Osclass 8.0 Release Guide: New Versioning, Locations, and Admin Updates

Quick overview

A practical overview of Osclass 8.0 architecture and admin updates, with migration-relevant highlights.

What this article covers

• Osclass v8.0 release overview
• Version has changed to 8.x.x
• Locations v3.0 added
• Oc-admin/Backoffice folder can be easily renamed

Practical notes

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

Osclass v8.0 release overview

Team is working great progress with re-inventing Osclass and boosting it with new features. But that is not all, we are also redesigning and improving existing functionalities and adding numerous new features.

Version has changed to 8.x.x

Hard and complicated decission, but rational one. Number "4" has been occupied by multiple branches and it was confusing for customers to understand relation between different branches. We wanted to cut this line and selected number "8" as new starting point for osclass. "8" represents infinity that correspondent with our will and work to provide continuos long term development and support of osclass.

Besides this, there will be also change in way how major & minor versions are rolled out.

• Major version (8.1.x, 8.2.x, ...) - change approximatelly once a year and will not be too much related to content of update, but will be more time-based (once a year major update change)
• Minor version (8.x.1, 8.x.2, ...) - change more frequently and will contain pack of bug fixes or 1-3 bigger new features or important feature updates

Please be possitive about the changes and take some time to accept new versioning, we have also prepared new logo and branding for osclass to step into new year "with style".

Locations v3.0 added

Few years ago, locations v2.0 has replaced original osclass location set. Based on feedback from customers regarding poor coverage of cities and weird regions dataset we've completely reinvented our locations data and brought much better locations dataset.

New locations are based on 2GB dataset that contains milions of locations, cities, regions and countries.

• We have 3x more cities comparing to locations v2.0
• 4 new countries added
• Much better regions structure
• Easier maintenance

Locations v3.0 are more-less advantage and benefit for starting classifieds as it is mostly impossible to replace existing locations on running osclass with hundreds of listings.

Oc-admin/Backoffice folder can be easily renamed

You can now easily rename oc-admin folder that is home folder for backoffice interface. Why would you do it?

• Security - your backoffice directory is not on "common" place and only you know what is home of your backoffice
• Osclass masking - usually you do not want people to simply come to your backoffice and try some logins

Renaming is now very easy and consists of 2 steps:

• In your file system, rename "oc-admin" to whatever you want, i.e. Xa28Adm77
• Open your config.php and at the end of file add new line:
  define('OC_ADMIN_FOLDER', 'Xa28Adm77');

Improved child theme features

Child themes as we know them in older versions of Osclass were mostly hard to use. As example, if you wanted to replace footer.php, you would have to update also every file that use footer.php (as include/require).

• osc_current_web_theme_path, osc_current_web_theme_url - functions will now "hard" check child theme folders to identify child files. This means - anytime you want to include some file in theme, use these functions.
• osc_current_web_theme_path_value - is new function in Osclass and works in same way as osc_current_web_theme_url, but return expected path.

Keep in mind that there is no change how to create child theme, we are just improving this feature here.

Ban rules improvements

Rules for banning unwanted customers has not been touched for years and in some cases were not easy to use. New & improved functionalities has been implemented in Osclass v8.0 and this feature is now much easier to use and work with.

• Ban rules page in oc-admin now contains pagination & search options. Keyword will be searched against name, email and IP of ban rule.
• New examples (tips) has been added when creating new rule, design & width of inputs changed, show more button removed.
• Multiple email addresses can be now inserted into one ban rule - separated by comma
• Ban rules summary widget has been added into Backoffice home page

We plan to invest some time into ban rules in future to improve performance and stability with thousands of ban rules.

New custom field types

Osclass now contains more custom field types:

• Phone
• Email
• Color
• Number

Input types for custom fields has changed and will use now correct HTML5 type (except date field). Make sure to test your theme properly.

• URL > url type
• EMAIL > email type
• PHONE > tel type
• COLOR > color type
• NUMBER > number type
• TEXT > text type

Design of custom fields has been slightly modified and improved in backoffice.

Additional updates & features

To not create a new book here, let me just summarize other features of this release.

• Updated translit from Cyrilic into Latin for URLs.
• New widget added: Latest product updates on OsclassPoint.com, where you can see last 5 updated products, date, current version, supported osclass version and what has changed.
• Configuration information in oc-admin does not calculate folder sizes and permissions by default to avoid resource wasting and speed-up page loading.
  Admin can run configuration information with details ("Run with details" button) in case these data are needed.
• New function created: osc_theme_get_info($theme):
  Returns information about front-office theme (from index.php of theme). Enter only theme name (name of theme folder). Example: bender, sigma, delta
• Default number of listings matching alert in User > Alerts changed from 3 to 12.
• Added category object into extendData and extendDataSingle functions, so it easy to identify if category has price enabled or not.
• Added "Changelog" menu item under "Tools", so you can now easily see what has changed in last versions.
• Admin can now easily show all plugins available for update in Plugins section.
• Admin hook admin_content_footer has been removed.
• Updated composer dependencies to latest available versions.
• Engine of all database tables has been consolidated.
• Category ID is now visible in oc-admin when editing categories as tooltip on category name and as header in category edit form/iframe.
• Updated notice text in all files, based on Apache version, if this file is present in original file, it must be present on all branches with copyright mention.
• Function osc_user_phone will now return primary mobile phone number, and if not exists, then return land phone number (if exists).
• Native location names are now available in premiums section as well. No modifications in themes are required.
• Optimized minified CSS & JavaScript files will now be cleaned and refreshed on following actions: activate theme, install plugin, uninstall plugin, activate plugin, deactivate plugin.

We hope you like this update and features it contains.
Thanks for your support, ideas, patience and help.
Looking forward to come with new Osclass releases in next year!

Your Osclass(point) team

Next: Osclass 8.0.1.