The ocProducts team is very proud to announce the eagerly-awaited release of ocPortal v4.2 RC2 (the second Release Candidate of version 4.2). ocPortal 4.2 is officially a minor/feature-release, but in fact is based on the continued development of ocPortal over the previous 8 months.
On the back of the well received 4.2 (RC1) release comes ocPortal 4.2 (RC2), with over 100 bug fixes and usability improvements. We used our recent 9-day team meeting, this time held in Cheltenham (UK), to thoroughly test ocPortal’s major features in both development and live environments. We took the opportunity to address all the bug-related issues that cropped up during our tests, as well as collaborating on features that enhance the user-experience in ways that we never consciously thought of before – such as adding the ability to use the tab-key to make indents in ocPortal’s CSS and Template editors, or to be able to preview existing uploaded images on any edit form (next to the upload field).
Feature recap
- Big cleanup of blogging/news features
- Tidy-up of galleries
- Posting-rate graph
- True multi-language support – virtually all content (news posts, forum posts, CEDI pages, etc) can be translated.
- More data-conversion choices – importing from CSV files, RSS and JPEG meta-data, and ocPortal’s new XML format for synchronisation of data between sites
- Google Sitemap generation
- Twitter and Facebook syndication
- A new weather block to show the current weather in a given location
- Refreshed forum driver support (IPB3, vBulletin 3.8, SMF 2)
- All the menu templates and CSS have been rewritten to be far easier to understand and modify
- About 30 new config options, to allow greater flexibility
- Shopping cart/Online store
- Error messages are now much more thorough, providing solutions on how to resolve the errors
- Performance improvements, particularly to reduce memory usage
- Search-friendly URLs (URLs with keywords in, rather than ID numbers)
- Reviews support (e.g. people can post reviews for a catalogue entry)
- MkPortal import, and feature parity: Slide-shows and eCards from galleries, Top-sites support
- New ‘carousel’ Comcode tag
- Overhaul of the support ticket system, including SMS alert support
- Encrypted custom profile fields (CPFs) and privacy settings
- Flash and Java based uploaders
- Further improved best practice compliance for web standards, and support for the semantic web (“Web 3.0″) – Microformat support, Dublin Core support, and more
- tonnes more (most of which is documented across various posts in our public staff chat forum)
About this release
Upgrading is not yet recommended for live sites, but new sites may wish to go with this release; it is still officially ‘bleeding-edge’ but this will change once it is no longer in Release Candidate status.
This website is now running RC2, and rigorous testing has been undertaken – it has passed all our code quality checking tools. The core 4.2 code, including any new features since the last release, is continually being deployed on our client-websites, and as such as already been thoroughly tried and tested.
Upgrading
To upgrade follow the steps in your website’s http://mybaseurl/upgrader.php script. You will need to copy the URL of the attached TAR file as one of these steps (“3: Upload an upgrade TAR for extraction”).
Please make sure you take a backup before uploading your new files!
» alternatively (but not recommended), you can manually upload the files inside the attached TAR file over existing files (7-zip is just one of many tools for tar files). This is not recommended because it will bypass the upgraders addon-aware extraction algorithm and potentially cause problems.
Important
If you don’t follow our advice by taking and testing a backup, and end up needing emergency repair help, ocProducts can help charged at our hourly rate.
For more details, see our upgrading tutorial.
We have posted a topic explaining the key issues upgrading a 4.1 site, or a 4.2 beta site. This URL will be updated if new upgrade problems are found.
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