Newbie to mojoPortal

This forum is only for questions or discussions about working with the mojoPortal source code in Visual Studio, obtaining the source code from the repository, developing custom features, etc. If your question is not along these lines this is not the right forum. Please try to post your question in the appropriate forum.

Please do not post questions about design, CSS, or skinning here. Use the Help With Skins Forum for those questions.

This forum is for discussing mojoPortal development

This forum is only for questions or discussions about working with the mojoPortal source code in Visual Studio, obtaining the source code from the repository, developing custom features, etc. If your question is not along these lines this is not the right forum. Please try to post your question in the appropriate forum.

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Before posting questions here you might want to review the developer documentation.

Do not post questions about design, CSS, or skinning here. Use the Help With Skins Forum for those questions.
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1/25/2007 7:48:21 PM
Ron
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Newbie to mojoPortal

Hi All,

I am new to mojoPortal. I am assigned by my manager to research about the open source portal frameworks available outside. And I came up with three options DNN, Rainbow and mojoPortal. Since I am using C# more than VB, my option down to 2 Rainbow and mojoPortal. My questions is:

1) Is there any mojoPortal application architecture design (I heard that it build using n-tier architecture?

2) How many modules availables today? I know that Rainbow has over than 45 pre-built modules?

3) The main modules that we are going to use are Forums, Blogs, Wikis and Document Management System. Are those modules available already?

Thank you in advance.

1/26/2007 5:24:18 PM
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Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

Hi,

1. Yes, mojoPortal is implemented in 3 layers
http://www.mojoportal.com/architecture.aspx

Because the Data layer is interchangeable we support MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite, and some work has been done towards a Firebird DataLayer

2. See the Feature list, http://www.mojoportal.com/features.aspx
Though Rainbow may have more modules, I think most software architects would find the design of mojoPortal better and cleaner. I used to use Rainbow and contributed the original Blog module to Rainbow back in 2003. I decided to start the mojoPortal project in 2004 because the architecture of Rainbow didn't lend itself to implementing alternate database layers and there were other difficulties with trying to get it to work with Mono on linux

3. We have Forums, Blogs, and Shared Files which is a Document Management System. We don't have a Wiki, but a Wiki mode is planned for the main content module to allow keeping every change and easily reverting to previous versions.

mojoPortal is designed to be lightweight and fast, while I have not tested compared to Rainbow, I have tested compared to DNN.

mojoPortal is more standards compliant, using XHTML, CSS layout instead of tables and is also more accessible. We have skiplinks implementation and also Access Keys (though its disbled on this site in Web.config)

mojoPortal has Personalization with WebParts

mojoPortal has a completely and easily customizable user profile system

Hope it helps,

Joe
1/26/2007 6:45:17 PM
Ron
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Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

Thanks Joe,

I have to decide which portal I should go with by early next week. Among 3 portals (DNN, Rainbow and mojoPortal), I like mojo portal the best. Architecture, mono, and AJAX like website (PageFlakes) are features that I like the most. Also, it is easy to customize. However, in order to choose this portal, I have to prepare a good documentation to present to my team. My team is going more to DNN, since it is growing really big and all the modules is already there. Here are my questions which I will use to convincing my team:

1) How easy it is compare to other portal in order to change the skin and themes of the website?

2) I believed that most of the modules build in this module is backward compatible to previous version right (because I heard that DNN modules mostly not backward compatible).

3) Knowledge base, forums, DMS, blogs, and wikis are some of the modules that we are looking for? How difficult it is to build that kind of module.

4) How many module is pre-built in the portal?

Thanks in advance.

1/27/2007 9:36:52 AM
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Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

Hi Ron,

1. mojoPortal uses MasterPages, Themes, and CSS which should be easy to understand since it is standard ASP.NET functionality. Of course this is just my opinion, but I found it very hard to figure out how to make a skin for DNN back when I experimented with it. I found lots of skins for sale but not much good free examples or tutorials. Probably the books have some good stuff on that. From my perspective while DNN has a flexible skinning system for those who know how to use it, they built it before 2.0 .NET came out and there is no reason to think they did a better job than what Microsoft implemented in 2.0, so its an advantage being later to market for mojoPortal as we did not have to implement our own deep plumbing for skinning, we just leverage the new features provided in the 2.0 framework. So, yes developers need to understand MasterPages, Themes, and CSS to build custom mojoPortal skins but they need to know how to do that for any new ASP.NET project. If developers don't already know MasterPages, Themes, and CSS they can use mojoPortal existing skins to learn about it and it will help them on their next project.

2. All the features included in mojoPortal have been maintained over time by me when any major framework changes were introduced. The ModuleControl for a feature is the part that plugs into a page via the content system and the api for this has not changed much if any since the beginning.

3. Forums and Blogs are already done, Wiki is planned for this spring/summer.
For me its very easy building features, its just a matter of how complex each feature is as to how long it takes.
 
