Hello mojo Developers,

I will start by introducing myself as I am new to this forum. My name is Pieter Pabst, I am a software developer at AenV ICT, an ICT solution provider based (and mainly focussing on) the Neterlands. We currently have 10 people working here, 5 of those are developers (mainly C#).

Our customer base consist mainly of SME companies based in our region. A lot of them have one or more websites we develop and host for them which sometimes go hand-in-hand with custom solutions we build for them (CRM/HRM/POS etc.). We currently do this using our in-house PHP CMS system which was born back in 1998 (that is for the entry-level "simple" CMS). Development on new projects is done in C# and this is why we want to fase out and move to mojo Portal for our entry-level CMS. Based on the CMS systems we evaluated in .NET we can say mojo is the most user friendly which, for most SME entrepreneurs who don't focus on IT, is important.

Unfortunate there are two (small) things we seem to miss in mojo, and I would like to know (as I did not see them in your roadmap) if there is someone working on there, or if you are planning on doing so:
- It seems the newsletters a user send out are not availble for review on the site. I saw someone allready requested this feature. What are your plans on this (or did I simply misted it during evaluation)?
- I read your (referring to Mr Audette) thoughts on multi-lingual sites. But I have to disagree. Especially when it comes to eCommerce. In our current CMS a user can translate all content he/she creates, if content is not availible in the language an end user selects the contect will either not be shown or the default language content will be used. Now for simple websites containing mainly pages it is possible to create multiple sites  (en.* nl.* de.* etc). But in an eCommerce situation that is not sufficient, users that sell over 1000 products all over Europe will not be willing to maintain a site on a per language base. Now we will not be using mojo for eCommerce purposes as we have our own software for this so this is not problem, but it would have been nice if a user was able to just translate content instead of mainting several sites. Multilinqual sites are very common in our region as we are located on the border with Germany and Belgium (NL-BE(NL/FR)-DE). I assume it is possible out-of-the-box in the multi-site scenario to have the administrator switch sites using the flags without have to log and out all the time?

Now on the technical site of things:
- An OR/M based layered-structure would make thing easier, even though I read your thoughts on this (Mr Audette). Using iBatis or nHibernate would significally simplify and speed up things from my point of view. It is not that hard to make them threat-safe. An OR/M "framework" like DevExpress XPO is also able to use optimized DAL for each DBMS so performance is not a big issue. It's also possible to use optimized queries for each DBMS using iBATIS. I read you generate the code so I guess for you it's not that much work to support several DBMS. But for developers like me it will be extra hard to support multiple DBMS when adding features in the current architecture where it would be easy using for example iBATIS. The way it is implemented now appears a little old fashioned to me reminding me of legacy Delphi or VB6 apps I sometimes encounter. But offcourse that is just my humble opinion, as the current architecture seems to work fine.
- The friendly url's allways have the .aspx extension, which I know, is due to IIS6. However recent prototyping we did for a new ASP.NET CMS (which was one of the the options we evaluated) I was able to use .NET MVC combined with the ISAPI Rewrite IIS extension to accomplish extension free URL's on IIS6. For us it is not a problem as we have webserver's running on IIS7 but I can image there are a lot of users who don't have that luxury. Perhaps support for friendly URL's using ASAPI rewrite for IIS6 is nice feature.
- I see you use DotNet panel for hosting. We use Plesk. Is there someone who automated mojo deployment for Plesk already?

Last but not least:
- A CMS is often part of a bigger system. Using the CMS to make it possible to maintain a website which is "a portal" to for example some insurance company's CRM is a common application scenario. As most of our systems are distributed applications most of them have webservices / WCF services which can be used to hook them up in other systems. A nice opensource/webbased example is Magento (used by our eCommerce partner) which comes with webservices (SOAP) out of the box and enables you easaly intergrate your existing CRM/ERP solutions. I see currently there are no such services in mojo at this time (just the ones for SilverLight). We will be needing them, so we will probably build them, partly for the core, partly for custom parts, but perhaps somebody already started on this?

All in all, we concluded that mojo is a nice and userfriendly CMS. I'm sure we will run into other things in the following weeks as we start modification, implementation and migration. We will be happy to contribute additions (to the core) we will be making in the future if we need to (the changes I mean). I would like to now if you already considered the points mentioned above, or if I simply missed them in evaluation.

Hi Joe,

Thank you for the fast reply. I did my review last week, glad you already added that feature. Yes we use OR/M for our own additions, but it would have been nice to see OR/M in mojo itself, this would for example have simplified multi-language content support (instead of writing queries and methods you just make your BU and the OR/M makes it happen).

Making the services use SOAP is not that hard in .NET. What functionality are you planning on adding in your WS?