Posts in Category: Community

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.

New Skin Available Mocha by i7MEDIA

The HTML5mojo project is continuing to progress as more desings are contributed. Today we'd like to thank our friends at i7MEDIA who have released their second contribution to the project by adding the Mocha skin.

Mocha Skin by i7MEDIA

Check out the Mocha skin demo site which explains some of the features of the skin and has a download link. Its another beautiful design that shows what is possible with mojoPortal. Huge kudos to i7MEDIA for sharing this with the community!

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

New Skin Available Hi5 by GloriaTech

Back in July we announced the HTML5mojo project to get more designers involved with creating nice skins for the community that show the possibilities with mojoPortal content management system. Since then we've had a nice contribution of the Swift Blue skin from i7MEDIA and this month we are happy to announce another new skin named Hi 5 from our friends at GloriaTech that has been contributed to the HTML5mojo project.

hi5 skin by GloriaTech

 

You can check it out on their Hi5 demo site and you can download it from the html5mojo download page.

Big thanks to GloriaTech for their contribution! We hope the continued progress with this project will inspire more designers to get involved.

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

Swift Blue - A Nice Free mojoPortal Skin from i7MEDIA

In a recent post I mentioned the new HTML 5 Skins project for mojoPortal which is aimed at getting more designers involved to produce nice modern skins for the mojoPortal community. Our friends at i7MEDIA have contributed their first skin, "Swift Blue", to the project and have setup a nice demo web site with intsructions and tips for using the Swift Blue skin.

Swift Blue Skin for mojoPortal cms

I really like the very clean calendar styling of this skin.

Swift Blue calendar style

Huge thanks to the i7MEDIA team for sharing this nice new skin with the mojoPortal Community! They also have some more skins in their pipeline that they plan to share soon, so stay tuned for more announcements in the near future. I'd like to encourage more designers to contribute and share and hope this gets the ball rolling.

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

New Project - HTML 5 Skins for mojoPortal - We Need Designers!

HTML 5 Logo

I mentioned in our mojoPortal 2.3.9.0 release annoucement that we would soon be announcing a new project to get more designers involved with mojoPortal. This project is now on Codeplex at html5mojo.codeplex.com. We welcome any designers who would like to participate in this project to help showcase the design possibilities of mojoPortal CMS using HTML 5. You can read more about the goals and rationale for the project on the codeplex page, and contact me if you would like commit access to our Mercurial repository to add and evolve your own skins and designs. Or if you are not familiar or comfortable using Mercurial you can send the files to me and I will add them to the project. You can find participation guidelines here.

In mojoPortal CMS design is completely de-coupled from functionality so it can be styled in almost limitless ways by good designers. However, in spite of this, people often judge mojoPortal CMS by the included skins and since the few skins that we have been shipping with mojoPortal are created by developers who are not designers we believe that the included skins have not presented mojoPortal in its best light. Therefore we invite/beg real designers to get involved with this project to help produce some really nice looking modern HTML 5 skins for mojoPortal. We need your help!

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