This is not really a mojoPortal question, how difficult is it to implement a Knowledge Base, implementing the ModuleControl which plugs into the content system is very easy and this would be the entry point to the Knowledge base application. From there how long it takes or how difficult it is depends on the specifications of what exact functionality do we mean when we say Knowledge Base.

4. I think in terms of features not modules. When I hear module, to me it means the Module Control which plugs into mojoPortal and is the entry point to a feature. However, not all features are implemented as modules. I could say any number for how many features does mojoPortal have compared to how many does DNN or Rainbow depending on how I breakdown the feature list.
To me you should not use feature count as a metric in making a decision, but rather focus on what features does it have that I need and what doesn't it have that I need or want as well as how well implemented are those features and how easy is it for developers to work with the code.

I have a lot of respect for the DotNetNuke project, they have been around a long time and have built up quite a brand and a thriving community and I hope to achieve that success with mojoPortal. I have a lot of plans for mojoPortal for the coming year and I think those who choose to build on mojoPortal will be glad they did. Several developers have told me that they get better support with faster response with mojoPortal than some commercial software they pay for.

If you decide to build on mojoPortal and you and your team need help or training implementing any features, please consider hiring me, rates are negotiable.

Joe
1/27/2007 2:29:22 PM
Ron
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Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

Hi Joe,
1/27/2007 2:29:28 PM
Ron
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Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

Hi Joe,
1/27/2007 4:34:35 PM
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Total Posts 18439

Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

Hi Ron,

Did you get an error trying to reply? I was updating this site and may have caused the error. Sorry about that.

Joe
9/3/2008 10:02:50 PM
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Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

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1/30/2009 7:23:52 AM
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Growing old is inevitable, growing up is optional :)

Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

Hi Joe,

I'll post in this thread cause I'm interested in similar things.

I'm VS (csharp) developer and back in 2004 we needed open source customizible CMS. Rainbow was our choice.
I have learned much about Rainbow, and the firm I'm working for is using it as primary setup for customers needing sites or portals. We have developed or extended about 20 modules for Rainbow and probably more then 30 themes for our customers.

Rainbow does not have any newer stable releases since 2006 and support and feedback on forums are quite poor. I'm also not satisfied with it's framework nor db structure. We are looking for better solution. I downloded mojo portal couple days ago and today I have opened solution and started testing and looking into it's possibilities. It looks familiar (because of Rainbow) but framework is far more better designed and on first look I like it.

The most important thing for me is writing our modules (I'll talk in Rainbow terms, as I have read above you are familiar with those :) ) because usually we have customers with specific demands that are not for public module, or they want included module changed with specific options.

Is there any guide about writing our own modules, something like in Rainbow? In Rainbow they were stand alone projects and we could import it into portal via add module function. It is important so when there is newer version of mojo portal, we have separate original upgrade of portal and our modules as addons.

Is there option in Administration for changing themes like in Rainbow? I see you have explained that mojo is using Master pages, Themes and CSS. That's great. Is there way to create our own theme that also can be independant from mojo source coude (that I don't have to include it in source code and rebuild it every time new mojo portal is released or every time new changes in Theme are made)

I have just started to look into code, so I'm sorry if I ask silly questions :)? I have mostly worked on VS2003 and took a little self learning about VS2005 and Master pages and Themes.

Is there module (feature) in mojo that is like Articles module in Rainbow?

I think creating modules (features?), themes and "Articles" module are important for changing our target CMS platform :)
In rainbow we have used HTML Document heavily but I see that is implemented in mojo. Images and Documents are also in portal, I'll see what they can do :)

Best regards
Goran

1/30/2009 8:34:44 AM
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Growing old is inevitable, growing up is optional :)

Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

hi,

looking into the skins, there are two folders:
1. /Data/Skins/[skinname]
2. /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins/[skinname]

I'm guessing 1. is designtime and 2. is created during runtime?

I have created new skin using existing as template and inserted it into 2. as [newskin]. It is visible in Administration/Site Settings/Skin.
Is this ok or there is another (regular) way?

best regards
goran

1/30/2009 8:44:36 AM
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Re: Newbie to mojoPortal

Hi Goran,

Most of your questions are answered in the documentation.

Seee skinning info here: http://www.mojoportal.com/creatingskins.aspx

Data/skins is just the library of skins, when a new site is created a copy of those is put in the site specific folder /Data/Sites/[SiteID]/skins

This way skins are not shared between sites as people my put alot of effort into a skin and not want to share it with other sites in the installation.

Unfortunately the Visual Studio design time story is not very good because at design time it doesn't have a way to know that at runtime the skin comes from the site specific folder. So designing is pretty much edit css and refresh the browser. But the css is combined, minified and cached on the server and also cached in the browser. So while working on skins its best to disable Minify and caching as indicated here:
http://www.mojoportal.com/important-skin-changes.aspx

Also developer documentation is here:

http://www.mojoportal.com/developerdocs.aspx

Hope it helps,

Joe

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