Our team at i7MEDIA have been developing mojoPortal skins for a long time, and we've done a lot of fine-tuning of our skinning process over the years. Now we want to make the fruit of our labor, the Framework skin, available for the whole mojoPortal community, for free! In light of this, we've just launched our new mojoSkins project with a version 1.0 release. This first release comes as a package of 5 skins: Framework v3.3.7, and four skins created out of Framework using Bootswatch.
Expect Much More to Come!
Framework was always intended to be a very basic skin which we would then build our designs on top of. With this new project, we're going to have to change that direction a little bit, making improvements for its use by all of you. For instance, because it's been a very long time since any of our clients used the Webstore feature in mojoPortal, the current version of Framework in this release doesn't include styles for it. We will be fixing this, as well as adding styles for all of the Pro modules in the near future, fixing any bugs that arise, and making quality-of-life improvements for the end users where we can.
We want to ensure that everything is as good as possible while also keeping the skins as small as possible, since after all Framework is intended to be a base that you use to build your own design on top of, which is why we are also going to be adjusting mojoPortal's core code to better suit being used with skinning systems like Bootstrap and will adjust the Framework skin as needed to reflect those changes. We believe we can greatly reduce the amount of CSS needed in Framework by doing this (though it is already reasonably small).
While the skins in this first release are primarily targeted at other developers, who we want to provide with a solid foundation for skin creation in mojoPortal, we believe they will work well for anyone, developer or not, who wants to create a very clean mojoPortal site.
How Can I use it?
Using the new skins from this project is incredibly easy, here's the step-by-step:
- Download the skins from here.
- Extract the zip file you just downloaded.
- Each of the skins is included in the root of the zip in their own folder. Choose which skin(s) you'd like to use, and copy those folder(s) into the
Data/Sites/1/Skins directory in your mojoPortal installation.*
- Sign into your mojoPortal site as an administrator.
- Click "Administration", then "Site Settings", and on that page, scroll down until you find the select input labeled "Skin".
- Your new skin(s) should be visible in the drop-down, select it and hit save.
That's it, you should now see the skin on your own site!
* Note: If you have a multiple site install, change the /1/ in the path described in step 3 to be /#/, where # is the site number of the mojoPortal site you'd like the skin to appear on.
How can I contribute?
We have already begun tracking issues in the project's GitHub repo, and look forward to community involvement as the project evolves. Please report any issues you notice, and feel free to do a pull request if you've managed to fix an issue yourself.
You can also create your own Bootswatch skins out of Framework, and submit them for inclusion in the project, which would be an awesome help.