Pacific NW Portal 5 launches tomorrow!

Mer­ry Christ­mas and Hap­py Hanukkah! On behalf of the team at NPI, I’m very excit­ed to announce that devel­op­ment and beta test­ing of the next ver­sion of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal, code­named New­port,  is com­ing to a close.

Tomor­row, we will launch the new site… just in time for the Feast of the Nativ­i­ty and the Fes­ti­val of Lights (and New Year’s after that). It will then be yours to enjoy through the remain­der of the hol­i­day sea­son and beyond.

A great deal of work has gone into this release. We’ve com­plete­ly re-engi­neered Pacif­ic NW Por­tal to make it faster and more reli­able… and test­ed it exten­sive­ly on tablets and smart­phones in addi­tion to desk­top oper­at­ing sys­tems to ensure com­pata­bil­i­ty across plat­forms. Read­ers who run GNU/Linux on their desk­tops will be pleased to hear that much of the devel­op­ment and test­ing for New­port was done on com­put­ers run­ning Kubun­tu and Debian.

Our thanks go out to every­one who was involved in this project… every blog­ger who made a sug­ges­tion, every read­er who helped us beta test, and every sup­port­er who respond­ed when we asked How can we improve Pacif­ic NW Por­tal?

Tomor­row, we retire the old Por­tal (Ver­sion 4.0+, code­named Sea­side) for good after half a decade of ser­vice, and intro­duce its suc­ces­sor … New­port. We hope you’ll join us here on The Advo­cate for the launch festivities.

If you’d like to pre­view the new Pacif­ic NW Por­tal before it goes live, you’re wel­come to join us for the final night of beta test­ing. Just let us know!