Sitefinity Release Notes

What's New

Performance improvements

• Sitefinity now comes with pre-compiled widget templates (ascx). This allows for much faster cold start (after first deployment) of the whole application. Back-end screens load up to 3 times faster after cold start. Dynamic compilation and loading of close to 800 assemblies in run-time is reduced to one assembly - pre-compiled and shipped with the distribution.

Font-end widgets & templates

• Decreased and optimized the client scripts served by Sitefinity public widgets. Removed unnecessary scripts (mostly unused Microsoft Ajax scripts)
• Ability to utilize CDN on frontend – In 5.4 we now have separate CDN setting that applies only to the front-end. A related recommended action is to stop script combining (set "Combine frontend script resources setting" to False) when using front-end CDN.  (PITS)
• ResourceLinks control:  Added an option for loading resources that don't have js or css extension (like .less) (PITS)
• Expose Kendo UI (kenod.all.js and kendo.web.js) as a JavaScript library in ResourceLinks control (PITS)
• SEO: ContentView based widgets now allow to change the page meta description and keywords tags dynamically in content detail mode. (use MetaDescriptionField, MetaKeywordsField advanced propeties) (PITS) (PITS)
• Users can now add their user controls directly from the ModulePageFacade using AddUserControl(string virtualPath, string placeholderName) method
• We now automatically invalidate browser cache of the theme CSS files when files were changed on the server (using a time-stamp token)

Multi-Site

• Support for multi-site mode based on sub-folders instead of domains, e.g. have mysite.com/de, mysite.com/pl instead of mysite.de , mysite.pl. We support also nested folders as site roots - for example mysite.com/cars/bmw - as the root of a site.

Multi-lingual mode

• Advanced option to keep multilingual data fields in separate tables per language. Recommended only for sites with large number of languages and translations and not turned on by default. This feature also makes possible the support of multi-lingual mode in MySql

Module builder

• Option to enable/disable dynamic link parser for long text fields in the dynamic module. The link parser is used to automatically resolve internal Ids to full url links for pages and images.ux

Forms

• Ability to upload files in Forms (PITS)

Lists

•  Custom sorting is now possible in Lists Widget (PITS) (PITS) (PITS)

Site Sync

• Improved syncing of large amounts of data. Decreased memory consumption and made possible the synching of unlimited number of content items
• Scheduled Synchronization. Be able to do site sync on exact date/time in the future or in recurring dates (daily, weekly etc)

Forums

• Improved usability on the public widgets: The buttons for “New Thread”, “Post Reply” and “Reply” are always visible for all users. When a user is not logged in they redirect to a login/registration page. After successful login, it returns to the original location.
• Significant performance optimizations based on caching of user info rendered in the forum thread and posts views.

Email Campaigns:

• Support for multiple draft issues in Email Campaigns.

E-commerce

   E-commerce Features

• Wish list - Shoppers can save products to a private wish list or they can make it public and share their wish list with friends or on social sites.
• More granular taxes for US: Merchants can define sales tax by zip code, city, and county.
• Reports - A new Sales Summary Report shows subtotal, tax, discounts, shipping and totals within a date range.
• Improvements to orders - Merchants can now search for orders by customer name, email or order number.  And, they can filter orders by the order status.
• A merchant can now add a surcharge to USPS shipping rates. 
• Inventory management works in conjunction with the “Buy Now” widget.
• Add custom fields to Order Confirmation Email Template (PITS)
• New filter on orders page (PITS)
• Search functionality on orders page (PITS)

     E-commerce API enhancements     

• Ability to change email formatting logic using IOrderConfirmationEmailTemplateFormatter
• Ability to change which tax gets picked for calculations in the shopping cart and checkout using ITaxPicker
• Ability to change Order calculations using IOrderCalculator
• New event when a wish list item is added to the cart. OnProductAddedToWishList
• New event when an item from wishlist is being bought by someone OnProductInWishlistPurchased 

Log-on / Activation

• The claims mode Login widget  now has a register link option which shows a registration link and navigates to a registration page.
• The activation widget and the register widget have the ability to redirect to a specific page if  they are passed a ReturnUrl query parameter.

Responsive design

• Groups of responsive design rules can be applied per specific page or page template. Users can now choose which groups of rules to be applied or whether to turn those on/off for both pages and templates.

Usability improvements

• Provide a sorting option that was missing in various places around the back-end UI - Content grids, Libraries, Categories & Tags, Page Templates, page & template selectors (PITS)
• Dynamic modules created in Multisite mode are assigned to the current site if there is only one site.
• Order image library by Title (PITS)
• Removed unnecessary Scroll-bars appearing in the back-end dialogs
• Returned the option to set image margins through the Image widget (PITS)

General

• Output caching for RSS (Available through the Advanced setting in Publishing configuration -> Output caching profile to be used for caching the feeds output )

Upgrades

• Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX - Q3 2012 SP2 (2012.3.1308)
• Telerik RadControls for Silverlight - Q3 2012 SP1 (2012.3.1129)
• Telerik RadControls for WPF - Q3 2012 SP1 (2012.3.1129)
• Telerik Reporting - Q3 2012 (6.2.12.1017)
• Telerik Open Access
• Kendo UI to Q3 2012 (2012.3.1114)
• jQuery - 1.8.3
• jQuery UI - 1.9.2
• FancyBox - 2.1.3

Testing

•  A new Automated test runner tool will be available with the SDK - which will make it easier to implement and run automated API tests with Sitefinity

What's Fixed

Navigation

• Navigation widget is broken in iPhone and iPad when in “tabs” mode.

