Sitefinity 9.0 Beta Announced

Posted by Community Admin on 05-Aug-2018 14:40

Sitefinity 9.0 Beta Announced

All Replies

Posted by Community Admin on 18-Feb-2016 00:00

Sitefinity 9.0 Beta is available for download on this link

NuGet packages are available at http://nuget.sitefinity.com. The packages are beta version with number 9.0.5950.0, so you need to switch to "PreRelease" version of NuGet Package Manager.

Please, take a look and let us know what you think!

Important Note: Sitefinity 9.0 Beta is not production ready and should not be used on live sites. Upgrades from and to it will not be supported.

What’s New

Multi-Page Forms

Content editors can now split large and complex online forms into several subpages and thus improve the user experience and reduce the dropout rate.
(documentation)

Multilingual Support for Digital Assets
Added option to upload multilingual versions of Sitefinity files with powerful control on how they appear on the localized sites. The new functionality is available for Images, Documents & Files, and Videos.
(documentation)

New Backend Theme (Beta)
A new “Light” Backend Theme comes with clean and attractive design, which removes unnecessary clutter and alleviates the editing experience.
To enable the theme:

  1. Go to Administration > Settings > Advanced> Appearance > Backend themes> Appearance
  2. Enter Light in BackendTheme field and click on Save changes


DEC: 360 degrees view of Contact Profiles

The Contact Profiles in the Digital Experience Cloud used to contain a demographics list, and the full list of scoring interactions and totally scored points for all Personas and Lead Scoring types. Now it is upgraded to a full 360 degrees view, by adding:

  • The full list of Conversions for this contact
  • The full list of Touchpoints the contact has interacted with
  • The full interactions log – all events reported for this contact from any integrated system (web site, mobile app, CRM, etc.)

(documentation)

DEC: Contact data import from files
When the user needs to upload offline data about the contacts, or integrates contacts and events from third-party systems which are not easily accessible, she can now use the new CSV File Upload connector. Using this new data source, the user can upload contact demographics and contact behavior or any kind, only matching the required input format for the connector (documentation).

MVC and Front-end Framwork (Feather): Performance and usability improvements
Developers can easily precompile their work for a better content editing experience and faster load times for the end users. Using client components in custom designers is now easier and there is no need to activate the module manually, as it comes activated by default.

Web Services: Configurable RESTful oData API
Developers can easily setup web services, that expose content over REST oData specification.
(documentation)

Continuous Delivery Improvements
Numerous improvements to support running Sitefinity sites in a continuous delivery setup:

  • Ability to export Dynamic Modules, Custom Fields and Custom Taxonomies, and to transfer them via deployment packages (documentation)
  • Simplified Dynamic Modules configurations management which results in reduced size of config files
  • Option to upgrade configurations locally and deploy to other environments (documentation)

Posted by Community Admin on 18-Feb-2016 00:00

Excited to play around with it.

So it looks like with the new Web Services that Ecommerce and Dynamic Modules content types will not be available to server out of these endpoints.

Are those two types on the roadmap to add in the future?  Those are two big ones that we using daily.

Posted by Community Admin on 19-Feb-2016 00:00

Hello,

We are not planning to support Ecommerce for the 9.0 release. Dynamic modules are supported. In the beta you could add them in advanced settings as a type registration under the default service. For the official release they will be automatically added to the auto-generation mode of the service.

Posted by Community Admin on 19-Feb-2016 00:00

Martin,

 

When you say you are not planning to support eCommerce for version 9. What does this mean? Is eCommerce being dropped? What about the eCommerce MVC support promised for the last two years or so via project feather? Will that also not be supported?

 

Some clarity around this issue would be most welcome.

Posted by Community Admin on 19-Feb-2016 00:00

Hello Austin,

Ecommerce is not being dropped. It is just a large area that needs to be carefully thought through as it is very different than the other content modules . We have plans to support all of the content types that Sitefinity exposes (including Ecommerce), but for the 9.0 release, customers will have all of the static built in types with Dynamic Modules as well.

