Update: I've commited the changes to svn and still testing and tweaking but as you can see I've updated this site with one of Jasmin's new skins.

I'll be committing major changes to svn today that affect the skinning system of mojoportal.  This will require a little re-work for those of you who already have your own custom skins. I have already done this re-work for all the included skins so if you are using one of those you don't have to do anything.

Jasmin Savard contributed a complete re-organization of the stylesheet classes that is much better than what we had before and allows for much more intricate styling, he also contributed 2 very nice skins that show what is possible with this new style organization.

I have changed the way skins are stored in the file system to make it easier to work with skins and create new ones. Now all skins will have their own folder and the name of the folder will be the skin name you see in the SiteSettings dropdown for skins. Inside this folder will be the skin file which must be named layout.ascx and the stylesheet which must be named style.css. Any supporting images can also be put in this folder.

To convert your existing custom skin just create a folder as mentioned above and put your files in it with the appropriate names. You will also need to re-visit the stylesheet and compare the classes in the new built in skins with the ones in your stylesheet and update your stylesheet with the new classes.

I will hopefully deploy the new model to this site later today after some additional testing and after I commit these changes to svn.

On another note, those of you using the latest release of mojoPortal on Windows should be aware of a bug in NeatUpload that was found to corrupt some file uploads. This does not affect users who are running on mono, only on Windows. The bug has been fixed in NeatUpload and will be included in the next release coming soon. In the meantime you can either comment out the upload module in your Web.config file or go get the updated NeatUpload code, compile and replace the Brettle.Web.NeatUpload.dll file in your bin folder beneath the web site root.

A new release of mojoPortal is now available on the download page.

New this release is the inclusion of NeatUpload by Dean Brettle. NeatUpload, licensed under the LGPL, is an ASP.NET HttpModule for handling file uploads gracefully with a progress bar. It works on Windows with IIS or on Linux/Mac OS X with mono using XSP web server or using mod_mono with apache web server. Pretty sweet! Dean developed this specifically for mojoPortal but I'm sure it will be used in countless ASP.NET projects once the word gets out about it.  I really can't imagine an ASP.NET developer that won't want to use it. Previously, mojoPortal shipped with SlickUpload which was disabled by default because it only works on Windows. A similar commercial control ABCUpload I've used before also does not, as far as I know, work under mono. Great work Dean!
Here's a screenshot of the progress bar in action:


you can even stop the upload midstream by clicking the icon.

Also new  is the final release of version 2.0 of FCKEditor, previously we were using RC1.

Thanks to Tom Opgenorth for adding a small enhancement to the Links Module to enable specifying the target. He is currently working on adding categories to the Links module allowing you to organize links in a TreeView by category. That will be a cool option. After that project Tom is planning on implementing a new image gallery using nGallery.

mojoPortal now includes, in addition to US English, culture files for Italian, Portuguese, and Czech.  If anyone transaltes to additional languages, please send me the translated files.

As you can see we have a new skin for mojoPortal. This one is called mojoGuideToGalaxy and was contributed by Jared Prins.

This will be in the next release coming very soon.

Big Thanks Jared!

Some of you may notice a strange behaviour with the style on this site today. Refreshing the page seems to toggle the style on and off. This site is currently running the latest dev code and Dean fixed this bug last night. I will put the new fixed code in place for this site tonight when I get home from work.

Update 8/26/2005 5:44 PM CST

I just deployed the latest code from svn to this server and the style bug is fixed. Big Thanks Dean!

We are getting very close to the next release, possibly as soon as this Sunday evening but no later than next Sunday

mojoPortal now has 100 registered users!

of course there are a lot more people visiting the site and downloading both the code and the release files, it seems that most people won't register if they can help it. I must admit I'm the same way, it takes a lot for me to register at a site. I guess its because we fear the possibility of an onslaught of spam. But I assure you if you register at mojoportal.com you won't get any spam from me at least until we get the Newsletter module built! But seriously it, even that will be an infrequent thing with an easy opt out on your profile page or from within any email newsletter that we have in the future. So come on if you haven't already, register and show you appreciate mojoportal.

In case you are interested, here is how we are doing in terms of traffic.


February was only half a month of data, before that the site was running on a Windows server but in the middle of February I moved the site to a Linux server with mono.

mojoPortal is coming up on a year of development time this month and 1 year since the first release in November.
Of course I only get to work on it mostly on weekends and some evenings. I do have a full time job separate from mojoPortal