Posts in Category: News

Picking up steam

mojoPortal has been getting some media attention lately, like this article from HostingAdvice.com. We've got some exciting new updates coming soon too, including new modules, expanded blog features, and new content creation tools. We've been working hard on things and hope to have a release ready soon.

We can truly appreciate a CMS that simplifies content entry and management for novice website owners without compromising the functionality demanded by seasoned developers. Kudos to the mojoPortal team for optimizing web development for folks across the board!

Thanks to the community for remaining patient as we work on these updates. mojoPortal is going to be better than ever.

A New Beginning

i7MEDIA Takes the Helm

It is an exciting day for the mojoPortal project! First, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Joe Davis. I am the Founder and President of i7MEDIA and a longtime supporter of mojoPortal. On Friday, February 3, 2017, I and Joe Audette, Founder of mojoPortal, completed an agreement for the sale of mojoPortal to i7MEDIA. This sale includes the open source project and the commercial modules available on the mojoPortal website from Joe Audette's company, Source Tree Solutions.

I have been using mojoPortal since 2008 and supporting it since 2009. I started my business in 2008 and set out to find a good content management system I could use to build websites for my customers. After a lot of trial and error, I came across mojoPortal and I was immediately drawn to its ease-of-use and friendly forum, fostered by Joe Audette. After 9 years of building sites with mojoPortal, contributing to the core, and providing support to my own clients and those around the world through the forums, I am thrilled that I, and my company, are able to ensure the further development of mojoPortal.

Rest assured mojoPortal will remain open source and there are no plans to change that. We (i7MEDIA) do, however, have plans for expanding mojoPortal to help it stay relevant and to provide the best .NET CMS platform on the market today.

You're sure to be wondering what Joe Audette has to say about all of this. Well, he is very enthusiastic about the new life of mojoPortal:

It gives me great satisfaction to know that I have created something that so many people have found useful and that it will continue to be used and supported by a top community member and his organization. Joe Davis and i7MEDIA have always been the most qualified consultants for mojoPortal other than myself, and I've always had great confidence in referring customers and projects to them over the years. Joe Davis has been a good friend and has been my go to guy when I needed to refer a customer or project that I did not have the capacity for. Whether you need design help, hosting, or custom feature development, i7MEDIA is the team you want with years of experience. mojoPortal was my baby for over a decade, and my baby is in good hands! Long live mojoPortal!

Joe Audette, mojoPortal Founder

What's Changing?

Basic Stuff

At first, we're going to focus on changing small things that will save site owners and site builders time. Some of these items are:

  • Ensuring that settings are logically organized and labeled properly.
  • Removing unnecessary markup (empty divs, excessive <br> elements, etc…).
  • Consolidating DB scripts.

Developer Support

Development of add-ons for mojoPortal isn't necessarily hard but there is a bit of a learning curve and quite a few steps one must take to prepare a working development environment. Our focus will be on cutting down on the number of steps and making the process easier overall. We will also explore possible MVC and WebApi implementations of some features, especially administration features like the File Manager. 

Additionally, we want to engage with the developers already using mojoPortal to get them contributing code to the project. GitHub provides a very simple mechanism for generating pull requests so if you have code you would like to contribute, we would be very grateful.

Beautiful Design

It has always been possible to create beautiful sites with mojoPortal but the built-in skins were not good examples. We're fixing that and we're committed to making sure that mojoPortal is seen as a designer-friendly CMS. To make that happen, we're going to implement some new functionality which will allow UI developers to include options for site owners to control various aspects of their skin.

Documentation Audit

mojoPortal is a fairly well-documented system but there is a lot of stuff that is just not needed anymore, other things have changed, and there's a lot that isn't documented. 

Commercial Add-On Pricing and Licensing

We're working on the licensing and pricing for the commercial add-ons. Some of them are going to be released as open source and others will see their prices change. The server licenses are back and are generally at a lower price than before. To see the new pricing, take a look at the store (we've renamed the page "Add-Ons" because in the near future we're going to have a marketplace so others can sell or list their own add-ons).

Licensing has changed for all commercial add-ons with regard to updates. Now, each purchase of an add-on will give the purchaser a year of updates to that add-on. If you purchase Form Wizard Pro on February 5, 2017, you can continue to download updates to the module through February 5, 2018.

When's the Next Update?

We expect to release a new version in the next couple of weeks with several small fixes, a few clean bootstrap-based skins, and a brand-new file manager to replace both of the current file managers and the link and image picker used in the WYSIWYG editors. That's right, one file manager that does it all. 

We Need Your Help

We purchased mojoPortal and we're committed to it being a success, again. We will need your help to make this happen. If you would like to help with documentation, let us know. If you would like to contribute code, check out how easy it is to submit a pull request. If you would like to help others looking for help, subscribe to the forums.

Here's to the Future of mojo!

I am very excited about the future of mojoPortal. We soft-launched the mojoPortal website over this past weekend and I have already received a few inquiries about what's going on and some messages of support. Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the forums or send us an email.

Gravatar Joe Davis is the mojoPortal Project Lead and the President of i7MEDIA.

mojoPortal is a Finalist in the 2011 CMS Awards!

Thanks to your nominations mojoPortal is a finalist in the 2011 Open Source Awards in the Open Source CMS Category!

Vote for mojoPortal in the 2011 Open Source CMS Awards!

That means we've made it to the next phase of the contest which is voting, so now we need your vote! The competition is very tough every year and the finalists are all excellent contenders with larger communities than ours which makes it easier for them to get votes, so we are definitely the underdogs in this contest and we really need as many of our community members to vote for mojoPortal as possible. The voting phase is open from now until October 31, 2001, then the judges weigh in and the final winners will be announced on November 7, 2011. I know that voting seems like the same thing as nominating but nominations were just the first phase. Thanks to you we got enough nominations to make it to the finals but voting is even more competitive and we need your support now more than ever! So go vote for mojoPortal today!

Vote for mojoPortal in the 2011 CMS Awards!

 

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Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

Nominate mojoPortal for the 2011 CMS Awards

Hello mojoPortal Community, its that time of year again and Packt Publishing has started their annual Open Source Awards and with your help we'd like to compete in the Open Source CMS Category.

open source awards

The first stage is the nomination stage and it requires a lot of nominations to get to the next stage which is voting, so we need your nomination. Please head on over to the Open Source CMS Nomination page and nominate mojoPortal! The competition is very tough every year so every nomination counts. 

The schedule for the contest is:

August  1 | Nominations Open
September 9 | Nominations Close
September  19 | Voting Begins
October 31 | Voting Ends
November 7 | Winners Announced

 

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Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.

mojoPortal.com Gets a New Look!

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

screen shot of new design for forums

 

Old Design Forums

screen shot of old forum design

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

screen shot of new search design

Old Design Search

screen shot of old search design

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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Gravatar Joe Audette is the founder of the mojoPortal project and was the primary developer until February 2017.