I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.3.6, its available now on the download page.

New This Release:

• Open ID Authentication
• Windows Live ID Authentication
• New Captcha Provider with support for Subkismet Captcha and reCAPTCHA
• Initial Support for XStandard editor (requires free browser plugin)
• New Swedish Translation by Christian Fredh
• 2 new Right To Left skins contributed by A.Samarian

As always, be sure and backup both your database and your site before doing an upgrade, see additional upgrade tips here. Please post in the forums if you have any difficulties.

I've just updated this site with the very latest code and have enabled authentication with Open ID and also with Windows Live ID. It is now possible to register or sign in to this site using either of these services.

Tip: If you are already a registered user of the site and you want to associate your Open ID with your existing site account you can do so on the My Profile page after you login with your current credentials.

For those interested, a good place to get a free Open ID account is at MyOpenID.com.

I really think single sign on is a huge thing the web has needed for a long time. I hope it catches on so I can use the same password at most sites. Now mojoPortal makes it easy to setup sites that support these single sign on services.

The code has already landed in svn in my sandbox and I will be merging it to trunk in the next few hours. Any testing would be appreciated. I would like to make a new release with these features very soon.

Hey friends and supporters of mojoPortal, there's only one week left so if you haven't already please take a moment to nominate mojoPortal for the 2007 Open Source CMS Award by PackT Publishing.

It will take a lot of nominations even to get accepted into the contest so every vote counts. We are competing against projects with much larger user bases and much larger communities so mojoPortal is kind of an underdog. If we don't get enough nominations we won't even be in the contest.

There are 3 categories in which to nominate mojoPortal:

Overall Winner, Open Source CMS Award

Most Promising Open Source Content Management System

Best Other (non PHP) Open Source Content Management System

Please nominate mojoPortal in all 3 of these. Nominations are allowed through August 31, 2007

I've begun work on adding support for Open ID and also for Windows Live ID in mojoPortal. I hope to have both fully working and committed to svn by the end of the week.

The Web has long needed some kind of single sign on solution and I am glad to see solutions like these available. The convenience for users is that sites that support these authentication services will be able to let users register and login without having to create yet another user name and password.

In mojoPortal, these will be supplemental authentication methods that can be enabled or disabled at the site level. They will work in addition to the regular email-username/password scenarios. Windows Live ID requires getting a Windows Live Application ID and Secret Key for your site so I have already added a place for this in Site Settings.

For the Open ID support, I'm using DotNetOpenID, and for Windows Live ID I'm using code based on the samples in the SDK.

I've just implemented a provider model for the CAPTCHA used in the Blog Comment Form and Email Contact form. I'm sure you are all familiar with the use and purpose of CAPTCHAs in reducing comment spam. As spammers get ever more sophisticated we seem to need ever stronger measures to defend against their spam. So I figured by implementing the provider model it will be easier for new CAPTCHAs to be used in mojoPortal over time as they become needed or available. You can select which CAPTCHA to use in Site Settings.

Currently I have implemented 3 providers.

The Simple Math Captcha:

The Subkismet Captcha:

and finally

reCAPTCHA, from Carnegie Mellon

The idea of reCAPTCHA is to use the human effort in solving the CAPTCHA to help improve the quality of books scanned with optical character recognition by finding and fixing the mistakes. To use reCAPTCHA you need to get an account and set the private and public keys in mojoPortal Site Settings.

As you can see I've updated this site to the latest code from svn and using reCAPTCHA for this blog.

For reCAPTCHA I used the Controls by Adrian Godong and Joseph Hill from here:

http://recaptcha.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/recaptcha-plugins/dotnet

I'll leave it to someone else if they want to implement a provider for HotCaptcha ;-)