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ocPortal is a website engine that drives powerful interactive and dynamic websites, by providing a wide range of features that are useful on many different kinds and themes of website. For example, ocPortal can easily power any of the following:
The ocPortal philosophy is that many different kinds of website have the same basic needs: for example, a corporate collaboration system is likely to include a forum, as would an on-line gaming community – obviously needs would vary in certain areas, but we provide additional, optional, features that cater for these different needs. For example, our member system supports HTTP-authentication integration to corporate networks, and it also supports user ranks: both useful features, for different audiences.
At the time of writing, ocPortal is a truly unique product. There are many portals, frameworks, and content management systems, but they all have strong assumptions and limitations, that limit what you can achieve. ocPortal has a vast pool of features for you to choose from, developed to a high level of sophistication, and fully customisable.
For example:
If you want an advanced website, full of dynamic and interactive features, ocPortal is the right choice for you. We provide a low cost, high quality and easy to use product, with a large breadth of documentation, and a development team that is available for contract work if you have very specific requirements. The only realistic alternative is to hire skilled programmers to write a new site from scratch, and this is likely to involve employing an expensive team for a project that last months, with regular additional costs as your needs change. Think about it: would you rather pay $100 (+ any consulting costs if you have very specific needs) or $60,000? Even if you required a highly customised site and drew heavily upon our consulting services, the price for such a bespoke site would be but a small fraction of the comparative cost, and you would be in a position to expand your website offerings in the future for no extra cost. To add to this, by choosing a customisation of ocPortal, you end up with an end result that is easier to manage, more stable, and has been written to far higher standards than a development team writing a custom system would take (as they would not have an incentive for their code to be easily maintained).
Here are the main ocPortal features, in no particular order:
No competing system can get close to offering this level of feature support, unless sub-standard (often insecure, and ill-fitting) complex modifications are added to the code. And, no competing system can match our level of “across the board” quality.
For more information on ocPortal features, you may wish to read some of our other tutorials. Our tutorials are organised roughly according to subject area, covering important tasks and features in those areas, and explaining other material indirectly associated with our product (for example, we explain issues that ocPortal site staff may need to be aware of, such as creating site rules).
ocPortal Tutorial: Introduction to ocPortal
Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts
This tutorial will describe what ocPortal is and details some of our features.Table of contents
ocPortal
A screen-shot from a default ocPortal site |
- a community forum
- a corporate intranet
- a corporate website
- a personal blog
- a community blogging system with thousands of different bloggers
- a collaboration community
- a community gallery
- and much more, and any combination thereof
The ocPortal philosophy is that many different kinds of website have the same basic needs: for example, a corporate collaboration system is likely to include a forum, as would an on-line gaming community – obviously needs would vary in certain areas, but we provide additional, optional, features that cater for these different needs. For example, our member system supports HTTP-authentication integration to corporate networks, and it also supports user ranks: both useful features, for different audiences.
A screen-shot from the Admin Zone of a default ocPortal site |
For example:
- if you choose a simple portal, you may find yourself with little more than a 'news' page.
- if you choose a community-built open source portal, you will find it is cobbled together from many different sources with a clear lack of shared design characteristics and/or is lacking important features, such as a high-quality seamlessly integrated forum. There are many reasons to avoid (most) Open Source software that is not commercially backed, especially:
- security standards are often very low, and code is patched up only when problems were reported
- features are added on developer whim, rather than according to a plan that benefits the end users
- documentation is poor, and there is nobody to turn to make sure your questions are answered
- quality is low in areas, such as interface design
- stability is low
- there is no central vision, leading to an inconsistent system
- software is complex and technical, in areas that it does not need to be
- if you choose a discussion forum, that's all you get
- if you choose a framework, you may find to create a website of even simple complexity, you need to be an accomplished programmer.
- if you choose a content management system, you may find that it assumes your whole site is based around a 'work flow' publishing system for documents, without support for any support for other kinds of content, such as image galleries.
