SF / Telerik - Please listen...
Dear SF / Telerik Team,
I don't think I speak alone when I say I love the direction and features you've introduced with SF 4 and I believe you have a very talented team. There is however a serious problem with some very obvious high-profile bugs that are wreaking havoc with our clients and development timelines. While we love the frequent version releases and aggressive schedule you have, each version introduces serious new bugs with new functionality. I personally will take stability over fancy features any day.
SF 4.4 gave us the much needed Module Builder, but it is VERY buggy and killing my development time. My clients/employer are not so understanding about this and are asking why we chose to use this platform if it is so troubled. At this time, it has delayed our release schedule and business goals by almost a quarter of a year. Additionally, I had to endure 2 painful hours of getting my butt chewed and yelled at in a meeting yesterday because of this.
On behalf of many frustrated developers using your product, I am KINDLY urging your management to freeze all new feature development and make 4.5 all about issue/bug resolution. We developers need a SOLID, STABLE base at some point. We patiently await these version releases to fix our crippling bugs, but then we have to deal with a slew of new ones and it becomes a vicious cycle.
I am big fan of Telerik and SF, and have been using and recommending your products for several years. I don't want to have to abandon you, but in regards to SF, something has to change or I will have no choice. Either the QA process needs serious improvement or you need to slow down development. Save the new functionality for major releases and supply us with bug fixes in minor releases. In the least, provide us with real patches for these bugs in a timely manner.
Thank you in advance for your concern and attention to this issue.
Craig
Dear Craig,
Thank you for taking the time to provide us with the feedback. We truly do appreciate it.
It is very hard to reply to your question, without going back to the past. What I’d like to do first is to say, that you do have a point. I can assure you that no one in our team is happy with the stability of the product or the procedures that we have in place to ensure the rock solid product. Now, that I’ve said that, I’ll also say that we are light years ahead of where we were only 12 months ago. Personally, I think the trends are tremendously important, and with Sitefinity it’s been a positive one. Moreover, as the time goes by, we are gaining a lot of momentum.
Now, I could leave this at the fluff answer I’ve provided you with, but instead, I’ll go and provide you with some hard data on what are we doing to make every new release more stable, smoother, faster and in general better.
Here are the things that we have today and we did not have 12 months ago:
In addition to this, we have formed one team with the sole purpose of ensuring that the quality assurance infrastructure is running at all times, doing so in reasonable time and so on. This team is also tasked with educating every single developer on testing practices – which is also something new – yes, all developers in Sitefinity team are writing tests – quality is not the responsibility of the QAs, but every single person.
Now, to go back to your suggestion: we have significantly slowed down the development of the features. This is in part that we really (absolutely) release less features, and in part that our team is growing while the bites we bite are getting smaller.
All this being said, we cannot stop adding new features; this is the curse of the product development. We have a huge customer base and blocking issues that our customers face come in all flavors: some people experience bugs that prevent them from doing something, while other people miss a feature – such as windows authentication or forums module, third group needs more documentation and so on. So, as a product company, we are in the ungrateful business of trying to please everyone. It requires a lot of fine balance between all kinds of needs and recently I think we’ve been quite able to strike that balance well.
To conclude, I still think you have a point and I know we can do much better. However, I also know that infrastructure, as well as the practices that ensure Sitefinity’s quality is literally getting more sophisticated by the day and our track record proves that. Our ultimate goal is not to have a great “checkbox” CMS, which will have every feature a consultant ever thought of – but to deliver world’s best CMS. A CMS that has the features that people need, that is fast, stable, reliable and predictable. I am confident that we are going in a right direction and with the velocity our team has at the moment, I am also confident we will be there very soon.
I hope I was able to answer your concerns and I am looking forward to deliver more than expected to you and all of our clients in the year ahead of us. Once again, thank you for your feedback.
