I just completed another new skin named techmania using this design by Erwin Aligam. You can see it now on the demo site. Great work Erwin! I will have this one in svn trunk by tonight.

I'm on a roll with implementing new skins now that I've found so many good free designs. This one took a bit longer than the first one. I spent at least 10 hours tweaking things until I was satisfied, but things I learned doing this one may make it go better for other ones.

I'm moving on to do another skin now, it is my mission to have a lot of great looking skins included in mojoPortal. If its bling the people want then the people shall have bling!

I just implemented a new skin today using this design, you can see it now on the demo site. It only took me about 3 and a half hours to implement it. It is in my svn sandbox now and will be in trunk later tonight.

I also got started on another skin using this design, but its not finished yet. Since there are so many good free designs on sites like OpenDesigns.org, OpenWebDesign.org, and OpenSourceTemplates.org, I plan to spend the next week implementing new skins to include in mojoPortal. I'm not a good designer myself but I do have a good understanding of CSS and can usually implement a skin using someone else's design. I've downloaded quite a few designs and am picking ones that I think will show a lot of variety. If anyone wants to suggest designs from one of these sites that they would like to see implented as a mojoPortal skin I'm open to suggestions.

Let me know what you think of the new skin on the demo site, do you like it? Do you think its better looking than the other mojoPortal skins. I do ;-)

A lot of people like tab style menus and they do look nice though you are limited to how many items you can have in a horizontal menu. I implemented this skin so that only top level pages are in the top horizontal tab menu and cild pages beneath those are in a vertical tree menu.

The new release has a bug that I thought I should mention as its easy to workaround. I plan to release a fix for it very soon but its trivial to solve for those who are working with the current release.

The bug is that if you try and save content after a clean install you get an error. The bug was introduced by my re-working of the search index. The cause of the error is that it tries to index the saved content but the index has not been initialized yet. The quick solution is just to do a search before you edit any content because the first time you do a search the index is built. After that there is no error.

I'm going to add a routine in the setup process to initialize the search engine so this bug doesn't happen and put out a fix for it in the next few days.

I've updated several developer documents today, primarily the ones beneath

Extending mojoPortal 

I also added some new ones:

Setup and Upgrade for Custom Featues
Making Custom Features Searchable
Module Settings - A Developer Convenience
Adding Custom Items to The Administration Menu

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.3.7, available now on the download page.

This release fixes a few bugs reported in 2.2.3.6 and also adds full integration for MS AJAX so that developers can easily use it in their custom features. We've used the UpdatePanel in the blog and also in the Poll feature. The Poll Feature by Christian Fredh is included in the release files for MS SQL but hasn't yet been ported for the other data layers.

Note for Mono users:

I did not make a 2.2.3.7 release for Mono but instead left the 2.2.3.6 release for those running Mono 1.2.4 or higher. The reason for this is that the release versions of Mono (1.2.4 and 1.2.5) do not yet support the MS AJAX framework. However, if you can build Mono from svn it does work. I figure if you can build Mono from source code then you can also easily build mojoPortal from source code and the latest mojoPortal source code does work with the latest Mono built from svn. If you do build mojoPortal against the latest Mono, you also need to replace the Web.config file with the one from the _mono_errata folder. I think we can expect to see support for MS AJAX in Mono 1.2.6 since it is there and working in svn.

Also new this release

Improved pager control is now used on Memberlist, forums and other places where there are pages to browse through. The pager handles large numbers of pages in a visually graceful way.

I revamped the search engine creating a provider model for the search index builders so that its easy to plug in new ones. Now it is possible for developers to make their custom features searchable by implementing an IndexBuilderProvider with just 2 methods. I will be writing a tutorial on that in the next few days. I will also be documenting the steps to integrate features into the setup process which is also very easy now. We've done a lot lately to make it easy for 3rd party developers to implement features and hopefully this will lead to more interest in developing features that plug into mojoPortal.

As always, be sure and backup your site and db before upgrading, review the upgrading tips, and post in the forums if you run into any troubles.

We've been making rapid progress with mojoPortal and it has led us to release early and release often which I think is a good thing. There are a lot of exciting things going on in the planning and early development stage that I ill blog more about later.