This is the biggest release of FreshPorts since FreshPorts 2 was released. Over the past 14 months, I've been working on various things, the biggest of which must be the ability to have multiple watch lists. I have no doubt that once people start using more than one watch list, they'll come up with new ideas as to how to use FreshPorts... which will lead to a new release.

My thanks to the people who contributed code, ideas, and time to this new version.

When FreshPorts started, a watch list was a single entity. That was to keep things simple. The underlying data structures were designed with multiple watch lists in mind. However, the user interface was the biggest issue. Now we have an interface which will allow you to have more than one watch list.

For the time being, you are restricted to five watch lists per user. Let's see how that goes and then we'll look at raising that limit. If you have a pressing need, I'm willing to consider changes on a case by case basis. Just contact me.

FreshPorts now caters for virtual categories. What's a virtual category? A virtual category is a category which does not correspond to a physical directory within the ports tree.

Ports are divided into categories. A port resides within a category which corresponds to a physical directory within the ports tree. For example, www is a real category. Some ports appear in more than one category. The first category is always the primary category and is the directory within which the port files will be found.

Categories which do not correspond to a physical directory are deemed to be virtual categories. As new virtual categories are added, trusted FreshPorts users can set the description for the new category.

The newsfeed now contains the version/revision information for the port. For more information on news feeds, please read the FAQ.

FreshPorts has a new subscription entry. If you subscribe to the new Security Notification report, you will receive a separate notification of any commits which are deemed to be security related.

Trusted FreshPorts users can designate a commit as being security related. This will ensure you are notified of that commit in the Security Notification report.

NOTE: Do not rely up on this service for your security purposes. You are urged to subscribe to the announcements list for whatever software you use.

You can now view the master websites for the port. Each ports has a list of websites from which their source can be downloaded. This information has always been recorded within FreshPorts, but it's never been available until now.

Some categories have a very large number of ports. This can make loading the page very slow, especially for those on dial up. Therefore, we've introduced paging to the categories page.

You can set the paging length via your account settings.

Much work has gone into finding faster ways to extract data from the FreshPorts database. Thanks to the amazing capabilities of PostgreSQL, I've been able to create very fast queries through the use of nested queries, outer joins, and static functions.

These changes to the web pages have enabled the removal of a housekeeping process which used to refresh a hidden caching table. Most webpages used this cache table. Instead, they now access the main tables directly. This means the website is faster overall and the background process is no longer needed.