Hello, we did an extensive research on all open source ASP.NET CMS'ses on the market to find a flexible alternative for our own CMS. In fact we installed and tested them all. MOJO PORTAL clearly stood out in terms of functionality. MOJO is very well build and we have the utmost respect for the archievement of Joe and his people. But there is one thing that we find cumbersome. The skinning process is quite a lot more timeconsuming than necessary. This might be a more fundamental discussion than normal on this forum, but i want to bring it up anyway.

Our remarks are about this:

1. Too many stylesheets involved. Selectors are spread seemingly randomly over the stylesheets. Stylesheets are organised for structure (lay out), colors, texts, borders, etc. In practice developers are "searching their butts off" to find the relevant selectors in the relevant stylesheet.
2. The way stylesheets are organised in a way that is not correct in hierarchy. The various stylesheets inherit from each other and cascade down. There is no good reason why "texts" should override "colors" or "borders". Texts have colors too. Layout-elements have borders and colors. Why can't these be combined?
3. CSS overdesigning. We are one of the four webagencies allowed to deliver webdesign for the Dutch Government, who demands working up to the highest standards in the world on usability, semantic coding, code-reuse, etc, etc. The way MOJO structures it's HTML and CSS would never get past the tests. We are really sorry we can not use this great CMS for this important client. The CSS suffers from an abundancy of classes. Often classes are set, overridden and overridden again.
4. An architectural choice is that MOJO hardcodes elements and element names. From a developers point of view this makes sense. From the clients point of view and from a designers point of view this is the other way around. The average client is focussed on appearance. From this design HTML-templates are build. The HTML templates are then integrated as skins in a CMS. This is the normal and accepted way of working. It is also widely considered the logical way of working. In Mojo this is however not the case. In Mojo the designer/developer/client has little or no freedom when it comes to defining the structure of the HTML. The only advice we have got is: find a skin that is a bit similar to what you want to archieve and try to modify it. What if we want something completely different? Shouldn't developers and designer have the freedom to create their markup/structure in the way they need it? Would it be an idea to organise MOJO in such a way that developers can simply plug in functionality placeholders into their optimised HTML/CSS?
5. One of the reasons we choose MOJO was that it allowes to run multiple websites on one installation. Not only this saves server-resources, it would also enable us to offer hosting with a state of the art CMS for a lower price to clients. I mean, this could be a time-saver. But the rigid structure of MOJO and the amount of time it takes to archieve realtively simple skin-adjustments greatly reduces this advantage. Skinning is actually much easier in other CMS'ses.
6. In general: A CMS is meant to manage content (functionality). A CMS should leave design and markup to designers.

I would really apprecciate a discussion about this and hear your opinions. The above is simply the result of our experiences building our first website with MOJO. Maybe things are easier than we know because we overlook options.

Kind regards,

Tjerk

@Joe Davis,

Dear Joe, thanks a lot for all the kind tips. I did look at your two examples and they are very much different indeed. I realise that any CMS is a compromise. Joe made a good choice indeed to build a CMS with a lot of functionality that is ready to run as is. Somewhat like a boilerplate CMS. That is fine. What concerns me is not Mojo as a CMS, but just the skinning process. While it is flexible, it is also - in my eyes - needlessly complicated. Skinning costs more time than necessary. We are in this business to get things done a.s.a.p. The entire problem we see is not even the abundance of css-files. It is in the way these are inheriting from each other, which is semanticly just not correct. And the fact that the is an abundance of classes used which is just not necessary and make Mojo an invalid choice for any customer who is keen on following webstandards.  In other words the CMS is great, especcially the data and BL-tier, but the presentation-layer has rough edges.

Of course it is possible to get the skinning done. The question is, in what time-frame?

@Joe Audette,

thank you very much for being so kind to write such an extensive answer. I appreciate that knowing how busy you are.
Please understand that i truly love MojoPortal. The reason for starting this discussion is simply because i feel there is room for improvement.

Can i suggest you organise the CSS in an other way? Not border, colors, etc?

But: layout (structure), text, mojomodules, forms? In other words: seperated based on function.

Each selector should only appear once. That would make things much easier to search and navigate. (The search function in Visual Studio isn't on the level of Dreamweavers anyway).

Good CSS means simple CSS, in general.
The more rules, the more complicated it gets and the greater is the chance for browser-related issues.
Allmost any CSS-file can be purified.
There are a lot of ways to write CSS and solve things, but a long experience have tought us that keeping the CSS as simple as pobbile allways works best. You'd be surprised how much more elegant things can be most of the time.
I don't think we lack CSS-knowledge as we work for one of the most demanding clients in the world. The Dutch government has every single character in our CSS tested and tested again. So in all hummility i think we have some valid experience here.

I agree with your remark about compiled versus interpretated languages, being a classic ASP - guy. I must admit that i have some trouble giving away some of the control. That is my fault. Allthough i will learn in the end.

I will get working on MOJO. It is worth it.