Module Builder

• If you have a module with a media field and then edit the fields to add another media field the content items get messed up (PITS)
• Mapping external templates to a widget, created by the Module builder  (PITS)
• Advanced settings of hierarchical dynamic module widget are not saved (PITS)
• ML: "Back to" link in hierarchical child types back-end pages throws 404
• Image Urls doesn't work in detail view of dynamic items with single and multi-image fields
• When one particular item is selected in the dynamic widget and that item has long text field containing links, those links lead to 404 error pages
• Sort by Title in the dynamic widget throws exception if main short text field is changed
• Upgrade: Parent and child items are switched in back-end after upgrade 5.2->5.3
• Editing developer name for a module is not persisted on save - Now the developer name is displayed as a label because it is not intended to be changed after a module is created.
• Edit fields -> Adding a video field for a module that has an image field removes images from already created items.
• Filter by Tags and Categories widgets in the front-end does not work by default for dynamic content widgets. 
• Hidden fields are visible in front end
• Missing validation when creating field with custom widget.
• Yes/No field value is not displayed in compare translations in multilingual mode
• Create permission for dynamic content items are not properly applied in the context of non-default provider

Libraries:

• Image localization does not work (PITS)
• Libraries: improper inheritance of parent permissions leading to large number of unused permission records
• Firefox: Silverlight upload is not working when you try to upload images for the second time

Pages & Widgets:

• Fix for Sitefinity Site Map with group pages. PageSeiteNode.Equales() method was not working correctly for group pages.
• Redirect pages are invisible when being under a group page (PITS)
  
• Search in widget templates returns error when in multilingual mode
• Page selector shows pages from different cultures in multilingual mode
• The page selector in the registration widget is not properly initialized in multilingual mode
• ResourceLinks control cannot add reference to external script if the path does not contain extension (PITS)
• Categories & Tags widgets: widget title was visible even when there are no created categories/tags
• Multi-site Management: Classification widget displays classifications used by other sites
• Pages > Title & Properties: Include RadScriptManager option is not persisted correctly
• User Controls that are in a separate class library can now be added to a back-end page in Sitefinity

Multisite:

• When a ML website with split pages that have child pages is deleted  an error is returned and the website is not deleted until the page is refreshed

Personalization:

• IE: Auto-complete in location characteristic is not working
• Personalized content of page is not visible on front-end under Cassini
• ML: Cannot personalize a page in the non-default language from Actions menu

Content blocks:

• Shared Content edit doesn’t force the same shared content in template to refresh
• Content block widget is not marked as Shared if the page template contains Content block widget pointing to the same content block
• Content block widget: saving Advanced settings results in empty content block designer (PITS)

Email Campaigns:

• Suspended subscribers are still counted in the confirmation message when you send an issue
• The name of the subscriber is not displayed in the “To” field of the email clients
• Style tags in Master page for Email Template not recognized (PITS)
• Content items with apostrophe in the URL result in error in the received campaign - "A potentially dangerous Request.QueryString value was detected"
• Export 200 000 subscribers results in server error "Invalid attempt to call IsDBNull when reader is closed."
• Duplicate emails when importing subscribers or adding from existing

E-commerce

• Internet Explorer:  cannot save a product when a document file is removed
• Can’t read/write to dynamic fields added to a customer
• Inventory quantity is not updated when two users purchase same product at the same time
• Inventory report errors if no products exist in the store
• Department widget shows 0 products when showing the count of products
• Discount not applied if user is in the anonymous role
• Shipping rates incorrect after quantity has be reduced during checkout because of reduced inventory
• No message displayed on the shopping cart if quantity exceeds inventory
• On the shopping cart, base price and extended price have wrong strike-through styles applied
• Product attributes not accessible after deleting product type
• Incorrect message on multilingual site during checkout if USPS configured
• Deleting an Authorized Order changes inventory quantity
• Deleting a payment method while customers are on Place Order page causes error message
• Adding last product to cart shows incorrect message to customer
• Reducing inventory in the backend shows incorrect message to customer
• Inventory Report shows incorrect status for product with variations and out of stock
• Sort items drop-down visible on product list even when set to not show.
• NewQuantity property in ProductInventoryChanged event not set for variations (PITS)
• Department count not updating after product reactivated (PITS)

Permissions & Users:

• Permissions > Pages: user that doesn't have permissions to edit group page, could enter the page for edit
• User selection dialog throws error "Object object" when 100 administrators exist in database (PITS)

Responsive design

• When no rules are applicable for a page or the responsive design module is turned off the CSS is not included.

Breaking Changes

• JavaScript libraries (JQuery, JQuery Cookie, JQuery Validate and etc.) are not always loaded on front-end. So, if you explicitly use some of these libraries, you need to take care to add them on the page.