Dear all,
Sitefinity team is glad to let you know that Sitefinity 4.2 is now released. This is a big release, lots of new things and improvements made it to it. We will appreciate any feedback you might have.
What’s New
Ecommerce
Sitefinity ecommerce allows users to setup and operate their online stores by the use of Sitefinity pages and widgets. The module is available in Sitefinity Enterprise and Professional editions, and as a separate add-on.
Features includedTeam Builder
- Create an online store easily and quickly
- Create pages and drag/drop widgets for Ecommerce functionality
- Multi currency support
- Navigational widget to display departments in a menu or a list
Product Listing/Product Detail
- View all products or a single product
- Configure the product listing using paging and sorting
- Display product information such as title, description, SKU, weight and images
- Product Images can be uploaded and resized to show throughout the online store
- Alternate images or videos can be displayed on the product detail page
- Display sale price
Shopping Cart
- Displays line items in the shopping cart
- Change quantity
- Remove items from the shopping cart
- Shopping cart summary widget displays a shopping cart link or expandable cart
Checkout
- Multiple page checkout
- Collect customers shipping and billing addresses
- Collect payment information
- Transparent payment processing through Authorize.NET AIM and PayPal PayflowPro
- Redirect to a merchant defined “Thank you” page and an email is sent to customer
Product Search
- Create a search index for products
- Easily create a SearchResult page and drag on the Search Result widget to display search results
My Account
- Customer can log into their account information and see past orders and view order details
- Customers can print their invoice
Product Catalog Management
Create products, types of products, and departments in the Products catalog area.
Products
- Create products with titles, description, weight, SKU, price, and tax information
- Upload and resize images (primary and alternate images), reorder images
- Assign products to departments and tags
- Put a product on Sale for a specified date range
- Assign a role to customer when a specific product is purchased. Allows for role based content
Product Types
- Create product types with any number of fields
- Specify required fields, field data types and lengths
- The ultimate in expendability
Departments
- Create hierarchical departments with parent/child relationships
- Reorganize departments
- Assign products to one or many departments
Order Management
The order management area allows the merchant to view customers and orders. Each order shows details of products purchased, shipping address and billing address. The merchant can define shipping methods or they can set up a real-time shipping rate provider as well. The merchant can set up a payment processor to process transaction in real-time.
Customer
- View all customers
- View all orders for one customer (order status, amount, date)
Orders
- View all orders (Order number, order status, subtotal, date)
- View one order (billing and shipping address, line items, shipping method)
- Mark an order paid or shipped
Shipping Methods
- Configure “off-line” shipping methods based on country, area, state, range of weights, prices, quantity or a fixed rate per order or fixed percentage of the order total
- Configure FedEx Real-time rates
- Designate FedEx Shipping Services
- Set product types to be shippable or non-shippable
Discounts
- Create site wide discounts for a percentage off or specified dollar amount within a date range
Payment Methods
- Configure Offline payment method or bypass credit card processing
- Configure Authorize.Net AIM and select credit cards for processing for a Sale transaction.
- Configure Paypal PayFlowPro and select credit cards for processing for a Sale transaction.
Taxes
- Configure sales tax for US and Canada and VAT for other countries based on billing or shipping address
- Set products to be taxable or non-taxable
- Tax shipping if requested
- Configure prices on storefront to show VAT in the product price
Store Settings
- Create default settings for currency, country, unit of mass & length, shipping from country, shipping from zip, merchant email
Reports
- Run reports by date range
- Exportable to csv and pdf format
File system storage for Images, Videos, Documents & Files
Added ability to specify file system storage for the files in Images, Videos, Documents & Files. The option can be set on a library level, and enables the efficient use of server space.
User Documentation
Template Builder
Launched Sitefinity Template Builder which empowers users having little or no experience with HTML and CSS to create template & themes for Sitefinity websites in an easy drag and drop manner. The outputted files (ASP.NET Master-pages, CSS, images) can be then imported to a selected Sitefinity project using the ‘Template Importer module’ included in the Sitefinity SDK 4.2 release, or can be used as a regular Master-page and theme in your ASP.NET application.
Online Link, User Documentation, Blog post
Migration Module 3.x to 4.x.
