Osclass 4.2 Update Guide: Features, Fixes, and SEO Improvements

Quick overview

A practical changelog walkthrough of Osclass 4.2 with impact-focused notes for production deployments.

What this article covers

• Major osclass release overview
• CSS style sheets and JS scripts optimization
• Market built-in to backoffice
• More than 50 free products uploaded to OsclassPoint.com

Practical notes

• Validate changes in staging before production updates.
• Track user impact with analytics, logs, and search performance signals.

Major osclass release overview

"Xmas" release is there and brings ton of new features, let's go trough all of them!

CSS style sheets and JS scripts optimization

New functionality to optimize, merge and minify CSS style sheets and JS scripts has been integrated directly into osclass. You can now optimize your classifieds even more than ever before.

Read more about CSS & JS optimization feature in osclass.

Market built-in to backoffice

Market features has been completely rebuilt from scratch and provides absolutely new experience when you are looking for theme, plugin, translations (osclass, plugins, themes) or looking for new locations to import. New functions can also download, install or update your theme or plugin.

Read more about New market interface in osclass.

More than 50 free products uploaded to OsclassPoint.com

Based on new built-in market features in oc-admin, it was natural decission to take all free plugins and themes created for community (or by community), update these products and upload to OsclassPoint so all of them are easily accessible from backoffice. You may find all free plugins under Osclass community account.

New UI for oc-admin dashboard

Backoffice dashboard (home) was ineffective for yours, showing too few information instead of provide rich overview on your classifieds. We've redesigned dashboard completely and now provides all relevant information you need. Charts in backoffice (including stats page) has been redesigned to look more modern and clean.

Read more about Backoffice dashboard redesigned in osclass.

Osclass configuration information

Brand-new page has been created in backoffice showing all possible information about your classifieds, including osclass, PHP, server, database and your browser.

Read more about Osclass configuration info page in backoffice.

Osclass debug/error log page

New page in oc-admin has been created, showing details if debug/error logging is enabled in your classifieds as well as showing debug file content, if exists.

Read more about Osclass debug/error log page in oc-admin.

Profile picture/avatar feature built-in to osclass core

User profile pictures (or avatars) feature has been missing in osclass for years, different plugins has been created but each was missing different required feature (hard integration, image control, bad ui for upload, ...). New release of osclass comes with profile picture uploader that allows to crop, resize, zoom and rotate image, as well as to define default dimension for profile pictures.

Read more about Profile picture/avatar feature in osclass.

Comments rating feature

Do you remember how many times you wished to have rating feature built-in to osclass core? This is especially required i.e. on real estates, services, dating or food classifieds. You can now enable rating on comments and get better feedback from customers.

Read more about Rating feature on comments.

Improved front & back office login security

When user/admin enter incorrect password while login, after 5th attempt will be suspended from login for several minutes (this is not cookie based).

There are several milestones with failed logins:

• after 5 failed login attempts, user/admin cannot login for 5 minutes
• after 10 failed login attempts, user/admin cannot login for 30 minutes
• after 15 failed login attempts, user/admin cannot login for 60 minutes
• after 20, 25, 30, ... failed login attempts, user/admin cannot login for minutes 360 minutes
• failed counter is reset once user successfully login to it's account

Listing publish redirect

You can now choose, where is user going to be redirected after listing publish. There are different priorities those depends on your osclass & user settings:

• Dashboard > Listing > Category - if user is logged in, is redirected to it's dashboard page, otherwise if listing is active after publish, is redirected to listing page, otherwise user is redirected to category search page
• Listing > Category - if listing is active after publishing (no validation needed), user is redirected to listing page, otherwise is redirected to category search page
• Category (original, default)

TinyMCE / Rich edit in user profile (description)

Admin can now enable users to enter their description using TinyMCE rich text editor and format it in way they prefer. This may be especially needed for business users or when using plugins like Business profile.

New Data clean up section in backoffice

You know how hard is to get rid of unwanted data in osclass, like unvalidated user accounts, listings or comments. Now everything is as simple as one click, data clean up section provide powerful features to clean your data.

New page contains clean up features for following types:

• Inactive listings - Remove listings those has not been validated in last 7 days. These data are usually spam/unwanted and are redundant for your installation.
• Blocked and spam listings - Remove listings those has been marked as spam, or has been disabled by you or your moderators.
• Expired listings - Remove listings those has expired more than 7 days ago and were not removed or reactivated. These listings are not visible on your site.
• Inactive users - Remove users those has registered more than 7 days ago did not activated their account.
• Blocked users - Remove users those has been blocked more than 7 days (based on last access date). This will remove also all listings published by this user.
• Inactive comments - Remove comments those has not been activated for more than 7 days.
• Blocked comments - Remove comments those has been blocked by your or your moderators.

Moderator custom access

Until now, moderators could access just several predefined sections in backoffice and were unable to access plugin sections at all. Now you can enable to different moderators to access different plugin pages, for example item validation plugin page, blog plugin page or forums plugin page.

Different access can be set for different moderators in their profile.

Renewal feature built-in to osclass

Osclass now has renewal features, so your customers may renew listings those expired in convenient way just by clickin on renewal button in their User listings section. This includes also creating supporting functions like renewal URL function or function to check if listing is eligible for renewal (expired, not reached limit, renewals enabled, ...). This option is available only for users those has registered (are logged in). There are several settings for renewal feature:

• enable renewals
• update publish date when listing is renewed
• limit maximum number of renewals per listing

Deactivate listing

When "Users can disable / de-activate listing" option is enabled by admin, user can now disable / deactivate listing. This may be very useful in case customer wants to temporary disable ad for whatever reason, but wants to continue in publishing it later.

