Thought I'd throw together a quick skin for Halloween. Wish I was more creative with design. I'm planning on learning CSS a little more in depth and see if I can do better. Anyway watch out for old bones over there. He'll be gone by monday.

Oh by the way, Boo!

Well I just got the forums working under MySQL. I had developed them first using MS SQL then all I had to do was add the methods to the MySQL data layer. You'll notice if you  login in that there is also a member list and user profile page now.

Still so much to do to reach my Nov 1 alpha release goal. Need to test and look for bugs and flesh out the documentation and test the installation scripts for both MS and MySQL databases.

I'm also thinking of dropping some of the IBuySpy legacy modules before the first release. The contacts module is pretty lame in terms of features. I'd like to add a better one later. The image module and events module are also pretty weak in my opinion because you can accomplish the same thing easily using the Html module. I think simpler is better in terms of usability and having module choices that don't bring anything really new to the table is just adding confusion for end users. 

Feel free to (I mean please do!) test the site and report any bugs you find on the forum. It would be much appreciated.

I got a copy of this site up and running at the new free mono hosting site http://www.monoForge.com
The url for my site at monoForge is http://mojoportal.monoforge.com
I give them high marks for their service and support. I was able to connect to my MySql database at their site easily using SQLyog, I'm sure there are other front ends that will work just as well but I like SQLyog and to me it is well worth the 50 bucks.
I only had one minor problem and the monoForge support forum helped me past it. To get the site working all I had to do was change the Web.config file to web.config which I believe must be a bug in mono 1.0.2 because the expected behaviour is that it will work with Web.config as it does under windows and under mono 1.0
Their servers run mono 1.0.2

Anybody else experiencing this with their mono 1.0.2 installations? I'm still running mono 1.0 at home.

I'm targeting November 1, 2004 for a first release of code that I will call an alpha release. I really would have liked to have a few more features before making a release but I think I will have the forums ready by then and thats a pretty big feature made up of a lot of small to medium features. I had to extend the properties of the user to include the expected things like avatars, instant message addresses, web sites, number of forum posts, etc. A member list is also important. I don't think I will have the private message system ready for the alpha but that is in the works.

Part of the reason I'm eager to get a release out is that there is now a free hosting site for ASP.NET under mono/GNU Linux at www.monoForge.com and they specifically support using MySQL, giving you a free MySQL database. Its free during the beta period which lasts at least till Q3 2005 depending on the progress of mono. After that they are suggesting it will be cheap for the beta users to continue, perhaps $5 per month. I think this is good news for mojoPortal. All of the ASP.NET projects currently listed at the gotmono.com web site only work with Postgre SQL and to my knowledge mojoPortal is the going to be the first one with support for MySQL. So hopefully with the new free hosting available it will encourage people to try mojoPortal. I've already registered there and connected to my MySQL database last night using SQLyog. I was able to copy the whole database from my local linux box to my database at monoForge in just a few minutes. Of course SQLyog is a windows program so I was doing it from a windows box. This site is running on a windows server but using MySQL from a Fedora Core 2 machine. I also have a copy of this site running on the Fedora machine but it is only exposed to my local network. The site works great there running under mono 1.0. I'm excited to be able to test it on the internet with a linux web server using my monoForge site under mono 1.0.2. I'll post again when its up and running there.

I completed the user profile page and started on the member list page this weekend. Did a little more refinement to the forums and also improved the implementation for the culture configuration. You can have a sneek peek at the progress so far on forums and other goodies at http://dev.mojoportal.com