I've completed the 4th and 5th skins of my 10 skin campaign, mitchinson-business3, and viktorpersson-thehobbit.

You can see these on demo.mojoportal.com, currently its showing viktorpersson-thehobbit which I made a little wider than the original design and also improvised on a workable menu design.

Of course since its a public demo site, someone may come along and change it, but you can change it back or checkout the different skins, by (key icon) Administration Menu > Site Settings.

This will be available in svn trunk later today for developers and will be in the next release of mojoPortal for everyone else.

So I'm halfway finished with my campaign to make 10 new good looking skins!

I think next I will implement skins using styleshout-stylevantage, and styleshout-citrusisland.

I've completed the third skin of my 10 skin campaign, mitchinson-earthy, which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com. Of course since its a public demo site, someone may come along and change it, but you can change it back or checkout the different skins by (key icon) Administration Menu > Site Settings.

This will be available in svn trunk later today for developers and will be in the next release of mojoPortal for everyone else.

I actually created 2 variations of this skin, one with the dynamic submenus hanging from the horizontal menu (which is more true to the original design), and one with a vertical sub menu for child pages instead of dynamic sub menus, named mitchinson-earthy-alt1. I like the alt1 version better myself. The flyout sub menu just makes it less user friendly and less able to support larger sites with deep page hierarchies.

I also varied a little from the design by making it 100 pixels wider and adding rounded corners on left and right side content.

So anyway we got 2 skins from this design, but it only counts as 1 of the 10 planned skins because I really want 10 new designs.

Next on my hit list is mitchinson-business3, which looks pretty straightforward to implement and should go quickly.

I've completed the second skin of my 10 skin campaign, graformix-orange, which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com. Of course since its a public demo site, someone may come along and change it, but you can change it back or checkout the different skins by (key icon) Administration Menu > Site Settings.

This will be available in svn trunk later today for developers and will be in the next release of mojoPortal for everyone else.

I've also renamed the existing skins to reference the name of the designer in the format desingername-designname. This makes it clearer as the skins are sorted by designer name. So for example, ticktockpro is now dcarter-ticktockpro, and others by dcarter have also been renamed like dcarter-orangesunset, dcarter-bluespring, dcarter-businessone, dcarter-sq2, and so on. techmania is now styleshout-techmania, and I plan to implement styleshout-citrusisland and styleshout-stylevantage as part of the 10 skins I'm making.

I'm not doing the styleshout skins next though, the next design I'm going to work with is mitchinson-earthy. My main reason for choosing this one is the horizontal menu with flyout sub menus. We have very few skins with this kind of menu and many it seems with tabs. Since my goal is to have skins that form a good starting point for customization, I think its important to get as much diversity as we can. I'm also planning to do mitchinson-business3, just because it seems a simple yet professional design and even the stock photo in the header looks good enough to be usable for a real site.

I just completed the first of ten new skins I plan to create for mojoPortal. This one is called graformix-company, you can see it now on demo.mojoportal.com, of course since this is a public demo site someone may come along and change it to a different skin, but you can always change it back by going into (key icon) Administration > Site Settings on the demo site.

This design took me 3 full days to fiinish, it was more challenging than some I've done. It required me to implement a few things to provide options in the rendering to make it possible, so it only works with the very latest svn code of mojoPortal. Specifically the tabs in the menu required 3 span elements inside the menu links to provide the hooks for hanging the background images that make up the tabs so I had to implement a custom menu rendering option to provide this. There are several different ways of implementing tab designs using marklup and css so this just adds one more method to our options which may prove helpful for other skins. This will be in svn trunk by tonight for eager developers and will be in the next release of mojoPortal for everyone else.

I am starting on the next skin now, its another one from Graformix, named graformix-orange.

In other news, a new custom News Feature by Asad Samarian is also available on the community download page. I have not tested it myself yet and it only supports MS SQL, but for any developers who would like to try it out and give Asad some feedback in the forums, please do. The .zip appears to contain the source code, so its not really packaged for non-developers.

Had another great day in Silicon Valley today. I attended the REMIX event and actually got to meet and shake hands with Scott Guthrie, an icon and hero for most of us ASP.NET developers. I didn't get to go the MIX event in Las Vegas so the REMIX event was very exciting for me. I was lucky this was going on while I was in town for the MySql Conference. I had seen Scott Guthrie's Silverlight demos online before but seeing the live demos with Scott on stage was much more compelling. I'm completely jazzed about Silverlight now and can't wait for beta 2 of Silverlight 2 which should be out soon. I also really enjoyed the Open Source Panel discussion which featured Sam Ramji and Anand Iyer of Microsoft, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror, Anil Dash of Six Apart, and Joseph Hill of Novell/Mono.

I had to skip part of the event because Joseph Hill and I gave our presentation at 2pm at the MySql conference, but we went back after that and caught the final panel session on the future of Social Networking and got to mingle in the closing happy hour event. I got to meet some really cool people like Dalton Caldwell, Founder and CEO of imeem, and Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, and quite a few other people doing very interesting things.

Our presentation at the MySql Conference went very well. I didn't see anyone video taping so unfortunately I don't think that session will be online but it was a lot of fun and was well received by the people who attended. During the MySql conference I was interviewed for a Podcast which will hopefully be up on the WebDevRadio.com site sometime soon. I didn't know about that site before but I'm adding it to the roster of podcasts I listen to and looking forward to listening to previous episodes while I work. The site and podcasts are put on by Michael Kimsal. Though I met him in Silicon Valley, it turns out he lives in Raleigh North Carolina, which is not too far from Charlotte, where I live.

Its been a great week of meeting people, experiencing Silicon Valley and getting lots of ideas for mojoPortal. Tomorrow I fly home and return to my ordinary daily life of software development but with fresh excitement for what I'm doing and new ideas I can't wait to get started on. Its really been a successful trip and a great opportunity. Seeing the mojoPortal logo on the same signs with all the big names and getting to meet so many well known and successful people was heady stuff for a not very well known open source entrepreneur like myself.

Huge Thanks to MySql for inviting us out here and giving us this great opportunity!