Posted by Community Admin on 22-Feb-2016 00:00

Thoughts on Multi-page forms. 

This sounds like a really good feature.

However if you have time it would be really nice to have the ability to cover the following use cases. 

1. Option to set the form as a "Submit on next" = True/false.

Use Case: In all forms there is a drop out rate. In Multi-page forms that rate can be higher.  In some business scenarios a partially complete can still be useful for data analysis. Especially customer questionnaires. 

If the form option "Submit-on-Next" = True. When the user clicks "Next", the back-end  could capture something which we would otherwise lose when the user abandoned the process. So clicking NEXT, sends the partial data to the server & also moves the user to the next page of the form. 

Clearly there are also Use Cases where an incomplete form is useless, hence we need this to be optional. 

 

2. Optional to "Save state" button

For long forms it would be nice for the user to hit "Save State". This would Submit the data they've entered so far. And permit them to resume from where they left at a later time. 

This is really handy where the user has an unreliable internet connection OR where you are asking questions which they may need to research prior to answering. 

3. Optional Sections 

Often really long forms are the result of needing to cover a diverse set of populations. 

It would be nice if some parts of the multi-part form could be skipped or included based on the Users previous answers. 

eg: If the "Type of Applicant" = "Business" then clicking NEXT would skip the pages for "Individual" & go to the Business, then Incident pages. Similarly if the "Type of Applicant" = "Individual". Clicking NEXT would go to Individual pages, then skip the Business pages, to jump to the "Incident" pages.

Perhaps this kind of workflow logic is too much for a V1.0 release. But hope you find it useful. 

Posted by Community Admin on 22-Feb-2016 00:00

Hi David,

Many thanks for the suggestions and the use cases illustrating them. We will be making improvements to the online forms in some of the upcoming releases and your items will also make it in there!

Mariush

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Mar-2016 00:00

Great news particullary for the multi lingual documents.

Can you also post a Changelog with fixes as our customers who would like to upgrade should consider it also from this perspective?

Posted by Community Admin on 11-Mar-2016 00:00

Thanks for the post. Do you have information available on what bug fixes we can expect in this release?

Posted by Community Admin on 12-Mar-2016 00:00

@Eva

You wont get the complete list until it's released, but it's easy to see now... just open up the release notes for all the internal builds since 8.2 has been out.  The way it seems to work is they fix existing bugs during internals, then give new features on each release.

Posted by Community Admin on 12-Mar-2016 00:00

Hi Eva,

Steve is right that internal builds announcements provide a full list of delivered improvements.

We are working on a list and pretty final version is below:

What’s Fixed

Pages & Content

  • Pages: Regular expression for Pages Additional URLs cannot be modified (FP)
  • Pages: Canonical URLs for pages with pagination should contain page number (FP)
  • Content: Incorrect date and time shown when item is scheduled for Publishing (FP)
  • Related items: not shown in Preview mode when they are set as simple links (FP)
  • Lists: Performance problems with many items (FP)
  • Lists: Advanced settings miss resource label (FP)

Widgets

  • Content items selectors: Cannot display more than 50 content items (FP)
  • Navigation>Light mode: Custom selection of pages and long text custom field results in exception (FP)
  • Navigation widget>Light mode: Long text custom field and related media field cause exception (FP)
  • Taxonomies widget:  ShowItemsCount includes deleted content items (FP)
  • DisplayName attribute breaks field value input (FP)

Forms

  • Forms cannot be edited after changing Multiple Choice Field properties (FP)
  • Form response email contain wrong site link in multisite scenario (FP)
  • Multiple choice validation message is not persisted (FP)
  • Captcha widget: ImageStorageLocation property cannot be edited (FP)
  • MVC mode: Search in form responses doesn't work
  • MVC mode: "Collection is read-only" error when trying to upload a file
  • MVC mode: Exception upon submission of form with captcha in non-default language

