Hi all,

Sitefinity 8.0 Beta 1 is available for download on this link.
This version contains improvements in Multisite and Custom Membership providers integration and many bug fixes. Please, take a look and let us know what you think!

Important Note: Sitefinity 8.0 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

Taxonomies per Site in Multisite Projects

Sitefinity 8.0 will offer the ability to have different Taxonomies content (Categories, Tags, etc.) for the different sites in Multisite projects. Thus, you can set, maintain, and assign, different taxa to items depending on the sites in which you work with them.

To use this feature on a Multisite project:

1. Go to  Backend>Content>Classifications and choose the taxonomy for which you want to set content to differ for this site only
2. In the “Actions” menu of the taxonomy, click on “Change classification for this site…”
3. In the dialog which opens choose to use this taxonomy on:
   • This site only - the taxonomy will be used only on this site, or
   • Other sites a well – the taxonomy will be reused on other sites.

From this moment on, this taxonomy will differ on this site, depending on your choice in the previous step. Please take a look at our documentation here.

Site Sync per Site in Multisite Projects

Added Site Sync support for multiple sites. This will give you the ability to sync only one or a few selected sites using Site Sync. Also, you will be able to create new sites on staging severs, and, when ready to go live, sync the new sites to the production server.

To use this feature on a Multisite project with enabled Staging and Syncing module:

1. Go to  Backend>Administration>Staging & Syncing, and set the connection to the target server
2. Select one or a few sites and click on “Sync selected sites”
3. On the screen which opens you will see the content from the selected sites waiting for sync
4. Click on “Sync now” to sync the content from the selected sites only

Simplified Custom Membership Provider (for Developers)

Implemented a simple LINQ translation and an interface to optimize the loading of users when using Custom Membership Provider. We prepared a sample that you can download from GitHub. There are more details in our community forum here.

Pages Precompilation tool.

Allows to precompile frontend and backend pages before deploying the site in production. Helps pages load faster when requested for the first time. Reduces processor load. Optimizes or skips the warm-up phase. For more information please check this documentation article

Feather

Allows developers to build mobile-ready sites using their favorite frameworks and includes MVC stock widgets, an AngularJS widget designer framework, Boostrap and Gumby support, and more.

*Note that Feather module needs to be installed from Settings -> Modules and Services

New widgets

• Social Share 
• Search box
• Search results

Widget enhancements​

• News widget: Sorting options, API improvements
• Dynamic widget: Sorting options, API for hierarchical types
• Content block: Image Manager, Hyperlink Manager, HTML view, Full screen mode
• Navigation widget: page selection options, external URLs

Selectors

• Image selector
• Link selector
• Site selector
• Language selector
• Multisite page selector
• Page selector: indicate page status, select external URLs

Client components

• Collection
• Tree
• Search box
• Sort box
• Infinite scroll
• Drag and drop

Other

Authentication

• Introduced an option to configure server session timeout. It could be configured from Settings > Advanced > Security > Server session token lifetime
• Introduced an option to turn on/off password autocomplete. It could be configured from Settings > Advanced > Login > Disable browser autocomplete

Content Modules

• Added permission "View backend link" for content modules, which grants access to the backend section of a given content type. Users with view/modify permission for an individual item, are granted the "View backend link" permission automatically (doc)

Page Selector

• Added a label to page selector that shows page status - unpublished/draft. Added support for Pages Selector lazy loading.​​

What's fixed

• Azure: multilingual issue when using split tables (FP)

Content

• Wrong content resolved in detail view when having contents with the same URL for different languages.

Custom fields

• Fixed an issue with custom media fields (created before 5.4) which resulted in new tables created in the database and data is not properly retrieved.

Dynamic content permissions

• Create button is not visible for child type when its parent item does not have 'Create' permissions. Parent type 'Create' permission should be evaluated instead of parent item.

