social networking

MonoX team has been very busy implementing cool new features for the next release, but never forgets to listen to what our community has to say. This time, by popular request, we will build a social networking Web part aptly named "Popular Groups". This tutorial illustrates several important techniques like templating, data binding and paging.

We have just published a new, completely redesigned release of MonoX ASP.NET CMS with full support for Social Networking features. MonoX is now completely free and comes with everything you need to build fully-featured social environments, including: user profiles, OpenID support, friendship modules, scalable multi-user blog engine with automatic anti-spam protection, photo albums, customizable group architecture with support for public and private groups, discussion boards, file galleries, support for activity streams (event logs), messaging, video conversion and sharing, wall and comments.

New version of MonoX was published today, featuring many improvements in back-end functionality (especially data access) and a brand blog module set. Although MonoX can be completely integrated with third-party blog tools like DotNetBlogEngine, our users often requested a custom subsystem that can be customized using standard MonoX administration utilities. So here it is, an easy to use module set that offers a complete functionality of "stand-alone" blog engines...

You may noticed that we've been quiet for the last couple of months. The vacation season is not the primary reason for the lack of updates - quite contrary, we are adding new features to MonoX on a daily basis. Just to give you a test of things to come, here is a short list of features that will be included in the next version that will be released later this year:

- MonoX is switching to .NET 3.5, allowing us to use LINQ, Dynamic Data, portions of MVC technology and similar stuff in the core libraries
- we have switched to the Web application project model, as it offers way better development experience on larger projects - compilation process is now shortened dramatically
- we have introduced some exciting changes to the licensing scheme - more on that later
- MonoX will include a complete Social Networking module set: friend lists, invitations, messaging, wall, notes, groups, profiles...
Stay tuned for more news and let us know which features do you want to see included in next releases.

Blog comment spam has been a massive frustration for our users over the last few months. Although the original release of MonoX blog subsystem followed the Google recommendations for preventing comment spam, the guys behind this obviously lucrative business don't really care about "nofollow" tags - they are submitting non-relevant comments agresivelly.
This is going to change with the new, "social networking" release of MonoX later this month. We provide a pluggable, provider-based architecture that enables users to pick one or more public antispam services or develop their own solutions