Hi,
After testing v3.0, I am definitely very pleased with it. Here are some of my thoughts:
- Far more intuitive than v2.x.
- the horizontal navigation menu and overall layout is easier to use. Has a more friendly "Web 2.0" look to it
- During page editing, I am very impressed with the drag and drop controls. One of the biggest problems my clients seemed to have with the old interface was remembering how to add a radeditor control to a new page. The new interface really makes this step easy!
- I also like how the controls have been named inuitively (such as "GeneralContent", etc.
- I like the expanded user administration functionality in the admin panel
- CSS / DIV based designs. Glad to see it!
- Although workflow is not in the alpha release, I believe the customization using the XML files will be one of the biggest advantages of the new version.
Here are a few potential problems I found while using the alpha (I'll try to list only items that haven't been already discussed in the forum)
- While editing a specific page (i.e. after clicking the 'edit page' button), I found that if I clicked any of the navigational components (top menu items, etc.), that I was no longer in edit mode when I landed on the desired page. I don't know whether this is a bug or design choice, but I personally found the ability to simultaneously browse and edit in v2.x very useful. If it is a design choice, I think the navigation menus should be disabled during edit so you can browse away from the admin panel by accident.
- Will there be an ability to edit/add new templates directly within the admin panel in v3.0? I am very glad to see master pages being used in this version, however I didn't see any built-in functionality to create/edit templates in the admin panel. As the developer, I like the idea of being able to user master pages to create the overall look, but I would like to be able to allow my clients to create simple templates directly in the admin panel.
- I found the installation process to be a little bit too clunky (too many manual steps). Some end users who purchase sitefinity may have difficulty knowing how to manually attached dbf files in SQL Server, etc. Will a wizard style installation be available with the beta? I would personally recommend at least including it as an option in the official release.
on a related note, one other thing I would like to see with v3.0 is an expanded developer's manual, including some sample projects where the base project has been expanded upon. There is very limited community discussion or resources on the web (probably because sitefinity is a relatively new product), and I would like to see more of it.
Anyway, overall I'm extremely impressed with v3.0. I've been using sitefinity since around v2.0 and I'm very happy to see its progression :) I'll continue to add more coments and feedback as I test it more.
Last question - will there be an 'upgrade' tool to bring 2.x sites into 3.0?
Thanks again!
Kevin