Sitefinity 4.0 Official Release Announcement

Dear all,

Sitefinity team is proud to announce that the Official Release of Sitefinity 4.0 is now available for immediate download from your Client.Net accounts!

The highlights of this release will be available soon on our web site. Detailed Release notes are posted below.

We will continue to follow the weekly internal builds practice so we can deliver everything needed for you as soon as possible, on time.

As always, your feedback is welcome. Please, get back to us with your comments!

New Since RC 2

What’s New

Newsletters (Beta)
The module is designed to provide a rich set of functionality ranging from subscribers management, newsletter composing all the way to the marketing features.

The scope includes:

• Recipients management
• Campaign management
• Reporting & Tracking
• Subscription management

Page Output Cache
This feature improves the sites performance by providing a caching mechanism upon initial page rendering. All subsequent page loads become faster because the controls on the .aspx page do not need to run again to generate the HTML.

Other Features

• Advanced options in pages for:  ViewState, SSL, Search indexing, Caching, Script Manager.
• Added Discard Draft option to Pages and Content
• Permissions for Custom Fields and Inline Editing
• Added support for custom providers in Feeds
• New Visual Studio Extensions for Sitefinity custom modules

Documentation

• Starter Kits for the following industries:
  • Real Estate
  • Intranet
  • Education
  • Charity
  • New SDK sample modules: Products module, Intermediate module

Note: The starter kits will be available for downloading on Monday.

What’s Fixed

Pages and Content

• Error when publishing page in a site on port 8080
• Adding custom layout element is not reflected immediately on the page
• In the Content Block Widget  the Image selector is limited to 20 images
• Error when renaming page templates
• Widget toolbox stays collapses and cannot be expanded when editing a in the Page Editor at 1024x768 resolution
• Adding a widget to a placeholder in the  Page Editor and clicking its title shifts the widget to another placeholder
• Page hierarchy in the Page Selector is not the same as the one in section Pages
• Items with status "draft newer than published" are not displayed under Draft filter in the right pane
• "End element 'item' from namespace ''  error appears when trying to move category up or down

Documents and Files

• Sorting order problems
• Attempt to use invalid character in the URL doesn’t cause conversion to valid characters
• Image widget height cannot be set

Permissions

• When user has no permission to view page, the error should be 403 not 404
• User with no permissions to manage posts is able to delete Blog with Posts

Forms

• Name for developers is not saved
• Non-latin text in field confirmation options breaks the encoding
• Forms with duplicate names can be created

Feeds

• Running import of external RSS twice duplicates the items in Sitefinity
• When importing content from external RSS, running  the feed in Sitefinity throws an error "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"

Multilingual Support

• Incorrect URL generation for sub pages on 4th level
• URL selector in the content block widget shows the site structure in the default language and not in the current language
• 404 error upon loading the home page
• Adding another language breaks the hierarchy in pages
• All language versions of pages show in the Navigation widget after upgrade

Workflow

• 1 level of approval: deletion of draft pages results in error "Workflow rules do not allow to delete"
• 1 level of approval: Uploading an image via the image widget causes error “Cannot save the file…”
• Multilingual is on:  Creating a custom workflow results in error
• Multilingual is on:  sending for approval a translation causes error  "Exception of type 'Telerik.Sitefinity.Workflow.Exceptions.WorkflowSecurityException' was thrown."

Inline Editing

• Updating a Tags/categories field  and editing content item after that causes error
• Adding Predefined value =today for Date field causes error
• The content editor does not show a cursor in the content area
• Updating content block does not update the page
• Browsing image galleries widget causes error
• Login problems

Other

• QL Server SqlConnection doesn`t support simultaneous transactions
• Error when navigating to “sitefinity/services/content/ContentItemService.svc/help/GetContent/response/example”
• 'LicensingPage' already in route collection problem when restarting application during module installation
• IIS 404 redirect causes route handler to break
• Dead lock on startup after pool recycle
• Group page with child pages in different statuses is not displayed correctly in the Navigation Widget
• minRequiredPasswordLength parameter is not considered when creating a user password
• Error 404 if you search label and try to edit it in Administration> Interface Labels & Messages

Known Issues

Pages

• Page Edit screen is broken if you add HTML iframe tag to a Content Block widget
• Attempt to use RadAjaxManager on a custom master page results in error in design mode (100443)

Multilingual Support

• Publishing content items (or page in synchronized mode) in one language, publishes all translated versions
• Deleting page in Page Edit screen deletes all translated versions (104800)
• Versioning is not supported (77507)
• Setting backend language to Arabic causes breaking of backend pages (77797)
• In Forms module localization is not supported for the following widgets: checkboxes, radio buttons and drop-down (100162)
• Adding more cultures to a language (i.e.: en-GB and en-US) results in error when creating a page (51377)

Load Balancing/Web Garden

• Issues with caching and configurations.
  Note: Fixing is planned for Q1.