- wizards make performing important tasks very easy
- interfaces are clean, usable and beautiful
- there are very few bugs
- the documentation is very thorough
- the terminology is consistent
- design principles are common throughout the system
- the source code is easily editable for those with programming experience, with thorough code documentation
- you do not need to mess around with individual files on your server to configure functionality: everything has a live interface as a part of the system itself
- interfaces are consistent; for example, the same user data input system is used throughout
If you want an advanced website, full of dynamic and interactive features, ocPortal is the right choice for you. We provide a low cost, high quality and easy to use product, with a large breadth of documentation, and a development team that is available for contract work if you have very specific requirements. The only realistic alternative is to hire skilled programmers to write a new site from scratch, and this is likely to involve employing an expensive team for a project that last months, with regular additional costs as your needs change. Think about it: would you rather pay $100 (+ any consulting costs if you have very specific needs) or $60,000? Even if you required a highly customised site and drew heavily upon our consulting services, the price for such a bespoke site would be but a small fraction of the comparative cost, and you would be in a position to expand your website offerings in the future for no extra cost. To add to this, by choosing a customisation of ocPortal, you end up with an end result that is easier to manage, more stable, and has been written to far higher standards than a development team writing a custom system would take (as they would not have an incentive for their code to be easily maintained).
ocPortal demo
If you would like to try ocPortal yourself, why not try out the demo? The demo gives full admin access for your testing purposes, and is available on our website, from the left hand menu, or via the link below.» Launch ocPortal Demo
Features
This section will cover some of the main ocPortal features. We do not know how many features are in ocPortal, but if it takes as many seconds to list features as there are lines of code in the product (this seems a reasonable estimate), it would take around 30 continuous hours to list them all.
ocPortal is completely themeable |
- News/blogging system, with support for member-blogs and two-way RSS support
- Gallery system, with support for member-galleries, videos, importing and exporting with zip files
- Integration with popular forum systems
- Our own forum system, capable of competing with the best standalone systems (which on their own, often cost as much as ocPortal)
- Cross-platform compatibility
- Support for different human languages
- Fully templated code, meaning the look of a site can be customisable without touching any PHP code
- A full, and very innovative programming language available in the templating system
- Compliance with the highest level of the accessibility standard (it is almost unheard of for a web application to reach any level), and a built-in validator that checks templates against all web standards, to aid maintaining of this when changing ocPortals templates.
- WYSIWYG editing
- A calendar and command scheduling system
- An extendable mark-up language for formatting data ('Comcode')
- Support for placing blocks of dynamic data (such as lists of recent forum topics) on any position in the system
- A banner rotation/exchange system
- A downloads system
- An attachment system, to add embedded content/downloads to content such as news
- An interactive 'points' system, to add a truly powerful economic dynamic to your community, with links into most other systems
- A 'store' where points can be exchanged for website commodities, such as promotion
- Integration with various forms of corporate network
Many forum back-ends (for member authentication) are supported, and we also provide our own leading-edge forum (which includes LDAP support) |
- Search engine optimisation
- Newsletters
- Expandability, with custom pages and sub-sites
- Full configurability of what dynamic content is displayed in what position, across all your pages and sub-sites
- Chat rooms
- An integrated backup solution
- A collaborative database
- A system to define custom types of record, and to add such records, and display them
- The ability to tie multiple sites together into a network, sharing the same members
- A unique installer, that makes installation quick and easy
- Polls, so you may survey your users
- Unified searching over all content
- Support for very high levels of pro-active security, and SSL
- User-group based permissions, which can be optionally set to allow users to submit content to your website (which appears, by default, only if you validate it)
- much much more (enough to fill a thick book, easily: but don't worry, you do not need to know it all)
- semi-official free add-ons, such as ocWorld (a community game), a beta testing system (for the developers of development websites), and WAP support
No competing system can get close to offering this level of feature support, unless sub-standard (often insecure, and ill-fitting) complex modifications are added to the code. And, no competing system can match our level of “across the board” quality.
For more information on ocPortal features, you may wish to read some of our other tutorials. Our tutorials are organised roughly according to subject area, covering important tasks and features in those areas, and explaining other material indirectly associated with our product (for example, we explain issues that ocPortal site staff may need to be aware of, such as creating site rules).
See also
Copyright © ocProducts Ltd, 2011