Sitefinity 7.3 BETA

Sitefinity 7.3 Beta is available for download on this link

We have also beta NuGet packages available on http://nuget.sitefinity.com

We’d be happy to hear your feedback and questions on the coming release!
Please, upgrade your projects and let us know if you encounter any issues.

We updated the beta with a new build that you can download from the original link or here. The build includes fixes and improvements and latest versions of dev tools - RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, Kendo UI, Data Access and other. Feather is included in Sitefinity project manager installation as a Module. 

Notes: This release is for testing and evaluation purposes. Upgrades from it will not be supported.  

What's new

Search in the Cloud and other improvements

• Added integration with Azure Search and Elasticsearch which enables the use of Sitefinity Search on Windows Azure for both indexing and performing search.
• Included support for search suggestions, "starts with" search, advanced filtering, etc.
• Added filtering of search results by user permissions on the front end
• Added option to search in multisite mode, as one search index is created for all sites

Granular permissions in dynamic content

• Added option to set permissions on individual item level for dynamic content items (in Modules created with Module builder).
• Extended Permissions API to cover for specific scenarios such as:

1. inheriting permissions form parent content items in hierarchical content types (video here), and
2. assigning of permissions based on tags or other content item properties (video here)

 Connector for SharePoint Online

• Added support for SharePoint Online in Sitefinity SharePoint Connector

Performance optimizations

• Reduced application start up times after restart/reset with about 60%
• Reduced page pre-compilation times
• Optimized permissions fetching when users opens page in Backend
•  Introduced option to wait for a requested page to be added to output cache and then serve all consecutive request to it.  (documentation).

PROJECT FEATHER
(github link, project page)
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. 

As of Sitefinity 7.3, we have introduced the following:

Automatically generated MVC widgets for dynamic content types

• Based on the Razor syntax
• Generated based on the structure of the dynamic content type
• Ability to manage widget templates from the Sitefinity backend
• Ability to control the generated widget markup (scaffolding)
• Advanced filtering by URL (related data, taxonomies, hierarchical types)

Reusable Content Selectors based on AngularJS

• Dynamic content selector
• Page selector
• Hierarchical taxonomy selector (categories)
• Custom taxonomy selector (auto populated with all taxonomies used in a type including custom field taxonomies)
• DateTime selector
• Multiple selection capability for all selector

Sample Website

• Updated to use the auto-generated widgets for dynamic content types
• Integrated the newly introduced content selectors and updated the old ones

As of Sitefinity 7.3, Feather will be shipped as standalone module, which needs to be installed from Modules and Services backend section. For more details, please visit the Feather Wiki on Github.

DEV TOOLS 

What's fixed

• Makes the SitefinityIdentity and UserIdentity classes serializable

Azure

• Fixed a problem with content changes not reflecting properly on the other nodes when using Load Balancing for Azure.
• Fixed an issue where server error is thrown when logging in with default admin user on Windows Azure with NLB enabled.

Caching

• Output cache is invalidated when clicking "back to pages" button.

Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud

• DEC sentences were not sent for Html5 videos played from a youtube list.
• DEC sentences will contain absolute instead of relative URLs.

Events

• All day events display as 2 day event in calendar view
• Fixed an issue where event body is not exported to Google calendar, ICal, Outlook

External blob storage provider for media (images, videos, documents)

• Moving media items to Azure Blob Storage from different libraries/folders results in overwritten content.

Forms

• Fixed a problem with the Forms module where editing an already published Form and duplicating a FormControl on it results in duplicate control IDs (An item with the same key has already been added exception when submitting the Form on the frontend) (FP)

Forums

• Calls to Notifications service was not correctly checked whether the call was from backend or frontend page.
• Search breaks when there are multiple providers for forums

InlineEditing

• "Publish all" doesn't work in Pure Mvc page

Images

• Added FIPS support for Url parameter signature for thumbnails.

• Changing LayoutControl properties not applied when publish the page (FP).
• Template won't change if you change it during page duplication.
• Duplicate page results in insufficient permissions error.
• "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" when you duplicate a page.
• Converting a Standard Page to Group and then back to Standard breaks the pages grid.
• Convert redirect page to normal page result in java script error

• Changing page permissions not applied when publish the page.

• Page editor throws exception when there is a user control in the toolbox and Feather is installed
• Fixed MVC controller cannot be found when attributes collection contains keys.
• MVC FileResult now sets the download filename as specified. (FP)

Multilingual

• Custom Labels & Messages are not localizable when .cs files inherit from in-built controls. (FP)

• Fix setting pageSize of folderFIlter to 0 disables the paging functionality.

