A couple days ago I opened my Thunderbird e-mail client on my Windows XP system and found an e-mail from Joe Audette of the mojoPortal project. "Mojo whata?", I asked. I thought I knew most of the content management projects (CMS) projects around, but this one didn't ring a bell. After reading his e-mail, I understood I likely have not heard much about his project because my focus on CMS has been a little too narrow lately.
In his e-mail, Audette writes, "Hi, just wondering if you only cover CMS's using php technology or if you would consider giving any press to .NET/Mono based projects? Any coverage of my project mojoPortal would be much appreciated."
As I've mentioned in past posts, I have a strong desire to cover more than just PHP Web applications. mojoPortal, named after Audette's dog, is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac. Already the talk of a CMS using a blend of Microsoft and open source tools was peaking my interest.
The vision of mojoPortal according to the project's own site is "ultimately to be a platform to run a business by providing a powerful but simple to use content management and virtual office system for easily building interactive collaborative web sites and applications for almost any purpose". Some of the features the projects developer have in mind include messaging, project management, issue tracking, and task management.
Enough of mojoPortal's vision, what you really want to know is what in the CMS is available today. Overall, you should find that mojoPortal includes features that you expect from a young but well developed content management systems. While the features to mojoPortal may not be unique to other CMS applications out there, you do relax a bit knowing that the project has provided the features.
Some of the features for mojoPortal include:
- XHTML Compliant Content Management
- Blogs
- Forums
- Event Calendar
- Image Gallery
- Authenticate against Active Directory, OpenLDAP, or the database.
- Interchangeable data access layer with support for MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite
- Skinnable Design (Themes)
- RSS Feed Aggregator
A full list of current features in mojoPortal as well as planned features on the site's feature page.
While the CMS may have roots to Microsoft products, it is being developed and released under a open source license, the Common Public License. The mojoPortal project seems to have a clear understanding of the GPL license ensuring their CMS and license will work with GPL projects. For example, for those wishing to use MySQL as their database the project has released he mojoPortal Data Library for MySQL under the GPL in order to comply with the GPL license used in the MySQL Connector for .NET.
Don't let all this talk about licenses scare you. Just know that when you run into GPL-only user at your favorite CMS forum, the mojoPortal appears to be doing its best to comply with the GPL and other open source licenses.
While I didn't install mojoPortal myself, there are a number of sites using the CMS. Some of the more interesting and well developed sites I came across using the CMS included GotMono?, Trendoid Internet Service, and ESCA Tepepan . If you're interested in using mojoPortal for your own site, it's available at mojoPortal's download page.