uPortal 2.6.1 GA (general audience) release is now available for download. uPortal 2.6.1 includes several modest bugfixes and improvements upon the software available in the uPortal 2.6.0 release.

All existing uPortal deployments are recommended to upgrade to uPortal 2.6.1 when feasible. New adopters of uPortal are recommended to adopt the uPortal 2.6.1 release in their new deployments.

Many people contributed code, testing, feedback, and issues leading up to the uPortal 2.6.1 release, including Nick Bolton, Timothy Carroll, Eric Dalquist, Andy Gherna, Cris Holdorph, Brad Johnson, and Andrew Wills, to name a few. These people and others deserve credit for their parts in making uPortal possible. Eric Dalquist of the University of Wisconsin-Madison did all but the very last bit of release engineering for this release, which was taken that last step of the way by Unicon's Andrew Petro.

Release of uPortal 2.6.1 frees the uPortal 2.6.x maintenance branch for further fixes and enhancements. The anticipated next increment of enhancement which will soon give rise to a uPortal 2.6.2 release is improvement in import-export and by extension upgrade path support which will continue to build a foundation to ease eventual upgrade of current uPortal deployments to the prospective evolutionarily-improved uPortal 3. These efforts to smooth the upgrade path suggests that would-be uPortal adopters need not wait for a uPortal 3 release in order to adopt the platform and can rather adopt a current-generation release confident that developers such as Unicon's Drew Wills, with the support of institutions for which he has been consulting such as Yale University and Johns Hopkins University, and with the guidance of the recently formed uPortal Steering Committee, are actively working on smoothing an upgrade path.