Release of Oscailt 3.9 software used by Indymedia Ireland

international | indymedia ireland | news report Tuesday December 01, 2020 23:10 by 1 of indy

Oscailt v3.9, the software used by Indymedia Ireland, has been released on it's SourceForge homepage and is available for wider use in setting up similar grassroot types of publishing sites. It runs on the PHP language and off the MySQL database. Oscailt is OpenSource software and is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL). As with previous releases it comes with a basic installer and HTML Install and User Guide documentionation which are also available online.

This release has been over a year in the making and includes a number of new features to help add new capabilities to website pages like allowing for slide decks of containing objects which make the slide deck of videos possible on the home page of Indymedia. It has also been updated to allow page layouts to include offsets before and after the main body content. This allows for the video slide deck followed by the feature story slide deck -the content in this case, followed by insets of two groups of headlines.

Other features in this release are the capability to simultaneously publish two or more different types of embedded video. For example you can add a BitChute and YouTube video together. Indeed this release now supports three additional video types which are BitChute, Brighteon and BrandNewTube which are all alternatives to YouTube. Additional features were increased useability of the custom tags in the publish form and many other minor updates all of which are documented in the release notes.

Oscailt is now compatible up to PHP 7.3 which is quite a recent release of PHP and works with MySQL 8.x. The full list of features for Oscailt can be found on the Features list page.

You can use Oscailt to setup your own publishing site quite quickly once you have the basics in place, namely PHP and MySQL which are often referred to as the LAMP stack and is provided by most web hosting providers. The Oscailt installer gives the option to import from one of a set of simple template sites which you can build out from there and the idea is to enable one to get a working if not basic site up and running quickly. Then the further refinements and complexity can be added over time. This should be helped with the availability of the online documentation which is linked to from the main administration page.