Kind regards,
Ivan Osmak
Sitefinity Product Manager
I am so glad I've come across this thread. I know what @Craig is saying. I had to go through a bit of the same, although, by the sounds of it, not as bad as Craig's experience. It is a difficult thing to face your management on weekly basis and tell them that whilst one thing was fixed, unfortunately, another one came up. Especially, after having sang so many praises to them about Sitefinity.
Having said that, @Ivan is right, Sitefinity has come light years now, and by the sounds of things (considering the QA procs), it will get much further still. That is a very thorough and informative reply from Ivan. Confidence starts to rise again.
Two things that I want to see:
1 - Speed, speed, and speed again. I want it faster. 4.3 & 4.4 is much better, but I want another at least 40%. This must stay high on the priorities list for now.
2 - Decoupling it. If I don't want bloggs, then I don't even want to see it in the menu let alone have it loaded into memory and take up space. I would love a checklist where I can tick what I need and what I don't and have that reflect in the menu strip. I want to build the system out of just the building blocks that I need. Just hiding it is not enough, I don't want it there at all.
Apart from that, I must admit that the interface, the intuitiveness of it, is a real hit with the customers. It's easy to train people. Customer's just love it. And your support is amazing.
Many thanks,
Andrei
Hi,
It is good to see someone from the Sitefinity team acknowledging problems, as this has not always been the case in the past. And despite all the positive stuff Ivan said, I'm afraid it's too little, too late, as far as we're concerned.
We already made fools of ourselves on multiple occasions, in front of our customers, due to the immaturity of Sitefinity 4. Besides, our manager told us to stop updating our Sitefinity sites to the newest version, as it's a nightmare every single time we upgrade. Not just regressions, but regular API breakages that are not mentioned in the change log. "Once bitten, twice shy." Except we've been bitten three dozens of times already. I can't see us renewing our license once it expires.
Even if Sitefinity ends up becoming good, we won't be there anymore at this point. We live in the present, not in the future.
"All this being said, we cannot stop adding new features;"
The way I see it, you can, but you don't want to. The marketing team wouldn't be happy with a release that just said "We fixed stuff". It has to include new shiny things to make it easier for you to sell more licenses.
Anyway, if you have to add features, how about adding features that were supposed to be there in the first place, like full multilingual support? Rather than adding all-new features such as eCommerce...
While I can live with a new feature being buggy in it's first release. What I find hard to deal with is explaining to my boss the reason I haven't produced any code the past 2 days (going on 3) is because the Program Manager won't upgrade my project to version 4.4.
As a suggestion, please include an upgrade log that indicates what upgraded successfully and what didn't. For instance, I was in day 2 of trying to get it upgraded when I realized the program manager did not update any of my config files.
I don't think manager suppose update config files. I thought config files are upgraded when application starts.
Yes, I think the Config Files get updated when the application runs and loads teh whatever module in. I once went and changed all the versions in the Config Files thinking "Now its going to work, I found the issue", to which Radoslav rebuked me, by saying "Never!!! touch the Config Files.". They update themselves when the code compares the version numbers and sees that they are different.
Ivan,
@Craig, I'm with you 100% on this. Yes SF 4 has come a long way from when it was initially released 1 year ago but because of the poor QA and constant introduction of new features with new bugs the system is no more stable then when it first launched. Yes, maybe some of the old bugs have been fixed but the number of new ones introduced (seriously, content blocks adding a <br/> tag, how was this missed???) make the product as painful to use as ever. I myself have gone from deploying 3-4 SF sites a year to just 1 and am staying away from it for now. It's caused some of my clients to go elsewhere (due to cost increase) and some clients to loose faith in me (due to bugs). Can't stop adding features? That's a pile of sh*t!! If you can't get one feature right and bug free, why in the world would you try to add another? There's obviously something wrong with your development process and QA. Fix that first, get a relatively bug free product out the door, then start adding new features. As equally important, if you insist on continuing to release with bugs, at least put a patch system in place so those affected by bugs don't have to wait for the next major release. Even Microsoft with it's monstrous code base for Windows has figured out how to release patches an not make us wait for the next version of Windows to get bug fixes.
