I'm targeting November 1, 2004 for a first release of code that I will call an alpha release. I really would have liked to have a few more features before making a release but I think I will have the forums ready by then and thats a pretty big feature made up of a lot of small to medium features. I had to extend the properties of the user to include the expected things like avatars, instant message addresses, web sites, number of forum posts, etc. A member list is also important. I don't think I will have the private message system ready for the alpha but that is in the works.

Part of the reason I'm eager to get a release out is that there is now a free hosting site for ASP.NET under mono/GNU Linux at www.monoForge.com and they specifically support using MySQL, giving you a free MySQL database. Its free during the beta period which lasts at least till Q3 2005 depending on the progress of mono. After that they are suggesting it will be cheap for the beta users to continue, perhaps $5 per month. I think this is good news for mojoPortal. All of the ASP.NET projects currently listed at the gotmono.com web site only work with Postgre SQL and to my knowledge mojoPortal is the going to be the first one with support for MySQL. So hopefully with the new free hosting available it will encourage people to try mojoPortal. I've already registered there and connected to my MySQL database last night using SQLyog. I was able to copy the whole database from my local linux box to my database at monoForge in just a few minutes. Of course SQLyog is a windows program so I was doing it from a windows box. This site is running on a windows server but using MySQL from a Fedora Core 2 machine. I also have a copy of this site running on the Fedora machine but it is only exposed to my local network. The site works great there running under mono 1.0. I'm excited to be able to test it on the internet with a linux web server using my monoForge site under mono 1.0.2. I'll post again when its up and running there.