openFIRST v.1.0.1 released

[Greg]

openFIRST 1.0.1 was released today. The web portal engine includes many powerful features, yet is very easy to set up and use. All teams, including rookies and veterans, should find something valuable in the engine. I will briefly describe some of the features.

• Basic portal functionality
  openFIRST makes it very easy to maintain a web site. Any member of the team can easily update the news on the site with a WYSIWYG editor. No knowledge of HTML or manual editing of files on the server is required.
• Highly customizable, open-source code base
  openFIRST comes pre-configured for easy setup. However, teams looking to create a unique site should not be discouraged. It is easy to customize the look and feel of the portal by editing the header and footer files. (www.sinclairsprockets.com is just one example)
• Project Planner
  An excellent organizational tool. Break your team down into groups and track tasks and progress. This section of the site is only shown to team members, of course
• Forum
  There is now a basic forum module included with openFIRST. While it cannot rival vBulletin or PHPbb, it is lightweight and has all the basic features.
• Windows Installer
  For teams planning to run openFIRST on a Windows server there is an easy-to-use EXE package that includes all modules. You can then choose which modules to copy to your server, and proceed to install openFIRST as usual, with a web-based configurator.

There are many more features available, such as the Guestbook, Traffic Logger with visual statistics tracking, and Emoticon functionality. openFIRST supports several databases - MySQL, MS SQL Server, and ODBC.

If you have comments, suggestions, or have discovered a bug, please contact the openFIRST development team. Thank you, and enjoy using openFIRST!

[Timothy D. Ginn]

Note: The Windows installer (EXE format) also contains other modules aside from base. This may be a source of confusion for some of those used to the modular system. Also, some of these other included modules have not received the usual amount of auditing before release.

Future Windows installer exe builds will not include all of the other modules. It was the result of a miscommunication on what exactly is to be included in each package.

The versions of 1.0.1 base which are not in the EXE format (ie: the Zip, Tar-GZip and Tar-BZip versions) include only the base module.