mojoPortal Review – my first experience creating mojoPortal skins – is this the best open source .net CMS?

Hi, and welcome to my mojoPortal review, sprinkled with a few tips from my first time creating mojoportal skins.

Let me give you the bits you need to know before I get into the review proper:

• You can download MojoPortal from here
• It is developed by the extremely helpful Joe Audette
• It is written in C# .NET
• You can use the very good Community Forums to help get you started, along with the official documentation
• You can check out the mojoPortal demo to have a play around

Ok, so that’s where you can get the information you need, so let me give you a bit of a background of me and the project for which I first used mojoPortal and then hit you with the review.

I’m a web and SEO geek at The Design Loft with alot of experience building brochure sites using Microsoft’s .NET framework.

The reason I like this is simplicity; I’m not a PHP basher and I do work on a Mac, it’s just I got an “ASP.Net for Dummies” book as a gift (I wanted something better) and it stuck.

At The Design Loft we do alot of work for white label clients and this project was one of those. For that reason I can’t name the client on here, professionalism and all. However, we had the requirement to build a full CMS system for them and were struggling to find something that the marketing company we were working for felt could be taken up easily by the end client.

Being a .NET chappie I’ve always found it tough to get along and finid a C# / VB content management system (CMS) that I liked. I was always thrust down the DotNetNuke road (great CMS) but found it a tad heavy for my clients to use; I have another vocation which is IT training so my goals from a user perspective are always speed and ease of use. I know there are other .NET CMS platforms out there but I’ve just never gotten on with them so much. I have used some of the PHP CMS systems out there; Drupal, Joomla et al but always felt like I was swimming uphill a little, given my .NET heritage.

Until I found MojoPortal.

With mojoPortal we have been (very) easily able to create a dynamic, SEO friendly, feature packed and well built content managed website; the reasons for this are simple:

1. mojoPortal is packed with features straight out of the box – install it on your .NET 3.5 server and watch as your website is filled with blogs, forums (yes, forums), dynamic navigation, Twitter feeds, Google Maps, jQuery UI elements, photo galleries and so much more. Oh, it does normal pages too!
2. Building skins is simple (if you’re ok at HTML / CSS)

My experience creating my first mojoPortal skin was exceptionally stress free – and where it did get a little hairy, the mojoPortal forums, and the two Joes (Audette and Davis) in particular were a huge help. I started with a quality, cross browser compatible html page which I’d built based on the client’s signed off design and then trawled through the preinstalled skins within mojoPortal to find one that looked a little similar in structure – i should mention at this point that there are plenty of preinstalled skins for you to play around with – magic!

Having found a skin I checked out the relevant layout.Master (a .NET Master Page which you use to create the basic template layout for the CMS to drop content into) and looked at what mojoPortal specific controls were present. After deciphering what the layout.Master required, I simply converted my html page to a layout.Master and replaced my static content with the mojoPortal specific controls to pull content into the right places.

It’s prudent to say that when you get to the stage with your first mojoPortal skin you are going to need to start considering CSS. As with many content management systems, mojoPortal has a set series of CSS classes which you will need to learn (to a degree) and implement in your layout.Master – my advice for this is to open up one of the preinstalled skins and look at the source / styles associated with it. You’ll get it in no time.

One more thing I will mention regarding CSS (which took me a little while to get my head around if I’m honest) is that mojoPortal has a control called “StyleSheetCombiner” which aggregates a list of separate style sheets (some for fonts, others for layout, one specifically for the blog etc) into one readable set of styles for the skin to utilise. Some people find it useful not to use this as it can feel like alot of work to separate your already working styles out into their own sheets, however my experience so far is that if you’re building for mojoPortal, take the time to split your CSS and make use of the combiner control – it could save you some headache in the future!

Once you’re skin is up and running, simply upload to the right place on your server (in my case it was http://www.mydomain.com/Data/Sites/1/skins/name-of-myskin/) and your skin is installed; just head to the admin menu and choose it from the list followed by “Save”.

After you’ve had the chance to test your skin out you will be extremely impressed by the breadth of features that Joe has built into the system as standard. MojoPortal makes it extremely easy to create blogs, forums, maps, Twitter feeds, excellent photo galleries, surverys, polls and contact forms by simply dropping instances of these items onto a page. You can very easily have 10 blogs running on one site, a pile of photo galleries and a set of forums – all within minutes.

Standard page creation and management is just as easy – drop an an instance of an “Html Content” control onto a page, set it up using the intuitive settings section and publish your content using the WYSIWYG editor. Lovely job.

I have to say that i think mojoportal is the best open source .net CMS I’ve found so far. Sure, it’s not as “grown up” as DotNetNuke et al, but it feels good, it performs well and it’s packed full of the stuf you really need.

Of course, there is so much more you can do with mojoPortal and Joe does provide a few excellent paid extensions whic you can easily integrate into your website.

To wrap up; Joe and mojoPortal are doing a great job of providing an easy to use, easy to skin, effective content management system for us .NET geeks to use for our clients (and ourselves) as we see fit. If you do end up using it and enjoy your experience, buy Joe a beer!

I hope you found this mojoPortal review useful and wish you luck creating your own mojoPortal skins!