If you've been here before you most likely have noticed the new site design.

Huge Thanks! go out to Jasmin Savard from Canada for designing this skin for us.

The previous skin was really looking old school by now. This one looks great to me, what do you think?

Just a quick post to mark a chronological milestone.

It was August of 2004 when I began work on mojoPortal so this month marks 2 years of development. Of course this has been 2 years of only nights and weekends since I have been working full time doing other development during that period.  Coming up on November 1, will mark 2 years since the first release.

Its been a lot of work but also a lot of fun. I think the next 2 years will be even better. Since January most of the work has been re-architecting to take advantage of 2.0 .NET but now we are past that and I am focusing on feature additions and improvements to existing features to take it to the next level.  I was excited when I started the project but I'm even more excited now. The project is being used by people and companies all over the world and interest in the project is building momentum. Its very rewarding to work on something and to see it become popular.

So thanks to all who have contributed in large and small ways and those who have downloaded and are using mojoPortal and those who have helped spread the word about this project!

I just updated this site to the latest 2.1.1 from svn for final testing before the release this weekend.

This release will include the new localization model which detects the browser language and uses resource for that language if available. So anyone visiting this site using one of the languages we currently have translations for should see the labels and buttons in their own language.

Currently mojoPortal is tranlated into:
English
Spanish-Mex
German
Dutch
Turkish
Russian
Czech
Italian
Portuguese (Brazil)

So if you set your browser language to one of those you should see the labels and buttons change to those languages on this site.

Also this release features a new help system making it easy to add contextual help links anywhere in a page or module with an editing system to make it easy to update or translate the help files.

The Image Gallery also uses a new modal dialog to show images. I've added an image gallery to the MyPage page, click one of the thumbnails there to see how cool the new modal dialog is. The same dialog is also used in the help system.

This will be an easy upgrade as there are no changes to db tables. Users of MS SQL and PostgreSQL will need to run the stored procedure scripts to get the latest procedures.

Access/shortcut keys for all important buttons is another new feature this release. It can be disabled from the web.config file if you don't like it but its pretty convenient not having to grab the mouse for everything.

This release will also be able to run in Medium trust hosting environments.

Noticed quite a few links in the logs coming from this article.

article no longer online

Its in German but I used google to tranlsate it, its a review of ASP.NET CMS solutions. mojoPortal, Cuyahoga and OmniPortal were all eliminated from the review because the author had difficulty with installation.

Its not a very elaborate test/comparison from what I can tell, no load testing or anything like that just one persons first reaction in terms of features and usability.

And no surprise DotNetNuke comes out on top. Its a shame to lose a comparison by not being compared. I have tried to make mojoPortal easy to install, I have helped a few people with installation in the forums but really not many problems reported in relation to the number of downloads. Is it fair to conclude from this article that mojoportal is hard to install or could it be that the author didn't put in much effort and didn't follow the instructions? Maybe a little of both?

What do you think? Is mojoPortal dificult to install and if so what could we do to make it easier? As a developer and thinking that the target audience is mostly developers I've always preferred x-copy deployment but maybe for windows I should provide a Windows installer?

mojoPortal, got a nice write up on the CMS Report web site today.

Big Thanks go out to Bryan Ruby for giving us some coverage!

Anything that helps get the word out is a big help to the project.