Thanks to our friends at DM2 Creative and i7MEDIA, mojoPortal.com now has a much nicer new design. Mark Asquith and the talented team at DM2 Creative came up with the design and Joe Davis of i7MEDIA did the conversion from a .psd file to a mojoPortal skin and also did lots of styling work for the features. I really love the new look and can't thank those guys enough for their great work. I hope you like it too!

Many of you may already know that I am not a designer myself, though I'm a pretty good mechanic when it comes to CSS and I can implement designs that others come up with, I lack any talent for creating designs from scratch. I'm just a developer, I can make it work well but I can't make it pretty, I need others to help with that.

The previous skin that we've used for the last 4 months or so was really something that Joe Davis had only intended as an example skin we could ship with mojoPortal, he never intended it to be the new design for mojoPortal.com, but I liked it and thought it was time for a change since the design we had before that was just some free design I had found on the internet. But after the change we got lots of complaints and only a few people said they liked it and I began to realize that not only am I not a good designer, I'm not really even a very good judge of design. However, I really did not want to go back to the previous design so I asked Joe and Mark to help, and this new design that we've launched today is the result of their awesome help.

Again huge thanks to Mark Asquith and his associates and to Joe Davis for making this site look great!

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This month's mojoPortal sightings includes the ChurchTeams.com site designed by TRIAD Communications, as well as the TRIAD Communications site itself which they have recently re-done using mojoPortal.

TRIAD Communications, based out of Cuyahoga Falls Ohio, has done quite a lot of really nice designs with mojoPortal and we've featured some of their sites before. 

Also this month we'd like to highlight Aquest IT based out of Greensboro, NC. They also have done quite a few sites with mojoPortal including their own.

They also implemented 99Blocks Magazine, Downtown Greensboro's Magazine.

Greensboro is not far from mojoPortal headquarters here in Charlotte, NC, so it is nice to see designers nearby using mojoPortal, and a good testament to mojoPortal to see design firms that not only use mojoPortal for their customers but also for their own sites.

We'd love to hear about the sites you are bringing online with mojoPortal. If you have a high profile site or a design that you're particularly proud of, or a site showing custom features you've built on mojoPortal, let us know, maybe we'll feature your site(s) in a blog post.

Don't forget if you haven't already, please vote for mojoPortal in the 2011 Open Source CMS Awards. Thanks to your nominations we are a finalist and now we need your vote.   

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Imagine Cup 2011 Multimedu - PEARLS Team

Please join me in congratulating these guys on winning 3rd place in the 2011 Imagine Cup in Greece with an application they built on top of mojoPortal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XClqjmjXw24
Note that the audio portion of the video is in Greek, but if you enable closed captioning it has English captions.

A description of the project from Panos Kakoulidis:

Multimedu is the first complete system that allows students with special needs to have access to the multiple capabilties of the Internet, intergrating them to the academic and the wider community.

System consists of 4 interconnected subsystems that support the significant processes of learning and participation:

1. DICTIONARY
2. MULTIMEDIA LIBRARY
3. PARALLEL PRESENTATIONS
4. SOCIAL NETWORKING

Dictionary is a multilingual catalog of terms which is updated by the active contribution of the users. On each term, multiple descriptions are offered in the form of text, picture and video in sign language. Moreover, there is text-to-speech support.

Multimedia Library is a hosting space for every kind of archives with educational content (video-recorded lectures, notes, presentations etc) which are accessible not only to the students with special needs but to everyone.

Parallel Presentations is an online system which offers the ability to attend on lessons, labs and seminars to all users, including people with sight or hearing problems by supporting them with videos in sign language, text-to-speech, access to Dictionary etc. Furthermore, it supports distance learning with active participation and lesson recording.

Last but not least, Social Networking support promotes mass participation and communication. This is achieved with user's profile and contacts, user groups, multimedia private messages and forum. 

Based on viewing the video, I would describe the system as a learning management system that supports users with special needs by making it possible to have multiple ways of presenting the same material and a social networking aspect that enables crowd sourcing the creation of material in various formats to support the needs of the users.

It is always rewarding to see the things that people build on top of mojoPortal. By not building from scratch they saved a lot of development time and were able to focus much sooner on the functionality they wanted to build. They have plans to bring the system online in the future, so we will post about them again once it is possible to see the site, but for now you can get a pretty good idea of what they have built from the video.