• Fix in Generate report
• Decreased number of requests to MultisiteService on every backend page when are more than 15 sites.
• Output cache is invalidated for non-default site in Multisite management.

Module Builder:

• Fixed performance issue when opening hierarchical dynamic item for edit.
• It is now possible to add more than one field of type Media Related - Images.

Network Load Balancing

• Resolved an issue with Level 2 cache communication with more than one database.

• Content items can be prevented from including in sitemap by subscribing to ISitemapGeneratorContentRetrieving event and setting Cancel property of the event to true.

• Fixed issue with overriding control inherited from a template on the page. The designer was not correctly working with the base control and not the overridden control - as result the overridden properties were lost when opening the designer for a second time
• Fixed issue with deep inheritance - parent template > child template > page. When a control was overridden on a child template and then opened for overriding on the page it inherited the properties of the parent template control and not the overridden properties of the child template control.

Responsive Design

• Cannot view to which pages a transformation rule is applied.

Registration Widget

• Fixed the label for Confirmation Page Title that appears as null in the widget settings but is actually selected (FP)

Other

•  Content items with many related media fields no longer cause performance issues when opened in edit mode. (FP)
• When duplicating pages workflow status is now properly set to Draft.
• Unable to edit a widget via user with Editor role on page based on template (the widget is placed on the page template and the option "Make editable on pages" is checked) (FP)
• Fixed an issue where widgets placed on page templates cannot be edited in some cases.

Permissions don't seem to work...

screencast.com/.../DEvGSt7v

 I would expect as an anon user to not see Folder 2 in the list let alone be able to open and comment on it.

 Am I missing something?

Have you enabled "Enable filtering queries by view permissions" in the ~/Sitefinity/Administration/Settings/Advanced/Security section - http://screencast.com/t/E10ykkBthQdC ? It is disabled by default since it adds some joining and filtering overhead for pretty much all queries.

Feather isn't available via NuGet and doesn't appear to be packaged. There's also no new information on the GitHub pages?

@Momchil

  Don't suppose the permissions menu item could be hidden then if thats not enabled, because it's gonna cause confusion.

 How much of a perf hit is it...noticable?  Should be be concerned?

Hi Steve,

Thank you for your feedback!

About the overhead - it is equal to the additional calculations that have to be made when joining two permissions related tables to the result set when querying multiple items. The performance impact is limited by the fact that the columns used for those joins are indexed. So there is a linear dependency between the number of existing rows and the total calculation time needed to perform a specific fetch operation.

In other words this functionality is optimized as much as possible but is disabled by default since view permissions are allowed for everyone by default. We are working on UI improvements to better communicate this dependency.

I noticed a small problem with the RadEditor when creating a blog post with the Sitefinity 7.3 Beta.  Below are the steps to repeat the issue.  Also, I did this on Google Chrome 39.0.2171.71.

1. On a brand new Sitefinity 7.3 Beta instance, goto Content > Blogs and create a new blog.
2. Click the "Create a post" link.
3. In the blog post body field click "More formatting options" and then click the "Toggle Full Screen Mode" button.  See Capture-1.jpg.
4. Click the "Toggle Full Screen Mode" button again to leave full screen mode.  See Capture-2.jpg.
5. Notice the RadEditor toolbar does not collapse correctly.  See Capture-3.jpg.

Please verify if you are also seeing this same issue.  Thanks.

@Momchil

I created a new module, using Module Builder, and set an item to be view-able by administrators only.  Added the widget to a page and logged out.  Even with your additional setting turned on I still see this item.

@Steve Were you able to get your solution to work after enabling this setting?

Hi Craig,

on the problem with RadEditor - we were able to reproduce it, and it is logged for fixing.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to test and to provide such detailed explanation!

Let us know if you have more feedback,
Regards,
Kalina

The issue with the RadEditor toggle mode has been fixed.

Hi Craig,

Thank you for your feedback.

Regarding the issue with dynamic content items being visible on the frontend, we already have this fixed. It will be included in the official release of Sitefinity 7.3.

Kali and Ivan, thanks for getting this fixed!  

I'm attempting to test this via the NuGet repository and I'm getting the following error:

    Unable to resolve dependency 'Telerik.DataAccess.Core (= 2014.3.1128.1)'.

Should this be working with NuGet?

The DataAccess packages have been uploaded to nuget.sitefinity.com/. 

