Everybody likes charts, a picture tells a thousand words they say, and I'm no different, I like them too. I've had my eye on the ZedGraph project for several years and have been including their dlls with mojoPortal for a long time with the intention of using ZedGraph in mojoPortal. I don't know why it took me so long to actually use it, but I finally implemented a chart in the Site Statistics feature of mojoPortal to show the trend of site registrations. I suppose it might have taken me so long to get around to this partly because charts are not that useful unless you have a significant amount of data. This year I have definitely noticed an increasing rate of people registering on mojoPortal.com, so I thought I would like to see this on a chart. ZedGraph is so easy! It took me maybe 30 minutes total to figure out how to create my first chart. Now I'm all excited to use it in a lot of places like sales reports for the web store feature and other interesting metrics. Maybe could produce pie charts of survey results, not for text questions but for ones that have choices we could show pie charts of how many people picked the various choices. Anyway, lots of ideas where to use it!
You can see the live version of this chart on our community page:
Now for me this chart is very meaningful because I can see that site registration started rising after the august 2007 release of mojoPortal that included support for OpenID and Windows Live ID, having those options makes it easy for a lot of people to register becuase they don't have to have any new passwords. That rise also was probably due to the 2007 CMS Awards. Then the big increase in the trend started when I went on a mojoPortal Beautification Campaign and made about 20 new good looking skins from April 2008 to May 2008. mojoPortal.com got a makeover with a new skin in May 2008 as well. In any case, its a positive trend showing an order of magnitude in growth. I sure hope it keeps going up! We have at least another order of magnitude to go to catch up with DotNetNuke. Where we are currently getting about 250 new members per month, they get more than that per day. So I look to them to see how high it could go. They have a lot more visibility due to all the support they have from Microsoft, and they take a more agressive approach to aquiring members by requiring site registration in order to download. I don't plan to change our approach, registration is not required to download mojoPortal, but registration is required to get support in the forums. I am looking at ways to increase our visibility in the Microsoft ecosystem. Hopefully we will be able to move to CodePlex soon for our source code and file hosting. The Codeplex Team is working on some fixes to their svn bridge that should make it possible for us to move there. I think that move will give us a lot more visibility in the .NET community.
Don't Forget Voting for the 2008 CMS Awards ends October 20
So if you haven't already please vote for mojoPortal!