California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST)

We've featured this site before, so I'm leaving out the image, but I thought it was worth mentioning again because they let me know about an award they won and an even bigger award that they are in the running for. Quoting Linda Sabella, Information System Analyst with POST:

I just thought you might like an update on our submission of our Mojoportal site for a “Best of California” award.  We did win an award.  We won for custom software that our programmers built on top of Mojoportal that allows peace officers to access records and course catalogs. Awardees listed here http://www.centerdigitalgov.com/survey/2581

After the awards closed, the State of California CIO, impressed by our use of Mojoportal,   recommended our site for a national award.  This submission is specifically for our use of a  content management system.  We have submitted the paperwork and will let you know if we are successful in winning an award. Website http://www.nascio.org/awards/2011awards/

mojoportal has been a great asset to us.  Thank you for all of your efforts.

The Space Needle 50th Anniversary site

For those who don't know, the Space Needle, is a monument in Seattle Washington that opened just in time for the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair and has become "Seattle's favorite icon".

A few sites were submitted by Bibiana Garcia Zapata of Colombia

I'm the leader of a community in Internet named Avanet, we found mojoPortal and now We are so happy. We help others to mount their sites with mojo in our hosting with the multiple sites feature, :) It allows us to help and promote our slogan "digital altruism", our additional projects are

Our site is www.avanet.org
and these are the projects that we help
http://www.barcampmedellin.org
http://www.anti-depredadores.org
http://senageeks.avanet.org
http://www.nexos.net.co/

Thanks to all the community members who keep us informed of the sites they are building with mojoPortal! If you've done something interesting with mojoPortal we'd love to hear from you, and maybe we will feature your site in a blog post.

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I've just updated this site to use a new skin designed by Joe Davis of http://i7media.net/i7MEDIA. I wasn't really dissatisfied with the previous design in general, it was pretty decent and in some ways it makes me a little sad to change from what had become so familiar to me. But the new design seems very clean and there is a lot of attention to detail that really looks professional and I think in some cases the new design improves the usability of the site.

The menu structure is very nice and one of the most striking elements of the design. But the usability improvements are the result of making things stand out more. For example people hardly seemed to notice the forum descriptions and posting guidelines in the old design. It is right there on the page but somehow it often goes un-noticed because it doesn't grab your attention, so the result is that people often post questions in the wrong forum or leave out information that is expected to be included. With the new design, the forum description/instructions really stand out and I anticipate it will be noticed better than with the old design. Notice also the nice attention to detail for the pager link styles.

New Design Forums

Old Design Forums

Similarly, on our search page there has always been a little help link that people could click to learn how to do more advanced searching, but in the old design hardly anyone ever noticed it. Whereas again in the new design it really jumps out and I anticipate more people will click the help link and will have better luck searching once they know the tips from the help.

New Design Search

Old Design Search

A huge thanks goes out to Joe Davis for his hard work on this design! Joe is also working on a variation on this design but with a different color scheme that we will ship with a future release of mojoPortal.

What do you think? Do you like the new design better than the old one?

Please also let us know if you notice any pages on this site that don't look right with the new design, we are still tweaking a few things here and there.

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Just a quick post to highlight a few mojoPortal sites that have come to my attention recently.

The City of Escondido California went live with their main site using mojoPortal back in December of 2010, but more recently they went live with a new site for their Police Department and for Recreation, and work is under way for a new site for their Fire Department.

Quoting Jamie Eubanks, a developer in the IT Department for the city:

"the PD site was pretty straightforward this time around (nothing custom). I can say that it's the great out-of-the-box flexibility of mojoPortal that allowed us to create a large and comprehensive site like this with no programming on our part. This is also our first site which was developed end-to-end by our webmaster with minimal technical support needed. She developed the site skin from scratch in Artisteer, and reused some of the layout.master tweaks we developed for the main site (like the Google Translate widget at the top of each page)."

Another recent site is the Solar Europa site designed by The Design Loft, one of our partners in the UK. They have done over 20 projects so far using mojoPortal.

We are continually adding new sites to our mojo Sites list. If you've designed a mojoPortal site that you are particularly proud of, let us know, we'd love to hear about it and maybe we will feature your site in a blog post.

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