I put a little more love into the mojoPortal blog feature in the last few days.

We now have friendly urls for blog posts. Instead of the previous ~/BlogView.aspx?pageid=2&mid=19&ItemID=258, we now have ~/the-title-of-your-post.aspx

I also added a Next Previous, navigation to make it easier to page through the posts.

There is also a new Site Map for blog posts to make it easier for google and other search indexes to crawl your blog posts and improve your SEO. You can ad your blog site map to google webmaster tools as yoursiteroot/BlogSiteMap.ashx

This is available in svn trunk now for developers and will be in the next release for everyone else.

I'm very excited to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.5.4

Its available now on the download page.

The main focus of this release is making mojoPortal more attractive, with the addition of 21 good looking new skins for a total of 34 skins now included with mojoPortal. There were also a few minor bug fixes for things reported in the Forums since the last release.

Those of you upgrading should do a full upgrade, don't try to just upload the new skins as there were code changes needed to support some of these new designs. You should upload all the new files and restore your customizations to Web.config or user.config.

My goals in producing all these skins was to make mojoPortal more popular and also to prove just how skinnable mojoPortal is. You can have a site fully populated with content and dramatically change the look of it with one click by changing the skin. This shows that we really have achieved good separation of presentation from content in mojoPortal. Those of you following this blog have surely seen the screen shots over the last 20 days as I implemented these new skins. 21 skins in 20 days is not bad if I do say so myself. It says a lot about the quality of the rendered markup produced by mojoPortal that one can go and find nice standards based designs and create mojoPortal skins from them relatively easy at least if you have an understanding of html and css. All these included skins can be used as a starting point for further customization to make your own custom skins as well.

I'd like to extend a huge thanks to the great designers who have made their work available. All the new skins in this release are the work of only 7 designers, Andreas Viklund, FreeCssTemplates, Graformix, Denise Mitchinson, snop, styleshout, and arcsin.

As always, be sure and backup your site and database before upgrading and if you have any trouble let us know in the forums.

I've just completed the 20th and final skin of this skinning campaign. Later this afternoon/evening I will be making a release to include all the new skins.

This one is based on freecsstemplates-level2.

I've just completed the 19th new skin of my campaign, mitchinson-golden, which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com

One more to go and I'm finished with skinning for a while!

I've just completed the 18th new skin for mojoPortal, far exceeding my original goal of 10 new skins. This one is named mitchinson-khaki, and the one below is styleshout-coolwater, which I completed yesterday. You can see these skins now on demo.mojoportal.com. I still have 2 more designs that I want to try and make skins with today while I have skinning momentum. Tomorrow I will package a new release of mojoPortal to include all these new skins. I've been working full blast on skins since April 23rd until today. I'm very happy with the results, but ready to get working on other priorities.