Why we're different
ocPortal is a relative newcomer to the CMS market. We're not nearly as well known as the more established players that people often gravitate to.
This page aims shows many of ocPortal's benefits, many of which are unique, and why the developers are the right team to put your faith in. We ask that you don't take our word on anything – take a look at our points and examine the truth behind them yourself, you are likely to be shocked at the basic things some competing systems can't do!
Calling all Webmasters…
- ocPortal has no licensing costs – it is completely free, even for commercial use
- As so many website features are available out of the box, you save a lot of time and money
- ocPortal can be thoroughly customised – you can do a surprising amount without a programmer
- Use the integrated administration system: everything is neatly organised in harmony
- ocPortal has many 100s of pages of docs freely available, plus video tutorials
- ocPortal has an active community of users
- ocPortal bundles almost every common website feature, so there's no need for third party addons
- Lack of reliance on addons = no risk of orphaned features if hobby-driven developers vanish
- The team behind ocPortal have a commercial support service available to you if you need it
- ocPortal has a proper company behind it, so you can trust that the developers won't vanish
- Because ocPortal is deployed commercially, it is kept up to date with technological changes
- Because you don't need 3rd party addons, you can find all support and documentation in one place
- Through ocPortal's advanced theme technology you can get a unique design up quickly
- You can integrate ocPortal with most forum software, so that forum users may login to the site
- ocPortal is a real hot bed of innovation, with many features not found anywhere else
- Because ocPortal is developed by a dedicated team, everything is designed for simplicity and coherence
- ocPortal has been tuned over years to run on almost any PHP web server – there are no special software or hardware requirements
Calling all Developers…
- We have over 100 pages of field-tested developer documentation
- Plug-in your existing code without needing to make substantial changes: 'echo' still works
- Every single PHP function is documented, however trivial – make use of a solid API
- You can remove any features you don't need: we hate bloat too, and believe in simplicity
- We have a rare transparency, even among Open Source companies… We don't hide our support prices, and think it is bad spirit for an OSS product to have a paid "pro" version
- ocPortal is Open Source, so you can make and distribute your own changes
- Use our framework to extend and override code without having to compromise upgradability
- Our CEO is a programmer and our creative director's father co-invented Usenet – we live tech
- We have extreme code quality standards; we even made own own stricter PHP version to develop on
- We design for scalability – with support for Rackspace Cloud Sites and Facebook's HipHop PHP
- There's no need for third party plugins to get a decent feature-base (compare our features!)
- Our high standards span all our features; for example cross-feature proxy-server support
- Our system architecture allows cross-feature functionality such as points and unified search
- Technology is used consistently – e.g. you only need to work with one templating system
- We find and fix bugs remarkably quickly, usually within just a couple of working days
- Everything we do is free and online: no need to invest in extra books or commercial addons
- ocPortal is secure-by-design, with layers of security and an inbuilt Web Application Firewall
Calling all Designers…
- Every little bit of HTML and CSS can be customised in ocPortal without having to ever touch PHP
- Our powerful templating language allows you to do common things like zebra stripes easily
- ocPortal lets you make the system completely White Label with just a few clicks, for free
- Your clients likely ask for lots of features: compare us on CMSMatrix, we dare you!
- We obsess about W3C compliance: see our vision page to see how far we go
- We care about clean design: see how we cut out the noise on our website compared to other CMSs
- A single ocPortal site can have multiple designs – e.g. different branding on different sections
- ocPortal is built for full design flexibility, we hate assumptions; use features like Lego™ blocks
- With ocPortal you can focus on design and stop having to hammer bits of technology into shape
- Get stuff like comprehensive automatic sitemap creation: most CMSs can't even do this via addons
- Avoid wrestling with the design styles of a dozen addon designers: use our consistent base
- ocPortal features are tame and built without ego – unlike third party addons other CMSs rely on
- Our CEO used to work at a design agency for high street brands: we live what you need and expect
- All kind of effects are built into Comcode, such as carousels, tooltips, and tickers
- As you know, clients now demand a CMS; ocPortal is designed for use by non-techies
- With ocPortal you can create a platform for your client that can grow with their business – turn on new features as you/they need them
- Get all that Web 2.0 goodness – ocPortal has always had strong community tools at its heart and includes Social Media integration
Direct comparison
| Feature | Drupal | Joomla | ocPortal | Wordpress |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WYSIWYG editor (*1) | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Discussion forum (*1) | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Events Calendar (*1) | No | No | Yes | No |
| Newsletter (*1) | No | No | Yes | No |
| Photo Gallery (*1) | No | No | Yes | No |
| Style Wizard | No, but lots of user themes | No, but lots of user themes | Yes | No, but lots of user themes |
| Open Source | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Commercially-driven | Somewhat | No | Yes | Somewhat |
| Bug back log | 4594 | 49 | 2 | 1429 |
| Uniform design | Core only | Core only | Extensive | Core only |
| Strong plugin integration | No | No | Yes | No |
| Uniform standards | Core only | Core only | Extensive | Core only |
| Modular | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Full API documentation | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Reported security holes | 92 | 97 | 1 | 113 |
| W3C compliance of project home page | 3 Errors, 1 warning(s) | 24 Errors, 18 warning(s) | Pass | Pass |
| WAI Compliant | Limited | No | Yes | No |
| Scalability testing | Some people have millions | Untested | Tested to 1 million | Untested |
| Queries on default front page | 50 | 26 | 6 | 20 |
| Page throughput | 26.22 trans/sec | 8.57 trans/sec | 10.13 trans/sec (*2) | 19.12 trans/sec |
- This data was taken from CMS Matrix on 9th September 2010 and tests run on 5th January 2011 using default installs. Please notify us if the status of anything has changed.
- *1: Most of this functionality can be added to other systems using third-party plugins (we explain why we think this is bad above).
- *2: We could have improved our speed by removing bundled addons (this gets ocPortal 17.77 trans/sec), but we wanted to be consistent in comparing default installations. Drupal 7's default site did not come with any content or blocks placed, so was naturally very fast. Wordpress is simple without much overhead.
We're reaching out for Community Partnerships
- Designers/developers: create and sell niche addons and themes for ocPortal, or partner with ocProducts for backend work.
- Publishers: work with us to get the first ocPortal book onto Book-store shelves.
- Consultants: recommend our software and services and earn referral rewards for it. Established consultants can apply to be a regional representative.
- Trainers: train teams and run seminars on ocPortal, the web site platform of the future, and receive advertising on our site.
- Individuals: join our active community and get involved.