Events

• Moving all day event in calendar makes it no longer all day event
• Resizing all day event makes it no longer all day event and calculates wrong dates
• All day events are not placed in All day events section of Day and Week view of Calendar
• All day events time is now properly calculated in the front-end pages.​

Ecommerce

• Filter products by custom classification doesn't work in some cases (FP)​

Email Campaigns

• Fixed Mailing List Chart Height

• Fixed email responsive design issue where the <DOCTYPE> tag was not appended to the email template.

Forms

• Cannot create a form with FormMultipleChoice, FormDropDownList  or FormCheckboxes using the API (FP)

Forums​

• Opening a forum post for reply by using query string parameter does not require authentication.​

Libraries

• Image, documents and video libraries cannot be deleted from edit properties view. (FP)
• Implemented load on demand population to save HTML output and improve the performance in selectors used in Images, Documents and Video libraries, Toolbox widgets and different back-end modules.
  
  You can configure the default number of loaded items on each request by setting "Number of items to load" configuration property in Administration-> Settings -> Advanced -> Libraries.
  The default value is 0, which means that all items are loaded.
  You can set the property to 200-250 to get a better performance and save the HTML output in case you have over 1000 libraries or folders in a single level.
  The selector has been tested with about 6000+ libraries and folders on a single level and folders were loaded on demand without blocking or freezing the page output.
• Relocating library to different provider is now working properly for the case when there are leftovers from previous relocation.
• Fixed a problem when relocating library item fails and the procedure can't finish after retry.

Module Builder

• When setting permissions on ModuleBuilder level, there is an error shown and they are not correctly propagated on inheriting DynamicModules, DynamicTypes and Dynamic Content items.

MVC

• ​Returning a pdf as file result from MVC controller action in Classic mode renders a blank pdf file (FP)

Navigation

• Navigation control is not showing group page when all pages under it are redirecting pages (FP)
• In multilingual Drop-Down Navigation Widget no longer shows pages that don't have a translation in the current culture. (FP)

Pages

• When having related data field on Page the Page duplicate options stops working.
• Redirect page which is visible in the navigation and redirects to another  redirect page throws an exception. (FP)
• Navigation widget with custom selection of pages does not show child group types of pages. (FP)
• Pages fluent API: Filter pages to return items without deleted pages

Page Templates

• Pure MVC template always loads personalization script. (FP)
• Layout control cannot be modified when it contains Navigation Widget with "Treeview" or "Horizontal with Dropdowns menus"  template (FP)

Personalization

• Personalization rules for locations in USA are now properly applied on personalized pages.

Related data

• Related data items ordering is not persisted correctly when the corresponding content item is edited.
• Exception on first load when using RelatedData Product -> Product (FP)

SiteSync

• MVC Control properties are not persisted after sync on page live version(FP).
• Syncing image file causes target servers to display "System is restarting" message"
• Cannot sync forms

Related Data​

• Filtering, sorting and searching for ecommerce products in related data items selector are now properly working. (FP)

Thumbnails​

• Thumbnails are broken after upgrade to Sitefinity Hotfix 2 (build 7.2.5320.0 ) when using custom crop size, images dynamic resizing is enabled (AllowDynamicResizing) and image url signature (EnableImageUrlSignature) is set to true. You can find more information here.

Users

• Verify email uniqueness when editing user details.

Upgrades

• Fixed an issue when upgrading directly from versions 6.2 to 7.3, where records from the sf_control_properties table were deleted resulting in YSOD in the back-end and front-end pages.
• Fixed an upgrade issue with dynamic content permissions.
• Failing upgrade to v7.0 when some content locations have invalid page id's.

Workflow​

• Workflow statuses "Reject", "Awaiting publishing" and "Rejected publishing" notification emails are the same as "Waiting for approval" notification email. (FP)