Supporting functions osc_item_deactivate_url() and osc_can_deactivate_items() were created for easy integration into theme.

Structured data (micro data / rich tags) integrated in osclass

Osclass now can generate structured data for all the pages, including listing page to be compliant in different rich data validators (like Google structured data testing tool). Structured data for following networks are generated:

• Google - rich snippets
• Facebook - og tags
• Twitter - tags

Admin toolbar in front

You can now enable admin toolbar to be visible in front office. Toolbar is not copy of one in backoffice, but is customized for front-office management.

Toolbar features:

• edit user link, when browsing public profile
• edit listing link, when browsing listing page
• edit page link, when browsing static page
• shows information under what user are you logged in front
• notification information to quickly see actions required in backoffice
• logout from backoffice

Admin can now "login as user"

Admin has now option from user list page in backoffice to quickly login as particular user into front-office. This option is available in quick actions toolbar under each records.

Previous: Osclass 4.1. Next: Osclass 4.3.

Other updates and fixes

• Breadcrumbs micro-data (structured data) has been updated to latest definition based on http://schema.org/BreadcrumbList.
• Static pages has new option to index / not index particular pages. When page is selected not to be indexed, meta tags (nofollow) are updated to tell crawling bot not to take page into index.
• Search engine counting has been redesigned (total number of listings) and pushed from PHP side (that had limitation) into database side that is much faster and more effective. Prior versions had limit 100*items_per_page.
• Backoffice (oc-admin) is now completely responsive, including guid pages (login, forgot, recover). Minimum width of page has been set to 280px that should cover any device nowadays being used.
• Dialog boxes in backoffice can now be closed also by clicking outside dialog box (not just by clicking on close button).
• Fixed error query trying to get currency with incorrect filter (blank).
• Custom fields are now sortable and may be ordered in way you like. In prior versions only way to resort custom fields was to remove them and create again.
• Fixed several minor issues with native location names.
• Language/translation files got new naming convention and has been cleaned.
• Fixed item price function, where 0 price was processed as "Check with seller" instead of "Free".
• CSRF security tokens has been redesigned and now are not so annoying as they used to be. Tokens now works in similar way as in Wordpress. New class keywords has been added to disable CSRF on forms: nocsrf (current), notoken, nooctoken.
• Stats page charts god new layout and are loaded from updated link. Still using google charts as it is stable solution.
• Fixed bug when it was not possible to change status of comment directly on comment page (Probable invalid request).
• "Remember me" option on front & oc-admin login has been fixed and you can now stay logged for much longer time.
• Code cleaning and formatting has been done in all osclass files, removing more than 200 000 unnecessary white spaces.
• Bender theme has been removed from installation files and is not delivered with osclass anymore, however you still may use it. Use Sigma theme instead.
• Modern backoffice theme has been removed and is not delivered with osclass anymore. You still can use modern backoffice theme, but will not contain many different settings. Use Omega theme instead.
• 100+ improvements and design upgrades in backoffice theme and backoffice itself.
• Pagination function has been fixed and will accept also itemType in user account > user listings section.
• Backoffice meta title tags has been redesigned, not using right double arrow anymore and using "-" instead.
• Contact form bug fix - in case visitor did not uploaded any attachment, osclass will no more throw error.
• Following libraries has been updated to latest versions
  • PHP Mailer - 6.1.x
  • Gettext - 4.8.x
  • Recaptcha - 1.2.x
  • HTML Purifier - 4.13.x
  • PHP Sec lib - 2.0.x
• Robots.txt has been updated and does not allow bots to crawl multiple osclass folders those should not be indexed.
• Filters item_title & item_description has been added to search items as well, so title and description can be modified in same way on all the places (i.e. bad words functionality).
• Improvements when processing non-latin characters into URL, like cyrilic, chinese, alphabet etc. Search page will not throw error anymore when using such characters with friendly URLs, listing URL also fixed for cyrilic characters.
• Listing views count has been added to oc-admin > Listings section as last column in table.
• new functions has been created to support theme authors: osc_lib_url(), osc_content_url(), osc_themes_url(), osc_plugins_url(), osc_translations_url()
• added missing email variables to class to avoid undefined notices error. Updated class to avoid errors in case some variable description is missing.
• version_compare2 function to compare versions of products has been redesigned and improved to accept string as well as integer version numbers.
• Fixed bug/problem with translations of CHILD themes those could not be properly used on prior osclass versions. Osclass now consider both language files as well as both translation domains.
• location dropdown functions (country_select, region_select, city_select) from item form class has been redesigned and now does not load any data if not necessary. In previous versions it loaded all countries, regions and cities into select boxes that made website to load for long time and made it slow and unresponsive to user interactions.
• limit set on generic_select function that generates select fields, default value is 1000. This is to protect website from loading unnecessary too much options into select box.
• Auto-upgrade no more send emails to admin if nothing has been upgraded. Now will also contain information if core, plugins, themes or languages has been updated.
• update removes old phpmailer folder located in oc-includes folder to avoid issues when using different plugins those may be checking if this folder exists.