ocPortal 4.2 released!

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Added 27 September 2009, 6:32 PM

ocPortal version 4.2-final is now released. ocPortal 4.2 is officially a 'feature' release, but in fact has a huge number of new features developed over the last 9 months or so. Upgrading is suggested, but please follow all our advice carefully and set aside a good amount of time for conversion. 4.1 themes in particular need some work to be converted.

The features

New features include:

Online store (shopping cart)
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
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)

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!

ť 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

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.

For more details, see our upgrading tutorial.

Any common upgrade problems and known issues are being tracked in this forum topic.
If you have another problem, please file a bug report and ocProducts will respond and update the topic accordingly.