Other

• Non-minified version of Kendo results in error when minified version of RequireJS used in widgets (FP)
• Cannot set string property with a value containing quotation mark in User Control (FP)
• Not loading metafields attributes when having large amount of metafields
• Filtering by Culture breaks for custom cultures with numeric values in the culture code (Ex. en-111)
• A wrong exception is thrown when anonymous users are trying to access content items restricted only to authenticated users (FP)
• LayoutsBasics.css cannot be removed on demand
• Duplicate cookies in response headers (FP)
• Pager not working properly when "UrlKeyPrefix" or "pageKey"is used (FP)
• Continue link in the trial message page is not encoded
• Clicking on Titles & Properties of the Sitefinity backend group page throws an exception (FP)
• Unable to create a backend page when selecting the "Under parent page" option (FP)
• Pages displayed in Page selector widget are now properly styled.
• Resolved a styling issue in the Permissions section "Break Inheritance" button styling overlaps with the "How to" tooltop.
• JavaScript Page Widget now properly sets relative URLs to files. (FP)
• MVC Control properties are not persisted after sync on Page live version (FP).
• Narrow selection in the image selector now correctly searches only in the selected libraries
• CSS Page Widget now correctly sets relative URL to selected files.

Thanks for the update Ivan.

 Is the precompilation tool tied to SF v8 or can it be deployed for earlier versions?

The precompilation tool has been introduced with internal build 7.3 5613 and the tool works with versions released after that - including the current beta 1 of Sitefinity 8.0. The tool won't work properly with versions prior 7.3 5613. We have also applied 4-5 fixed since its initial release with  internal build 7.3 5613.

So I upgrade my site(quatum SDK site) worked great. I was excited to read about the ability to sync individual sites(from a multisite) so I went directly to that.  Once i got there i was hoping to be able to schedule different times for different sites ... apparently that's not the case :( 

 Any chance that feature is possible? 

 Also when you have two server configured you can't switch between them for syncing ..

Server Error in '/' Application.Object reference not set to an instance of an object.Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. 

Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Source Error: 

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.
Stack Trace: 

[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
Telerik.Sitefinity.Web.UI.ContentUI.ContentViewControlDefinition.GetDefaultMasterView() +122
Telerik.Sitefinity.Web.UI.ContentUI.ContentView.DetermineCurrentViewName() +569
Telerik.Sitefinity.Web.UI.ContentUI.ContentView.CreateChildControls() +134
System.Web.UI.Control.EnsureChildControls() +83
System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +42
System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +155
System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +155
System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +155
System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +155
System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +155
System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal() +155
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +974

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.34212

Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for the feedback!

Although we understand that being able to schedule Site Sync per site would be convenient it won't be done for the current release.

The second problem will be fixed for the official release.

Thanks again!

Dimitar

Hi all,

i've upgraded one of our sites to Version 8.0 Beta 1.

The Update works fine on my site.

Now I've tried out the "Pages Precompilation tool".

In difference with the version is my 7.1 site faster than the 8.0 Beta 1 site.

The warm up phase is very long (~2-3 min).

The tool generates a valid dll in my bin folder on the webspace!

Kind Regards

Emanuel

Precompile doesn't work if you have any mvc widgets...do you?  Backend precompile is nice though!

Hi Steve,

thank you for your reply.

In my Stitefinity i only use normal webforms usercontrols and the default sitefinity controls.

Kind Regards

Emanuel

Hi eb-1988,

How long is the warm up phase of the site with the 7.1 version ?

You should experience significant improvement on the front-end with precompiled pages. 

The tool does not precompile custom user controls. If you have many of those, they might be causing the delay.

Best Regards,

Martin

Hello, just documenting a crazy idea I had...

Can I read the "Site Sync per Site in Multisite Projects" as another way of saying: "I can get away with syncing sites A, B, and C from Server 1 to Server 2, and sites D, E, and F from Server 2 to Server 1."

or will Sitefinity v8 just laugh at me ???

@ReadonlyChild

Here's a video of it if it helps: www.youtube.com/watch

Hi,

In short the new Site Sync features that comes with Sitefinity 8.0 allow you to create a site during sync and to be able to filter content per site when you perform a sync.

The two way sync won't be supported.

For more information on what's new in Site Sync you could check the video which has been posted by Steve (thank you Steve).

All the best,

Dimitar

Thank you Steve,

Thanks Dimitar.

I'll keep my two environments split.

Kudos on creating new sites in destination environment!

Thanks Ivan this is really great.