Medium Trust

• Not supported

Other

• “Database connection closed” error appears when data base server is restarted (103780)
• Clicking more than one time on Publish in Forms results in error
• Backend pages templates cannot be accessed
• User with view permissions for Content can Publish/Unpublish a content item (104875)
• Videos on public site cannot be maximized
• Applying restricted permissions to a group of pages, hides the ability to create a page

Custom Providers

• Tags/Categories added  to items from custom providers are not shown in section Content> Tags/Categories (77109)
• Custom fields cannot be set per provider

 Starter Kits Source Code (Updated 1/20/2011)

• Source code of Charity and Education Stater Kits is available for download. Credentials for the backend are:
  • Username: admin
  • Password: password

Congratulations guys, a long time coming I am sure you are all very happy to finally have it out the door officially!!

I believe your ambition and vision for the future of Sitefinity has been commendable
I'd like to offer my congratulations to your team!

Great work, but where is the Telerik Internation University Sample ? Somwhere have i read, that the sample will be delivered for demonstration.

congrats

Hello,

Thank you guys!
The TIU template is in the SDK.

Well done guys, now lets get those WebEditors out so that it is a bit easier for us to develop in 4.0.

When will the starter kits be available? You wrote "on Monday" (today)!

Hi ,

The Charity and the Telerik International University starter kits are also available for trying out through our on-line sandbox. More information regarding these can be obtained here.

The Intranet and the Real Estate starter kits will be delayed a bit, as they include more complex functionalities..

The people from Telerik are promising too much at the moment. These days you deliver less than expected. If you say Monday it should be Monday.

Does the official release of 4 mean there is a built-in upgrade tool for sites currently on 3.7?

I have been pulling my hair out trying to get the migration tool to work on several sites.  3.7 sp2, patched them to 3.7 sp4, .dlls get built, Migration gets added to the Sitefinity admin tool, but the migration fails every time.  http://sitefinitymigration.codeplex.com/documentation  Followed these instructions exactly for both of my site upgrade attempts and it just doesn't get me anywhere.  Judging from the discussion section over at codeplex, I'm not the only one this tool doesn't work for.

Hi,

is there an easier way to update Sitefinity 4.0 to the newest version (from 4.0.910.0 to 4.0.1098.0), as to download the whole BIG msi-File?

Regards,
Gabriele

Corby, I, too have 3.7 sp2 that I have to upgrade to version 4. I can't believe that in order to upgrade to version 4 we have to jump thru the hoops of installing sp 3 and sp 4. This is ridiculous. As to the migration tool, after what I read about it, I am even afraid to start. Did you have any progress with this tool?

Please share your experiences.

Inna

Inna, no I have not had any further luck.  It appears the patch from 3.7 sp2 to 3.7 sp4 worked, as when I view the source of a page from Sitefinity I do see a version number change.  But when I run the migration tool in my empty Sitefinity 4 project and point it to my newly updated 3.7 sp4 website to do the import, I get a variety of Telerik.Framework, Telerik.Security, and another one I can't think of right now, errors.

I tried to fix the erros in the 3.7 sp4 project by reverting back to the original dlls from before my upgrade to sp4 and more errors occur.  I'm a bit on the frustrated side with the migration tool and very disappointed that the "Upgrade" button on the Sitefinity Project Manager (4.0.1098.0) won't let me just point to a 3.7x site on my system and upgrade it.

I understand that there were some pretty drastic under the hood changes between 3.7 and 4.0 but I wish the 1/2 working migration tool would be fully operational and bundled with the 4.0 download or at least out of Alpha stage...

Hi ,

We are fixing issues with the migration tool on a daily basis. The tools will be extended further, but integrating it with the project manager is quite complex. Currently the migration tool uses Web Service to get the data from 3.x edition and port it to 4.0 using its specific API.

Best wishes,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Tnx for the reply Ivan.  I know you folks are working on it, as I've been following the progress of the migration tool for a few months now.  I was just really hoping for "Sitefinity 4's out, one click to upgrade from 3.7x to 4...here's the button to do it."

Hi,
I have not yet seen any word of success with the 3rd party alpha migration toolkit and I really don't have time to experiment right now. I'd rather wait. I suggest that Telerik provides an announcement by e-mail or a separate page with feed, once a 3.7SP4 -> 4.0 conversion kit is official.
Thanks.

Congrat...., I already started on 4.0,

Thanks
Johar Iqbal

Johar,

Could you,  please, share how you managed to migrate from 3.7 sp4 to version 4?

Thank you

Inna

I also have a problem upgrading my sp4. Could you please help me, anyone? In any means, congratulations!

gt8

@ Inna,

There is a migration tool that you can use

sitefinitymigration.codeplex.com/

Regards,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

i am looking forword for it

Hello,

Is the SP on course to be released today?

Thanks,
Andrei

Hello Andrei,

Yes, we have just released it.