The era of 5.0 has begun–Sitefinity 5.0 released

Moments ago, the Sitefinity team uploaded Sitefinity 5.0.  This is our first release of 2012 and it adds numerous features and enhancements for Sitefinity customers.  We previewed this release a couple of weeks ago, but it’s now available to everyone to download and use.

Download Sitefinity 5.0 from your Telerik Account

What’s new in Sitefinity 5.0

Forums Module

Forums module enables your Sitefinity site to have Forums functionality. The module allows easy management of forum groups, threads and posts. In contrast to the 3.x Forums module, this implementation provides search, permissions, file attachments, e-mail notifications and feed subscriptions management. The performance is also taken in mind – Statistics subsystem takes care of all the visible forum counters (views, number of threads, forums), so that even large forums are performing really well.

Claims Authentication

This feature is based on Windows Identity Foundation. It opens the doors to Windows Authentication and Single Sign On support. You can configure several Sitefinity instances to work in Single Sign On mode. The implementation is done with FIPS standards in mind.

Mobile & Responsive Design
Sitefinity can now serve content ready for mobile devices. The content can be transformed in flexible and customizable way – for tablets, smartphones or any devices with custom resolution. The rules of content transformation are up to you and your target set of devices. The feature allows preview and rules management from the UI.

Sitefinity Thunder

This is a new developer productivity tool that is integrating with Visual Studio in order to help developers manage (create/edit/delete/deploy) Sitefinity assets on the fly. The Visual Studio plugin can connect to any Sitefinity instance even on a remote server. This speeds up the development and the support of any Sitefinity web site. The extension is be able to install new assets through templates – for example in this version, all files and folders needed for a Sitefinity theme can be installed with a click.

You can download Sitefinity Thunder from the Visual Studio Gallery

Module Builder Import/Export

Sitefinity 5.0 brings dynamic modules import and export functionality, dynamic module deletion and module data export to excel tables. This allows the developers to simply pack the modules as zip files and import them in any existing Sitefinity web site. The Module Builder also features new dynamic field types, which allow the developer to create one-to-many relationships in dynamic modules - Blog Post.

Ecommerce

The Ecommerce module has added functionality to allow merchants to sell Downloadable Goods.  Downloadable goods can be any type of media, images, pdf’s, music files, docs, text files, etc…  Customers can purchase the Downloadable goods and then download them from their “My Account” after they’ve logged in.  The Ecommerce module also offers a new pre-processing hook that allows developers to cancel an order based on some custom order processing before an order is placed.  The merchants can now filter orders for a specific date range.  And lastly, merchants can define multilingual product variations.

Migration Module

• Support for multilingual sites migration
• Support for user profiles migration

New Widgets

• Breadcrumb widget – by popular demand
• Page social sharing
• Video widget now supports social networks sharing
• User Registration widget
• Login widget using Cache Substitution Implementation

Upgraded Developer Tools

• OpenAccess is upgraded to 2011.3.1320.1

What’s fixed

In addition to new features, there are numerous fixes included in this release.  For a full list of the issues addressed in this release see the full release notes.

How to Upgrade

Upgrading from Sitefinity 4.4 to Sitefinity 5.0 will be no more complex than upgrading from Sitefinity 4.3 to Sitefinity 4.4.  For full upgrade instructions, visit our Upgrade Guide.

Download Sitefinity 5.0 from your Telerik Account