Craig,
Hi Craig. First off, thank you for the constructive tone of these posts.
What are the 4 critical high-profile PITS issues that are a thorn in your side? Can you provide links? I'd be glad to provide some internal advocacy on your behalf. Or, if you would prefer, feel free to email me privately - sumner@telerik.com.
@Gabe - WebEditors would be a very good start. I know we can develop our own, but that adds time (which means cost, to an already pretty costy CMS). And at the moment, those property windows look really uncool. If I get them before our next project, I will be a very happy man.
--
Hey Andrei,
The none exist of an good Editor is the biggest Problem.
People love Software which works like Word. And when End User must work with the software the rules are different compared to what a Developer use.
And you are light Years away from it. This is the reson why we search for a way to replace your simple Text Editor you provide at the moment.
Thanks
May I add my 5 cents?
It is not a bug but: support for MultiImageFieldElement for custom modules would be really appreciated. In support ticked I opened it has been promised that "we are going to start work on this feature after the Sitefinity 4.4 release in mid-December".
Please do not forget about this.
Thanks!
Denis.
Well since everybody is adding cents and you know I usually can not keep quite here we go.
A) I really really would love that all bugs would be fixed before doing anything else. Ok Module builder is great, fast, impressive and well done - but not multilingual
B) I would love some improvements Forms (Captcha, Mailing, Regex build in for e-mail and so on
C) I have a custom widget that lets you select two image on for on the page and one for lightbox. Stuff like this is needed by clients every day!
D) One thing I really think is a missing feature is the missing multilingual image/document feature.
Hi,
I agree with Markus for Module Builder, but I thinks Telerik Team have really to work on multilingual part on every parts of Sitefinity.
Custom field => No multilingual.
Content (documents/images/videos) => No real multilingual (two Pits already register).
I can suggest another little thing for your test plan if you don't already make it. Take a site Sitefinity version 4.0 and made all existings updates and realize your test plan. Because when we encounter bugs, rather often the answer was test it on a new site of the latest version if it works. You really think we restart from scratch just because on a fresh site it works.
Personally I am ready to have no more new features on 2 or 3 versions if it allows to correct bugs. For us we approach point of no return, our manager said us: "no more updates we don't want new bugs". And probably after no renewal licence.
Regards,
Nicolas
Hello all,
Thank you all for joining the conversation. Let me try to briefly address each one's concerns.
@Craig - we do have our regular internal builds release cycle (every two weeks). The internal builds are released containing the bug fixes we have done for past two weeks.
@Andrei - your requests are on our focus. We will continue working on improving the memory footprint of the system. At the moment we are analyzing what would be the gains and complexity of decoupling all modules and letting you load them on demand (if you do not need News it will not be loaded). However this is not trivial task, and I cannot promise that you will see this in 5.0.
@Thomas - I guess that by full multilingual support you mean custom fields. We are planning the multilingual support for the module builder to be introduced in Sitefinity 5.1. Once we have support for multilingual dynamic fields, then we will be able to apply this approach in the custom fields for built-in modules.
@David - Sitefinity keeps an upgrade log located in ~/App_Data/Sitefinity/Logs. This log contains information whether upgrade procedures passed or failed. As Denis has noted the configuration files get upgraded @ runtime. The Project Manager of Sitefinity only substitutes the old project files (assemblies, service files) with the new version ones. Please visit our documentation about upgrades. It explicitly states that configuration files must on be touched manually during the upgrade process.
@Markus:
A) MB is scheduled to have multilingual support in 5.1
B) Regex validation in the forms responses can be done right now. Captcha and Mailing are on focus after the 5.0 release. However, you can have this with your forms even now, please visit the following blog posts:
http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/radoslavgeorgiev/posts/11-12-23/how_to_implement_notifications_for_incoming_forms_responses.aspx
http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/radoslavgeorgiev/posts/11-12-14/captcha_for_sitefinity_forms.aspx
C) This can be achieved by extending the control template of the single image control, but that is a discussion for another thread. I have logged this in our feature requests backlog.
