mojoPortal has had the friendly url feature for quite a while but I just now got motivated to setup more friendly url mappings on this site. The great work Dean Brettle did in modifying skmMenu to have crawlable links instead of just javascript was the final ingredient that got me motivated.

If you'll notice mousing over the menu links shows the url in the status bar of the browser which it didn't until Dean worked his magic and now most of the links are friendly like http://www.mojoportal.com/download for the download page instead of http://www.mojoportal.com/Default.aspx?pageindex=1&pageid=8

It also makes my awstats reports show me which pages people visited more clearly because it didn't care about query string params so it thought every page was the same until I added the friendly urls

Joseph Hill, the producer of the mono-live CD just produced a fresh version of mono-live including a running copy of the latest mojoPortal on mono 1.1.8.3 and has been distributing them at the PDC in LA. It will be available soon at the mono-live CD site.

Hopefully this will expose more .NET developers to both mono and mojoPortal.

Big Thanks to Joseph!

A new release is now available on the download page.
Highlights of this release are:

• better CSS organisation and 2 great looking new skins by Jasmin Savard
• improvements to forum administration and menu system by Dean Brettle
• improvements for blog category management
• Dutch Culture file by Jan Hussaarts
• a number of bug fixes

We are planning a new release this weekend to include

• All the new skinning work and CSS organization by Jasmin Savard, including 2 great looking new skins.
• Improvements to the menu to make it more crawler friendly and right clickable by Dean Brettle
• A new Admin feature for the forums allowing you to move a thread to a different forum and/or rename a thread topic, also thanks to Dean Brettle
• Miscellaneous bug fixes since the last release

Update: I've commited the changes to svn and still testing and tweaking but as you can see I've updated this site with one of Jasmin's new skins.

I'll be committing major changes to svn today that affect the skinning system of mojoportal.  This will require a little re-work for those of you who already have your own custom skins. I have already done this re-work for all the included skins so if you are using one of those you don't have to do anything.

Jasmin Savard contributed a complete re-organization of the stylesheet classes that is much better than what we had before and allows for much more intricate styling, he also contributed 2 very nice skins that show what is possible with this new style organization.

I have changed the way skins are stored in the file system to make it easier to work with skins and create new ones. Now all skins will have their own folder and the name of the folder will be the skin name you see in the SiteSettings dropdown for skins. Inside this folder will be the skin file which must be named layout.ascx and the stylesheet which must be named style.css. Any supporting images can also be put in this folder.

To convert your existing custom skin just create a folder as mentioned above and put your files in it with the appropriate names. You will also need to re-visit the stylesheet and compare the classes in the new built in skins with the ones in your stylesheet and update your stylesheet with the new classes.

I will hopefully deploy the new model to this site later today after some additional testing and after I commit these changes to svn.

On another note, those of you using the latest release of mojoPortal on Windows should be aware of a bug in NeatUpload that was found to corrupt some file uploads. This does not affect users who are running on mono, only on Windows. The bug has been fixed in NeatUpload and will be included in the next release coming soon. In the meantime you can either comment out the upload module in your Web.config file or go get the updated NeatUpload code, compile and replace the Brettle.Web.NeatUpload.dll file in your bin folder beneath the web site root.