Sitefinity 9.0 Beta Announced
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
Thanks for the post. Do you have information available on what bug fixes we can expect in this release?
@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.
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:
(detailed release notes on GitHub here)
Widgets
@Steve and @Kali Thank you for the info.