Regards,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team
Dear all,
I am going to reply once again this thread, as I believe the thread itself outlines what I’ve said in my previous reply.
Namely, pretty much everyone that voiced their opinion on this thread has different needs. If you go through the whole thread you will see many of the problems being actually feature requests. Here, I’ll aggregate those for you:
Those are all new features. Please, do not get me wrong, I am not trying to win a debate. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is if you are happy or not. I guess we have a different definition of a “feature”; it would seem that you are thinking of the “epic” features, like forums, while from our perspective everything that is not there is a new feature.
So, as to bring some perspective to this discussion, this is what I can tell you:
Finally, I admit that at the moment we are not handling hotfixes / patches properly. As it was suggested by several people, ideally, one would be able to get a hotfix (probably for the last 1 or 2 major releases) that cover only one or more (I’d say never more than 10) bug fixes. This would allow you to quickly apply patches without going through a full-fledged upgrade. I will immediately initiate the internal discussion on how can we solve this problem and I am confident that very soon we will have such system in place.
Once again, thank you all for taking the time to provide us with your valuable feedback. Solving your problems and making your work with Sitefinity pleasurable is our top priority. This is not marketing fluff, but simply a matter of existence and excellence; so be assured that we take a note of everything you say and act accordingly, though due to the sheer amount of communication we have with our clients and partners on daily basis, sometimes it may seem otherwise. I'll repeat once again, no single forum post, support ticket or an email is ignored - ever!
I will keep you updated on this thread about the developments of our discussion.
Regards,
Ivan Osmak, Sitefinity Product Manager
Hi,
It's not a question to win or lose debate. But multilingual it's not a new feature, your product was supposed to support multilingual. We just ask that it works in a coherent way.
Regards,
Nicolas
Hi Radoslav,
About full multilingual support, I meant custom fields, indeed, but not just that. Also: truly localizable documents, images, etc (not just the title). Not sure if I'm forgetting something noteworthy related to multilingual support.
And to clear things up, multilingual support was a random example among many others.
Among our pet bugs: reusable content blocks in templates, an image field type (we currently use WYSIWYG fields for thumbnails...), paging within lists (assuming it was not fixed in 4.4, did not check)... Actually, I think all of that just worked in Sitefinity 3.7.
Thanks for listening.
@Radoslav, about decoupling, I thought you were on it already. I read a deadline of April somewhere. If you are still thinking about it then it might not happen then? Ahh well.... as long as you can get it to eat less CPU and move faster, I am happy. RAM is cheap so not too worried about that, but it would help if you got that down as well.
@Ivan - from what I can see people's definition of a new feature is different than that of Telerik, due to the simple fact that they were in 3.7. A continuum was expected between 3.7 and 4.x, which it seems not to be the case. Hence the surprise on people's face :-( )
Hi all,
Thank you all for the feedback provided. We are taking into account every opinion expressed and will keep them in mind when working our feature set.
Kind regards,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team
"Shared Content in templates have been scheduled for Sitefinity 5.1 with highest priority (the most voted on PITS issue)"
If shared content blocks are added at the template level, will this alleviate the performance issues experienced with shared content? Just loading these in the admin takes an extremely long time (even with page size set to 10) and updating usually times out and we have to go back in, wait for the content blocks to load to determine if our change was actually saved. We've recently run into some intermittent performance problems and after running SQL Profiler, the queries to the shared content block table are taking an extremely long time to load (~30sec). Having brought this to Telerik's attention, the responses I get from support are along the lines of "you have a lot of content blocks (100) and 190 pages". While workarounds were suggested (e.g. move content to the template, create a module for shared content, use a different content type like News for the shared items, reduce the number of content blocks), none are acceptable.