ocPortal is a free and open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 content management system

Content management system

A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

 (CMS) written in PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

 and based on a MySQL

MySQL

MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

 backend database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

. The software has been developed by British software developer

Software developer

A software developer is a person concerned with facets of the software development process. Their work includes researching, designing, developing, and testing software. A software developer may take part in design, computer programming, or software project management...

 Chris Graham since 2004, with contributions from programmers Chris Warburton, Paul Duffy & Philip Withnall and designer Allen Ellis.

Associated companies

Bitnami announced the release of a new installer stack for ocPortal towards the end of June in 2009 . Installatron, a plugin for hosting control panels also includes ocPortal within its list of included scripts . In early 2010 ocPortal was one of the first websites to use Facebook's Hiphop HP on a live site and in Production. ocProducts founder Chris Graham completed a number of tests and reported a number of bugs which had not yet been found by Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

.

Features

ocPortal has a number of features which can be included when installing the software or added later . Some of those features are:

• Self extracting installer option
• Automatic Site map
  Site map
  A site map is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion...
  
   Generation
• Support for short URLs
  URL shortening
  URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator may be made substantially shorter in length and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using an HTTP Redirect on a domain name that is short, which links to the web page that has a long URL...
  
  
• Highly Web standards
  Web standards
  Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites,...
  
   compliant, see more information below
• Theme Wizard
  Wizard (software)
  A software wizard or setup assistant is a user interface type that presents a user with a sequence of dialog boxes that lead the user through a series of well-defined steps. Tasks that are complex, infrequently performed, or unfamiliar may be easier to perform using a wizard...
  
  
• Rich Media Support
• Social Media
  Social media
  The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
  
   Syndication
• RSS
  RSS
  -Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
  
   & Atom Support
  Atom (standard)
  The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
  
  
• Media Galleries including optional watermarking
  Digital watermarking
  Digital watermarking is the process of embedding information into a digital signal which may be used to verify its authenticity or the identity of its owners, in the same manner as paper bearing a watermark for visible identification. In digital watermarking, the signal may be audio, pictures, or...
  
  
• News & Newsletters
• Forums
  Internet forum
  An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
  
  
• Shopping Cart
  Shopping cart software
  Shopping cart software is software used in e-commerce to assist people making purchases online, analogous to the American English term 'shopping cart'...
  
   & e-commerce functionality
• Customisable Pages
• Web Banners
  Web banner
  A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser...
  
  
• Images of the day option
• Site statistics and analytics support
• Downloads
• Calendar
• Quizzes
  Quiz
  A quiz is a form of game or mind sport in which the players attempt to answer questions correctly. In some countries, a quiz is also a brief assessment used in education and similar fields to measure growth in knowledge, abilities, and/or skills.Quizzes are usually scored in points and many...
  
   and Surveys
  Statistical survey
  Survey methodology is the field that studies surveys, that is, the sample of individuals from a population with a view towards making statistical inferences about the population using the sample. Polls about public opinion, such as political beliefs, are reported in the news media in democracies....
  
  
• Points store
• Search functionality
• Support ticket support
  Issue tracking system
  An issue tracking system is a computer software package that manages and maintains lists of issues, as needed by an organization...
  
  
• External software integration support
• Polls – Simple voting system by users
• Catalogues for Links & FAQs
  FAQ
  Frequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. "FAQ" is usually pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym, but an acronym form does exist. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual...
  
   etc
• CEDI (Structured Wikis
  Wiki
  A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
  
  )
• Blogs
  Blog
  A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
  
  
• Chat Rooms
  Chat room
  The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing...
  
  , Instant Messaging
  Instant messaging
  Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
  
   & Shout-out boxes
• Multi-site network support including shared membership
• Multiple User group support and customisation
• Control of user privileges
• Unique Realtime "Rain" visual usage tracker

Standards compliance

ocPortal complies with a number standards. covering areas such as web publishing, accessibility and internationalization, metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

 and data storage and distribution.

Web publishing

HTTP 1.1, XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, HTML5 rel semantics, OpenSearch 1.0, DOM, SVG & ECMAScript

Accessibility and internationalisation

WCAG 1.0 and 2.0, with support for AAA, Unicode, ATAG, Internationalisation, UK Government, recommendation for access keys & Section 508,

Data and feeds

XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

, RSS 2.0 (all formats/variants), Atom 1.0

Atom (standard)

The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...

, iCalendar 2.0

ICalendar

iCalendar is a computer file format which allows Internet users to send meeting requests and tasks to other Internet users, via email, or sharing files with an extension of .ics...

, LDAP 3

LDAP Data Interchange Format

The LDAP Data Interchange Format is a standard plain text data interchange format for representing LDAP directory content and update requests. LDIF conveys directory content as a set of records, one record for each object...

 & OPML

OPML

OPML is an XML format for outlines...

.

Metadata

Dublin Core

Dublin Core

The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...

, hCalendar, hCard

HCard

hCard is a microformat for publishing the contact details of people, companies, organizations, and places, in HTML, Atom, RSS, or arbitrary XML...

, hReview

HReview

hReview is a microformat for publishing reviews of books, music, films, restaurants, businesses, holidays, etc. using HTML on web pages, using HTML classes and rel attributes.....

, rel-nofollow

Nofollow

nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index...

, rel-enclosure, rel-license, rel-tag & XFN

XHTML Friends Network

XHTML Friends Network is an HTML microformat developed by Global Multimedia Protocols Group that provides a simple way to represent human relationships using links. XFN enables web authors to indicate relationships to the people in their blogrolls by adding one or more keywords as the rel...

 (limited support)

Criticisms

ocPortal's weak points have been noted as its relatively small community. Very few community addons or themes have been released for ocPortal when compared to projects such as Drupal

Drupal

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system and content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and...

 and Joomla.

Early versions of ocPortal were hit with a setback in the form of a HTTP Remote File Include security vulnerability which “presents itself when an attacker provides a remote path to the 'req_path' variable through the URL” . This security vulnerability was fixed in later versions and several processes were added to make any future vulnerabilities less likely.

History

ocPortal was originally released in February 2004 and the current version is Version 7.1.5. In September of 2009 ocPortal was added to the CMS reports top 30 web applications from a list of 1,700 . In December 2009 ocProducts moved to new offices in Sheffield

Version history

• March 2004 – version 1 Released; Included limited page support & basic features
• August 2004 – version 2 Released; Software largely re-architected
• November 2004 – version 2.1; introduced member database, attachments
• October 2005 – version 2.5; Added discussion forums
• July 2006 – version 3 Released; Included a UI overhaul
• August 2008 – version 4 Released
• January 2009 – Included in the Opensource CMS Demo program
• June 2009 - included in the Killerstartup's “Web App Tools” list
• September 2009 - version 4.2 released. ; Included Joomla, Wordpress
  WordPress
  WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...
  
   & HTML
  HTML
  HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
  
  website importers
• February 2010 version 4.3 released
• July 2010 version 5 released ; Included a major Adminzone overhaul, Gallery re-design, Added the ability to transcode video and an innovative real time visual usage tracker.
• March 2011 version 6 released ; Included many performance improvements, stability improvements, and usability improvements.
• May 2011 version 7 released