ocPortal 6 released

3 mins

ocProducts are please to announced the final release of ocPortal version 6. This is a major new version, incorporating many improvements that improve the usability of ocPortal in a number of areas, whilst keeping compatibility high.

Key usability changes in this version of ocPortal include new “install profiles” built into the Setup Wizard allow you to easily set up a new site with many of the elements pre-configured for your needs. Choose from: blog, community site, info site, portfolio and shopping site. We've gone to significant efforts to tune each profile (particularly the blog profile) to ensure clean operation and suitability for purpose.

We have made it easier than ever to strip back your installation of ocPortal, keeping your installation small and efficient. We have achieved this by reducing the number of ocPortal modules that are designated as “core” features. These modules are still bundled by default, but this simplifies ocPortal for small sites and blogs. These revisions to the core system now make it it easy to:

Disable RSS.
Cut back the Members system.
Cut back some of the forum features.
Remove more features, admin features or the whole collaboration zone.
We've added a new Comcode tag button to forms, which adds an easy form for adding Comcode tags to pages.
Rearranged the menus to make things simpler.
Content translation has been made more user friendly (we've added a new tutorial too). You can now export PO files from a local install to be able to share them through Launchpad.
Fixed width support is now built in to theming.

Helping users:

We have added two new features to help webmasters from within their own admin zone. The first is a new chat room for web masters, which enables them to talk with other ocPortal webmasters from their own admin zone. Secondly, we have made it very easy to file a usability report from within ocPortal. This feature is aimed at less experienced users, so they can let us know when something isn't as clear as it could be.

Performance testing

We have tested millions of entries to ensure huge ocPortal sites run smoother. We have improved speed performance meaning our speed is now similar to our competitors regardless of us being a much more flexible system. As part of the above, more things can be paginated in the system, such as comment topics or buddy lists.

Our new ‘Advanced admin cache' feature will blow your mind. Once enabled, Google Chrome webmasters will have page's cache locally on their own machines, whilst the server generates the latest version of the page in the background and delivers it slightly later (e.g. 1 second later, whatever it would be if the AAC cache was not enabled). This means you can click around ocPortal at lightning speed as the server has to do zero work, yet nothing is actually cached in the annoying sense. Saving a few seconds does not seem like much, but it really makes things much more fun.

Other Notable Changes include:

We have a new WYSIWYG editor, we have Switched WYSIWYG editor to CKEditor: better editor, with added support for IE9, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera.
Gallery Improvements including galleries now support SWF files and now accepts direct Facebook and Youtube video links.
Our default theme now has Mobile support including better mobile theme detection and framework to meet modern hardware.
Added A new main_multi_content block has been added that allows you to embed sets of any kind of content, sorted in a number of ways.
Added webm and HTML5 video support.
New functionality for creating temporary usergroup memberships.
Improved Breadcrumb usability and flexibility.
New support for writing addons for associating to videos on external video sites, rather than it being limited to Facebook and Youtube via hard-coding.
Fixed issues with dark theme wizard themes.

There are many more changes which are too numerous to list in full here. You can find out more information and a full list of changes at http://ocportal.com/site/news/view/new_releases/ocportal-6-released.htm