There are 2 more skins coming, styleshout-coolwater, and styleshout-envision, but they are really just variations on the same design.

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

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

A few of the designs I've made alternate versions of which accounts for 11 skins so far. I really only need 2 more designs to meet my original goal but I've decided to do 1 extra design. The 3 remaining designs will actually result in 6 more skins. These are the designs I've chosen to complete this skinning campaign:

styleshout-brightsideoflife
styleshout-citrusisland and  styleshout-stylevantage (which I consider as variations on the same design)
styleshout-refresh, styleshout-envision, and styleshout-coolwater, which are all variations on the same design in my opinion.

Hopefully, I can complete all of these by sometime this weekend and then ship a new release with all these new skins.

Actually I made 2 skins from this design and named the second one andreasviklund-02-alt1. The interesting thing about this skin is that it has 2 levels of tabbed menus and then a vertical menu for any pages deeper than that. In my alt1 version I took it a step further and used 3 levels of tabs and then a vertical menu to show anything deeper. This screen shot shows the alt version with 3 levels of tabs and a vertical menu for pages below that.

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

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

In my previous post I said was going to work on the styleshout skins next but I saw this one and decided to do it first.

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.

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.

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.

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.