Thanks to the nominations from the mojoPortal community, we are a finalist in the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards in the category "Best Other Open Source CMS"!  (other means non-PHP)

See the full list of finalists here:

http://www.packtpub.com/2007-open-source-cms-award-finalists

Its very exciting to be among the finalists and its all thanks to your nominations!

Now we need your vote again since the first round of voting was just nominations, so please go and vote for mojoPortal, it would be wonderful to actually win in this category!

Voting ends October 26, 2007

I just completed another new skin named ticktockpro based on this design by dcarterdesign.

You can see it now on the mojoPortal demo site, and I'll have it in svn trunk later this evening.

That makes 3 new good looking skins this week, and I plan to do more of them in between my other work.

Did you know that you can preview skins with a query string param? So you can see each of the 3 skins I made this week using urls that specify the skin like this:

http://demo.mojoportal.com/?skin=tabular1

http://demo.mojoportal.com/?skin=techmania

http://demo.mojoportal.com/?skin=ticktockpro

I just completed another new skin named techmania using this design by Erwin Aligam. You can see it now on the demo site. Great work Erwin! I will have this one in svn trunk by tonight.

I'm on a roll with implementing new skins now that I've found so many good free designs. This one took a bit longer than the first one. I spent at least 10 hours tweaking things until I was satisfied, but things I learned doing this one may make it go better for other ones.

I'm moving on to do another skin now, it is my mission to have a lot of great looking skins included in mojoPortal. If its bling the people want then the people shall have bling!

I just implemented a new skin today using this design, you can see it now on the demo site. It only took me about 3 and a half hours to implement it. It is in my svn sandbox now and will be in trunk later tonight.

I also got started on another skin using this design, but its not finished yet. Since there are so many good free designs on sites like OpenDesigns.org, OpenWebDesign.org, and OpenSourceTemplates.org, I plan to spend the next week implementing new skins to include in mojoPortal. I'm not a good designer myself but I do have a good understanding of CSS and can usually implement a skin using someone else's design. I've downloaded quite a few designs and am picking ones that I think will show a lot of variety. If anyone wants to suggest designs from one of these sites that they would like to see implented as a mojoPortal skin I'm open to suggestions.

Let me know what you think of the new skin on the demo site, do you like it? Do you think its better looking than the other mojoPortal skins. I do ;-)

A lot of people like tab style menus and they do look nice though you are limited to how many items you can have in a horizontal menu. I implemented this skin so that only top level pages are in the top horizontal tab menu and cild pages beneath those are in a vertical tree menu.

The new release has a bug that I thought I should mention as its easy to workaround. I plan to release a fix for it very soon but its trivial to solve for those who are working with the current release.

The bug is that if you try and save content after a clean install you get an error. The bug was introduced by my re-working of the search index. The cause of the error is that it tries to index the saved content but the index has not been initialized yet. The quick solution is just to do a search before you edit any content because the first time you do a search the index is built. After that there is no error.

I'm going to add a routine in the setup process to initialize the search engine so this bug doesn't happen and put out a fix for it in the next few days.