As Mindfly continues to finish things up on one of our latest projects, an announcement was published on the Aramco ExPats' website that the new version of the site can be expected "in the very near future." I think within the week we will start moving the new code to the production environment and begin testing. It will be nice to hear feedback from the websites' community.
I have been working on the overall framework that the site will be running on for well over a year. As my initial inspiration I looked at DotNetNuke (DNN) and I played around with quite a few of the new features within ASP.NET 2.0. However, in my opinion DNN is cumbersome when it comes to layouts (particularly its' lack of flexibility with CSS) and content publishing. I reviewed quite a few open source blogs (obviously I have a bias for ASP.NET which is limiting in this arena) and played with some mashups. Eventually I wound up coming up with something we at Mindfly call "SiteWorks by Mindfly." Aramco ExPats will be it's maiden voyage so to speak.
Read the announcement here: http://www.aramcoexpats.com/Lifestyles/Special-Interest/ContentID/2960/Content.aspx.