ocPortal Version 5

It's been a long time coming, but we finally have news on our next version of ocPortal.

We had planned to be releasing 4.4 but we've decided to head straight for version 5, and now we are within a few days of releasing it.

And what a version 5 we have for you!

Version 5 brings ocPortal right up alongside the most beautiful CMS packages out there, and drives straight past without stopping. We've reviewed everything, gone right back to the drawing board (Photoshop) in many cases, as well as injecting the latest display and interface technology.

We could show you a number of before and after pictures, but pictures alone don't really do ocPortal 5 justice. We have decided to create a preview video of some of the main changes, because from a few pictures you might think we had just tidied things up a bit. This to be fair, is in some sense true, because when we design ocPortal we have to make sure we don't project too specific a design concept onto people's unique sites. We've done far more than that though, as the following video demonstrates…

ocPortal video tutorial

Version 5 isn't just about graphics. It's also about addons, dozens of them, which we have lined up waiting for release. I promise you'll be blown away: we've really gone the extra mile to design a set of addons that encompass the best of what can be achieved on the Internet today.

Version 5 isn't just about graphics and addons. It's also about features. We've implemented dozens of new features, usability improvements, and also bug fixes. All this without breaking anything except theme compatibility.

Version 5 isn't just about graphics and addons and features. It's also about something else which we've been working on in secret for months and will change everything for ocPortal users… but we're not ready to announce that yet.

ocPortal Version 5 release candidate will be released on Thursday 22nd of July.

*claps*

I honestly can't wait to grab the new version of ocPortal and my only wish is that it was released right now .

I can see from the video lots of work has been done. I do not know exactly for sure how it will all work, but it all does look nice. I like the idea of the drop down tabs, and wonder if that is a feature available for all the menus or just an admin zone menu feature. One thing I still think would have been an improvement that I didn't see changed from the video was the consolidation of the manage themes and list of themes page, as per my suggestion in the develop forum; but who knows, maybe the drop down menu will make it all the better.

I am also curious if any work has been done with the WYSIWYG editor for working with webkit and khtml browsers. Seeing that it wasn't talked about i the video I can only guess no, which is a little disappointing but I of course do understand that such things are a huge undertaking.

All in all, I think ocPortal 5 is gonna be massive and can't wait to use it! I thank you and congratulate you for your dedicated work and wonderful promo video!

Thursday is now a day to look forward to this week! Thanks Chris and Co. and I can't wait to test driving OCP5!!

Looks like I crawled back just in time - AND - before I opened up the 'new' site.

For me, a few more days won't make any difference, and that includes getting to grips with the new soft, getting my new design incorporated, and not rushing to deploy before I 'learn' everything it is capable of …

@mythus RE menus – we restyled the 'dropdown' menu type and hooked the admin stuff into that. So yes, you can get these very easily. You can do it now, but it's not as pretty.

@mythus RE saving clicks – if after trying it you still have some issues please make a suggestion to the tracker.

@mythus RE WYSIWYG – no, this hasn't changed in this release. My worry was we'd risk too much disruption, as the WYSIWYG editor has been tuned over a number of years now. The eventual plan is to move quite a lot over to the latest YUI (Yahoo Interface Library) and standardise on that.

@Fletch – I considered letting you know about this version early for obvious reasons, but actually it's not all that disruptive. Certainly not as much as the v3-to-v4 transition. A lot of our CSS and templates have changed, but architecturally nothing has really changed. Good use of a diff tool (e.g. Win Merge) should help you and I hope to get Haydn to record a quick video tutorial (time permitting).

@mythus RE menus - we restyled the 'dropdown' menu type and hooked the admin stuff into that. So yes, you can get these very easily. You can do it now, but it's not as pretty.

Ah, sounds awesome .

@mythus RE saving clicks - if after trying it you still have some issues please make a suggestion to the tracker.

Yes, my thoughts exactly actually. I stated in my earlier comment that I'd see how this worked out, and if still thought needed IMO, then I'd post a new suggestion. Hadn't thought of using the tracker though, so I'll be certain to use it for that should I desire to.

@mythus RE WYSIWYG - no, this hasn't changed in this release. My worry was we'd risk too much disruption, as the WYSIWYG editor has been tuned over a number of years now. The eventual plan is to move quite a lot over to the latest YUI (Yahoo Interface Library) and standardise on that.

No biggie . It would be nice, granted to have a working WYSIWYG editor in browsers like konqueror, chrome, safari, rekonq, midori, epiphany (since it now uses webkit), opera, etc… but 9 out of to most users will likely be using IE or Firefox. Plus the comcode editor does work just fine. It is more of a vanity request lol, and I of course understand the reasoning behind not having it yet. I admit though I don't know about the YUL.

I do wonder though, you did get rid of that odd firefox case right, where when you copy say a bold text into the editor and have to go into comcode or html editor just to end the bold text formating?

Again though, nice work and cain't wait for it

I do wonder though, you did get rid of that odd firefox case right, where when you copy say a bold text into the editor and have to go into comcode or html editor just to end the bold text formating?

I'm not aware of this one. I think we have changed how Comcode bold is done in this release so perhaps it is incidentally fixed. If it's still an issue please open an issue up on, you guessed it, the tracker .

I'm going to attempt to use this version on the site that got suspended and HOPE FOR THE BEST the CPU doesn't crash the server.

This looks fantastic!

Do you have any good news about the excessive CPU usage issue being addressed in V5?

There are some performance improvements in v5, but apart from one specific problem searching large forums, and the menu block caching issue that definitely is fixed on your site, there shouldn't be any serious performance problems. Over the years due to a lot of hard work we've made ocPortal more efficient with each release (apart from v1, which was very basic in comparison) so I think there's some other issue going on here. It may be a reporting issue, some kind of configuration issue, bot activity, for example, or some very specific bug in a part of ocPortal not often used – I'll try and take a look tomorrow and see what I can find. I'm aware both yourself (friendly) and Eric have seen similar problems around the same time, and that might not be a coincidence. To be honest we have had performance issues here, but the situation is different – in addition to normal hits we get continuous hits from bots due to the size of the forum, and also quite a lot of hits to our RSS feed and version database from all the ocPortal site's out there.

With ocP v4, when my site was suspended twice, a "bot" issue was seen in both instances. Everything else with the CPU was different. robots.txt was being called when I get suspended the two times and those were the highest percentages. Just an FYI for ocP5.

Thanks for the Look-Ahead ocP-Team. That is a well done video presentation. By the looks of the new features alone you might just be delivering a killer CMS with v5. Can't wait to put my hands on it.

I thought ocPortal is already a killer CMS+Portal+Blog+Forum+comunitybuilder+etc…

v 5 will simply make it even more so. Poor other CMS'es… they just don't have a chance of ever matching ocPortal.

Now if only we could get others to see the light of the truth that is ocportal…

{{twiddles thumbs in anticipation that it is Thursday, July 22!}}

Imminent.

Installing it now... woot! woot!

Top stuff i shall be upgrading my site this weekend, might actually get around to some theming too

I've already started to theme ocP v5. I'm loving the easier navigation through the admin zone.

Upgrade seems to have gone smoothly

What happened to the 5.0 download? It was there yesterday and today it is gone from the downloads.