ocportal

Spend a day in the ocPortal office

By ocStevenJ - Posted on 19 March 2010

We are offering an opportunity, available to all, to come and spend a day with us in our office, to see how we work and spend the day using ocPortal. ocPortal is an open source CMS with many features and benefits. We believe this will be fulfilling both for those people who can make it, as well as for us…

You get to spend a day in our office and have questions answered relating to ocPortal, (and maybe a cup of tea/coffee or ten, bring your own red bull though .
We get some help with our documentation and help finding where it could be clearer. This is really important to us which is why we're opening our doors for what is effectively free informal training (for a limited time only).

The ocPortal office is located in Sheffield (England) and is about 25 minutes walk from the train station but it is easy to find. Sheffield is located just off the M1 (Junction 33). We can arrange parking if you are driving as long as we have enough notice. Please note that we cannot provide traveling or accommodation costs.

You can either reply to the topic on the ocPortal forum, send me a Personal Topic on the ocPortal forum or email me on steven@ocproducts.com.

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ocPortal 4.3 released

By Bryan - Posted on 11 February 2010

ocPortal 4.3 was released this week. The new version of ocPortal introduces a number of "bug fixes, performance improvements, and usability improvements". However, ocPortal also introduces some new features to make upgrading to the new version more enticing.

The new features that have been implemented in ocPortal 4.3 include:

Wordpress, Joomla, and HTML website importers
iCal exporter
Quiz results CSV exporter
New Comcode 'pulse' tag
Improved shared-install functionality
ocPortal can now run without a database (the inbuilt database is now a bundled feature, although not completely supported or recommended for production sites)
New developer feature for the quick addition of language strings, written (temporarily) in-line into the code
Support for running a server behind a proxy server

Additional details regarding ocPortal 4.3 can be found in the official ocPortal news announcement.

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Expected improvements coming in ocPortal 4.3

By Bryan - Posted on 30 November 2009

With a release candidate out for ocPortal 4.3, you can expect a number of improvements in the upcoming official release of ocPortal. This version is a feature release that introduces a number of bug fixes since the last release as well as performance improvements and new features.

The new features expected to be included in ocPortal 4.3:

The "What's new" newsletter feature now allows you to easily re-order categories, change what categories are used, is better presented, and allows you to choose the reference date
Added link to ocPortal's bookmarks feature on the screen-actions block (commented out by default though)
Added Guest forum searching to OCF

ocPortal 4.2 is available

By Bryan - Posted on 30 September 2009

There is a new version of ocPortal out and about. ocPortal 4.2 is officially a "feature" release and includes a huge number of new features developed over the last 9 months or so. ocPortal 4.2 is such an impressive improvement over the previous version that this content management system is worth a second look if you passed it by once before.

Some of the new features and improvements in this version of ocPortal include:

Online store (shopping cart)
Big cleanup of blogging/news features
Tidy-up of galleries
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

Ektron, FatWire, ocPortal and Sitecore added to CMS Report's top 30 list

By Bryan - Posted on 08 September 2009

During the past few weeks, I have been quietly updating CMS Report's CMS Focus page. CMS Focus is a list of the top 30 Web applications representing what I see as the Web applications of today and tomorrow which interest me the most. In a world where niche CMS news sites try to cover it all for their readers, I feel one of the strengths of CMSReport.com is limiting our focus on a certain number of CMS. The CMS on this list are applications I recommend site owners first look at before moving into the deeper waters of content management and social software.

Recently added to this list of content management systems are Ektron, FatWire, ocPortal, and Sitecore. The new additions are heavily weighted toward enterprise content management systems and are a reflection of my shifting focus from Web CMS for the Internet to those applications that run on an organization's intranet. Don't worry though, I still plan on talking about some of our favorite Web CMS such as Drupal, Joomla!, mojoPortal, and SilverStripe as I'm broadening not limiting my interests.

I bumped five CMS off the list and placed them into the "Hall of Fame". Those CMS no longer being listed under CMS Focus include SMF, OpenEdit, eGroupWare, e107, and dotCMS.

Mailbag: ocPortal

By Bryan - Posted on 17 July 2009

During the past couple months I've had a number of email exchanges from Chris and Allen regarding their PHP based CMS, ocPortal. Their company recently relaunched ocPortal under an open source license in hopes of growing their user base. Both gentleman are very enthusiastic about ocPortal and have a strong desire to see more community involvement with their CMS.

In one of those emails, Chris had something to say about ocPortal's move to open source.

I've been following you on Twitter for a while and it was good to see you commenting on my blog post recently. I'd like to see if we can work with you to get some more ocPortal coverage on CMS report - we've got a lot to say and offer, and everyone who comments on our product gives really glowing reviews. I really want to get our project out of the obscurity it's always suffered; it's always a downer to read about things other groups do if we've done it already and not had news of it leave our community. From my personal perspective I feel we should really be up with the most popular CMS's, as we are ahead of them in about every category except community size. We started out commercial but are now OSS - I think in our initial years people weren't motivated to advocate us much because of that.

In a few other emails from Chris, he also discussed some of the frustrations with getting open source ocPortal some attention while the IT media is often focused on the bigger open source projects. How does a small project compete against the bigger CMS projects such as Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress? I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know ocPortal deserves a chance.

In the coming months we'll focus on ocPortal for some of our stories. The next time our CMS Focus page gets a refresh, you can expect ocPortal to be in our Top 30 list. That also means you can expect a CMS or two that we're less enthusiastic about off the list.

ocPortal and Bitnami team together for easy CMS installation

By Bryan - Posted on 08 July 2009

Two providers of integrated solutions: ocPortal, an open-source Content Management System, and Bitnami, which makes "stacks" for easy installation of web applications, have partnered to release a "stack" for ocPortal 4.1.10. Jointly developed/tested by both companies, users of almost any background can now easily download and run ocPortal on the "big three" operating systems, Windows, Linux, and Mac.

A flexible Web CMS, ocPortal has an emphasis on building online communities, and dynamic and interactive websites. ocPortal provides features for blogging, running a forum, providing downloads, hosting galleries, serving your own databases, eCommerce, and much more. Everything is customizable, done to high standards, and easy to use.

ocPortal with the Bitnami stack installer Bitnami has done a fantastic job integrating every major component (Apache, PHP, MySQL, ocPortal) seamlessly, topped off with a straightforward, intuitive installer that makes the entire process a breeze.

Bitnami's "Stacks" page showcases dozens of web-based applications. After choosing "ocPortal" and an operating system, the all-in-one installer asks for basic site info (site name, username, password, e-mail) and configures every necessary component to work properly.

Bitnami represents the next step forward in software distribution by empowering virtually anyone to utilize new web technologies on their own computers.

Bitnami for ocPortal 4.1.10 is freely available at: http://bitnami.org/stack/ocportal.