It got a little further but still failed with the following:

Updating 'Telerik.Sitefinity.Core 7.2.5300.0' to 'Telerik.Sitefinity.Core 7.3.5350.0-beta' failed. Unable to find a version of 'Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather' that is compatible with 'Telerik.Sitefinity.Core 7.3.5350.0-beta'.

We updated the beta with a new build that you can download from the original link or here. The build includes fixes and improvements and latest versions of dev tools - RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, Kendo UI, Data Access and other. Feather is included in Sitefinity project manager installation as a Module.  NuGet packages are available on http://nuget.sitefinity.com

Please share your feedback and questions on the coming 7.3 release!

Thanks for your update. We included Feather as a Module and we applied changes over the spec of the packages. Now there are two packages Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather.7.3.5351.0-beta.nupkg and Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather.Core.7.3.5351.0-beta.nupkg. Both packages are dependencies of Telerik.Sitefinity.All.7.3.5351.0-beta.nupkg. I suggest to try to uninstall the old packages and let us know how it goes, meanwhile we will try come up with update scripts (uninstall and install). 

It looks like removing the original Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather NuGet package and then re-adding it fixed the NuGet update issue.  I was able to fully update all NuGet packages now.

Although, now that Feather is an integrated Module, I have some questions about the upgrade with with 7.3 and Feather. Not sure if I should I ask those here, or on the GitHub project site?  I'll start here, but I can move it to a GitHub issue if you'd prefer...

 After doing the NuGet update, I compared how it upgraded an existing project to a new project created with the Project Manager.  It looks like a new project doesn't include any of the files in the ResourcePackages directory (since it doesn't use the Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather NuGet package), but a project using NuGet includes all the content in the ResourcePackages directory (Bootstrap/Foundation/SemanticUI).

Does this mean that if I'm upgrading an existing project using Feather from NuGet, that I could delete all of the non-custom content in the folder structure?  Is the Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather NuGet package even needed anymore since it's a built in module?

 And a general Feather upgrade question: What will be the recommended method upgrading an existing project using Feather NuGet packages?

Thanks,
Ryan

When you make an upgrade or new installation:

- Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather.7.3.5351.0-beta.nupkg  extracts all files from the package's content folder to ResourcePackages folder including Bootstrap, Foundation, SemanticUI etc.

- The Project Manager will do the same - add ResourcePackages folder including Bootstrap, Foundation, SemanticUI and all content inside them. The project manager uses System.IO instance methods for creating, moving, and enumerating through directories, so I suppose if something is not added there might be an read/write issue although I think that there is error handling.

But, if you have customized a file, say 'ResourcePackages\Bootstrap\csslint.json' it will be overridden from what we have in the ProjectManager as ResourcePackages .

I performed a simple test and didn't noticed missing files or folders when using the NuGet package or the PM for creating a new project or upgrading an existing project. Let me know if I'm missing something, so we can do further testing and see if we are able to replicate the issue with your help and apply a fix.

As for the usage of the NuGet package and PM - these are just different ways to keep your solution with specific versions. The project manager is our implementation for upgrades and managing Sitefinity projects easily. NuGet is wide popular web based gallery platform and has various integrations with other tools provided by different contributors / consumers.

The current plans are not to coupe Feather with the specific version of Sitefinity and allow users to use packages to get updates from the Feather repository on Git without changing their Sitefinity version or releasing a new version of Sitefinity when possible, so Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather NuGet will be needed for such cases.

Have to say, actually really impressed with this beta. Performance seems much better than the current release.

Is the Azure storage dlls (1.7) supported after Azure announced the retirement of the older dlls?

I see the beta is still using 1.7

Will this release upgrade to the current 2 version of the Azure storage client?
(I am asking after reading a post on the forums.

www.sitefinity.com/.../azure-storage-version-removal-and-continued-support-for-sf-6-in-azure

We are using Azure 2.2 version since several releases.

Using Just Decompile I can see that the references for WindowsAzure.Diagnostics and Service Runtime are 2.2 but StorageClient is 1.7

I have attached an screen shot

The Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient will remain 1.7 version in Sitefinity 7.3.

 The other Azure assemblies use 2.2 version

Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime, Version 2.2.0.0
Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version 2.2.0.0
Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.StorageUtility, Version 2.2.0.0

The planned removal of earlier versions of the Azure Storage Service APIs will happen in December 2015, so we will have a compatible version prior that. I cannot tell you the exact Sitefinity version right now. Once we started working on this we will make an announcement in the forum.

Dec 2015 a typo?