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
New features include:
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.
Your upgrade to version 4.2 RC2
You can generate an upgrader from any version of ocPortal to any other version. If you access this upgrade post via the version information box on your Admin Zone front page then we'll automatically know what version you're running.
If you'd prefer though you can enter in your version number right here:
Important
ocProducts cannot make any guarantees about the speed of which any new bugs might be patched, for this upgrade or any other upgrade. It is your own responsibility to make and test a full website backup (files and database) before you upgrade, for use in the unlikely event of you wanting to revert your upgrade. Some users may wish to test upgrades (and pre-fix any theme compatibility problems that could occur) on a staging site (a private mirror of their live site). 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.
Hey Chris! I've had issues generating the patch code from this site both for 4.2.beta and for 4.1.10. Here is the error I get:
Skip navigation Critical error - bailing out
This is an error that has been elevated to critical error status because it occured during the primary error mechanism reporting system itself (possibly due to it occuring within the standard output framework). It may be masking a secondary error that occured before this, but was never output - if so, it is likely strongly related to this one, thus fixing this will fix the other.
Cannot write to /home/ocp/public_html/themes/ocproducts/templates_cached/EN/ HEADER.tcp. File permissions for it (or the directory it is in) have not been set correctly.
Details here are intended only for the website/system-administrator, not for regular website users. » If you are a regular website user, please let the website staff deal with this problem.
Depending on the error, and only if the website installation finished, you may need to edit the installation options (the info.php file).
ocProducts maintains full documentation for all procedures and tools. These may be found on the ocPortal website. If you are unable to easily solve this problem, we may be contacted from our website and can help resolve it for you.
*i need to change my shorts*
Thanks for the update. Keep up the good work.
Errors generating the upgrade patch
Thanks!