Pacific NW Portal 5.0 (Newport) to launch in December after years of development

I have some excit­ing news to share this morn­ing: In a cou­ple of months, NPI’s Pacif­ic NW Por­tal is final­ly going to be get­ting a much-need­ed over­haul with the launch of Ver­sion 5.0, code­named New­port.

We’ve been work­ing on this new ver­sion for a very long time, and I’m pleased to say we’re close to being done with it.

I want to stress that New­port is much more than an update or an upgrade… it tru­ly is an unprece­dent­ed revamp. We’ve built it to com­plete­ly replace the cur­rent incar­na­tion of the Por­tal, which is out­dat­ed and falling apart.

Obvi­ous­ly, we haven’t com­plete­ly neglect­ed the Por­tal over the last few years — we’ve pushed out many minor updates to the site since we took Ver­sion 4.0 (Sea­side) live in May of 2006. But Sea­side is def­i­nite­ly show­ing its age.

I think long­time read­ers who remem­ber the Por­tal’s ear­li­er days will agree with us that it’s time for Sea­side to go into retire­ment. It had a long run, but its days of ser­vice are appro­pri­ate­ly com­ing to an end.

Every major ver­sion of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal we’ve released since Ver­sion 3.0 has had a theme. Seaside’s theme was com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Marine Green’s theme was cov­er­age. And True Blue’s theme was stability.

New­port’s theme will be speed. This ver­sion has been engi­neered from the ground up for faster load­ing and quick­er updat­ing. We’ve been test­ing it on smart­phones and tablets in addi­tion to good old desk­tops and lap­tops, and it’s been per­form­ing well. In addi­tion, we have test­ed all sorts of com­bi­na­tions of desk­top oper­at­ing sys­tems and browsers to ensure the new Por­tal is ren­der­ing properly.

Since many browsers share what’s known as a ren­der­ing engine, or lay­out engine, we have been pri­mar­i­ly test­ing New­port with dif­fer­ent lay­out engines. The four major ones are Tri­dent (used by Inter­net Explor­er and deriv­a­tives), Gecko (used by Fire­fox, Camino, and Sea­Mon­key), WebKit (used by Chromi­um, Safari, and the Black­Ber­ry brows­er) and Presto (used by Opera).

We’re pret­ty con­fi­dent that no mat­ter which brows­er and oper­at­ing sys­tem you use, if it’s rel­a­tive­ly mod­ern, Pacif­ic NW Por­tal 5.0 should ren­der smooth­ly for you. (If you’re still liv­ing in the 1990s and using a hor­ri­bly out­dat­ed brows­er, we can’t guar­an­tee the Por­tal will look good. It’ll still load, but it’ll be ugly.

We haven’t final­ized a launch date for New­port yet, but mid to late Decem­ber is like­ly — after the elec­tion is over, but before Christmas.

We’ll keep you post­ed on our progress as we get clos­er. We think you’ll find the new Pacif­ic NW Por­tal much more intu­itive and pow­er­ful than the cur­rent ver­sion. We look for­ward to bring­ing it to you very soon!