Following ocPortal's new feature tracker becoming established we wanted to make this announcement to a wider audience outside of our forum. Since the news item below there have been 11 new features added for discussion and 37, almost 20%, have been resolved.

Since the original release we are now working on Version 5 rather than 4.4 due to the amount of changes made. You can expect an announcement about this in the next few days.

Original news forum article:

Preceding the expected release of ocPortal version 4.4,  we are pleased to announce a new feature tracker which we will be using to plan future features. The tracker shows all 177 feature areas we currently have for consideration for future versions of ocPortal, laid out for anyone to see and comment on. In the past we have planned ocPortal in private so this is a huge change for us and a huge release of what were previously private plans.

The purpose of the feature tracker is to highlight current and future developments within ocPortal and allow the community to have a say and make suggestions. Each issue or feature in the database has a description of the intended functionality, a time estimation, and a clear layout of dependencies and risk management data (which gives an impression to how the developers likely see it in terms of schedule for implementation).

We hope the new feature tracker helps foster a greater feeling of inclusivity amongst our community and a real foundation for transparency and engagement. You shouldn't expect everything on this list to be "around the corner" but it does give everyone a chance to have their say, and help foster a shared vision.

The ocPortal feature tracker can be found here:
http://ocportal.com/tracker/my_view_page.php

A new version of CMS Made Simple was released this past weekend. CMS Made Simple 1.8 offers a number of new features to enhance performance not only of the website itself, but to make doing some mundane tasks faster and easier.

Some of the more significant changes in CMS MadeSimple include:

• Stylesheets - The {stylesheet} tag has been deprecated in favor of a {cms_stylesheet} tag. The replacement works by grabbing the content of the individual style sheets and passing them through smarty before writing them to uniquely named files in the tmp/cache directory. Processing the style sheets (individually) through smarty means that you will no longer have to search through each of the style sheets for individual colors, you can give them names.
• Bulk-copy pages
• New {content_module} tag - Allows modules to provide different types of content blocks for use in Content pages.
• SSL support
• Updated documentation
• Clean up of language files
• Module Manager improvements - It should now be much easier to install or upgrade modules, including all of their dependencies.

Additional details about CMS Made Simple 1.8 can be found at CMSMadeSimple.org. The latest stable version of CMSMS is available on their download page.

The open source Web forum application, phpBB, is available in a new version. phpBB 3.0.6 introduces not only bug fixes and stability improvements but also some major new features.

We are very pleased to announce the availability of the phpBB "Fast and Furrious" 3.0.6 package. This release fixes numerous bugs, introduces some major features, as well as improves stability and performance. Furthermore, the internal updater has been updated to detect and solve most conflicts, resulting in a reduction of necessary manual interaction by administrators.

Please note that we urge you to update. phpBB 3.0.6 fixes bugs being quite important for a smooth operation of your forums. With this release our support team will only give support for phpBB 3.0.6, updates to phpBB 3.0.6 and conversions to phpBB 3.0.6. Submissions to our trackers for older versions will not be accepted, please make sure you update/upgrade before you submit a bug report.

Some of the new features that have been implemented in phpBB 3.0.6 include:

• Better spam control using improved captcha options and backported 3.2 captcha plugins:
  
  • Classic and GD CAPTCHA
  • reCaptcha
  • Q&A CAPTCHA
  • 3D Wave
    

A few days ago, I mentioned that "Drupal 6 feels ready to me" for public release. Evidently, that was more than feeling as Drupal 6 was released early Wednesday morning.

As a user of Drupal, let me start by saying thank you to all the developers and advocates that brought Drupal 6 to light. I've been watching Drupal 6 grow from a distance this past year and have made some observations. There is a lot more sweat, tears, and love put into Drupal than most outsiders realize. Those of us that have used Drupal during the past six years owe a lot to those of you active in the Drupal community.

You can check out the release announcement at Drupal.org for all the new features and enhancements that have been rolled into Drupal 6. Let's look at some of the highlighted features in Drupal 6 which I've listed below.