Events

  • All day events without end date are displayed as infinite in Calendar view (FP)
  • Published events cannot be sent for approval (FP)
  • Event date range in Events Selector shows '&ndash' instead of '-'
  • Recurring events issues upon adding to Google Calendar (FP)
  • Export: Timed events don`t calculate correctly daylight saving upon export (FP)
  • Export: Invalid .ics files are generated on export
  • Export: Link to internal page is not exported
  • Export: Image, videos and files in event description are not exported
  • Export: Weekly recurrent events are not exported to Google

Search

  • Search in media content after re-index is not possible
  • Search results don’t show the proper blog posts URLs (FP)
  • Sitefinity cannot initialize when the Search module is disabled (FP)
  • Search results render Html from a styled LongText field in a dynamic module's child content type (FP)

Other

  • Address Field: Some countries are missing from the country field (FP)
  • Caching: Introduced “VaryBy” option in output cache backend configurations (FP)
  • Ecommerce: All products appear locked in the backend (FP)
  • Ecommerce> Search: Re-indexing product custom fields clears their values (FP)
  • Forums: Thread attachment are not deleted properly (FP)
  • Forums: Error in NLB environment (FP)
  • Google Analytics Module: Configurations have invalid resources (FP)
  • IE 9 Support: Backend interface breaks (FP)
  • IE 11 Support: Uploading a second document works problematically (FP)
  • MySQL Support: Backend page search does not work in default language (FP)
  • Multilingual> Forum Widget: Problems in page selectors (FP)
  • Multilingual> Page selector: Selecting from different sites after updating language is not possible (FP)
  • NLB Support: Postponed sending of restart message until application finishes bootstrapping
  • Site Sync: Deleted page not available in updates waiting for sync (FP)
  • Site Sync: Using the SetSites filter in the API doesn’t persist the value to the call and fails (FP)
  • Permissions: User sees Library although he lacks View permissions (FP)
  • Permissions: Child permissions are not inherited correctly (FP)
  • Performance: Output cache is not working properly for authenticated frontend users
  • Personalization: Long segment name is not displayed correctly in the main menu
  • Personalization: Widget personalization throws service error in non-default site in multisite
  • Precompilation Tool: Added ignore of errors during compilation
  • Logout: Redirect on logout does not work properly when Sitefinity is a subsite (FP)
  • Upgrade Status Page: Date is not displayed when region format is different from English (United States)
  • Responsive design:  Transformations override the margins of the layout control for all columns except the first (FP)

MVC and Front-end Framework Feather

(detailed release notes on GitHub here)

Widgets

    • Content block: Pasting simple markup which is not closed properly breaks the page (FP)
    • Card widget: GetViewModel method is marked as virtual for CardViewModel
    • Embed Code: GetViewModel method is marked as virtual for EmbedCodeViewModel
    • Login Status: GetViewModel method is marked as virtual for LoginStatusModel
    • Navigation: Output cache invalidation doesn’t work (FP)
    • Search: Does not work with Elasticsearch (FP)
    • Widget designers: Unfriendly message when user session expires
    • Widget designers: Added automatic resolution of client components' scripts (link)
    • Widget designers: Added automatic registration of client components' AngularJS modules (link)

      Other

    • Core: Html.ActionLink doesn’t work on Backend pages
    • Performace: LoginStatusController json result action processes the whole page before returning
    • Precompiler tool: doesn't work on pages with Dynamic Content Widget (FP)
    • Login Status: Exception is thrown when the widget is on Details page of Master/Detail widget (FP)

    Posted by Community Admin on 23-Mar-2016 00:00

    @Steve and @Kali Thank you for the info. 

    Posted by Community Admin on 12-May-2016 00:00

    What version of the Azure SDK does version 9 support?

    This thread is closed