The Migration tool is now available as a standard Sitefinity module. It can be used to migrate Sitefinity 3.7. SP4 projects to version 4.2. This release of the module is marked as Alpha.
Performance Improvements
Achieved overall improvement in the load time of backend and frontend pages.
- Optimized the sitemap and loading of Navigation controls
- Removed unnecessary database calls when resolving widget templates
- Optimized the loading of shared content blocks when there are many pages with content block widgets
- Introduced ASP.NET wrappers performance optimizations
Feeds Improvements
- Added option to filter feeds by category, tag, date, and language
- Added ability to schedule the running of feeds imported from external sources
- Added custom modules and custom fields support in feeds
Multilingual Support Improvements
- Added option to search content in specific language
- Added ability to translate Page Templates
- Enabled the separate publishing of content and pages in different language versions
Other
- Forms: Added option to sort form entries
- Forms: Added ability to export responses to excel format
- Workflow: Added configuration properties for setting workflow operation time outs
- Added SitefinitySitemapDatasource
- Introduced fluent API for backend definitions
- Implemented the use of definitions of Taxonomies Backend
Upgraded Developer Tools
- OpenAccess ORM - to Q2 2011 (2011.2.713.3)
- RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX - to Q2 2011 (2011.2.712.40)
- RadControls for Silverlight - to 2011.1.419.1040
- jQuery – to 1.6.2 (Release notes)
What’s Fixed
Pages
- Anonymous user accessing unpublished page gets 403 error and not 404 error (PITS)
- Pages with "show in navigation" false are visible in the Rad Menu (PITS)
- When duplicating a page with custom URL, the URL of the new page is not generated automatically but stays the same (PITS)
- Closing pages search, causes pages grid to sort by list view, even if it was sorted by Hierarchy previously (PITS)
- Layout Editor: When editing a layout widget, the width of each column is set as inline CSS even if the width is not explicitly changed (PITS)
Widgets
- When dragging a widget to a page, the CSS styles of the widget are not included automatically and apply only after reloading the page (Ticket ID: 382446)
- Lists items: Setting a widget template different than the default one, is not applied (PITS)
- Lists items: When more than one lists are selected, they don’t display in the order of selection on the public site (PITS)
- Content Blocks: Setting a word as a link, makes the whole paragraph a link (PITS)
- Content Blocks: Sharing an empty content block results in error "Sequence contains no elements" (PITS)
- Content Blocks: Inserting a link to a Sitefinity page in the link manager, displays only this page as option upon subsequent opening of the link manager (PITS)
- Content Blocks: In the Document Manger dialog, inserting a link to a document item and clicking on its properties results in error (PITS)
- Navigation widget: Caching issues with page nodes which are restricted to specific users/groups (PITS)
- Download list: Filtering a document list widget with pagination is not applied correctly (PITS)
- Archive: Clicking on pagination in the Archive widget opens the wrong URL (PITS)
Content
- Filtering by date modified and selecting a custom range shows a displaced calendar (PITS)
- Comments: No validation is applied to email and web site fields (PITS)
- Custom Fields, Forms: Setting upper limitation on a text custom field is not applied (PITS, PITS)
- Custom Fields: Saving multiple choices in a custom field of type Multiple choice causes serialization exception (PITS)
- Forms: Updates to widgets are not properly saved in Forms (PITS)
- Images: Selecting an image highlights it in blue improperly (PITS)
Page Templates
- Creating a master template with the same name as an existing master file results in error "Duplicated Name!" (PITS)
- When creating a template, that is based on a nested master page, extra layout element spaces are added (PITS, PITS)
- Changing a page template doesn’t apply immediately (Forum Post)
Users and Permissions
- When a user is set as an owner of a page or other content item, this user doesn’t get permissions to access the item automatically (PITS)
- User associated to a role with rights to see everything, sees only the "Dashboard" page when he/she logs in (PITS)
- Non-admin user cannot revert a page to an older version saved by an admin user (PITS, PITS)
- Pages: Users see links to pages for which they don’t have permissions in all sort modes other than “by Hierarchy” (PITS)
- Login screen: When the login session expires, user trying to log in sees message “Someone is already using this username…” (PITS)
- Cookies: When user logs out, .ASPXAUTH cookie is not cleared (PITS)
- Users: Create a photo> 'Create a new album' option doesn’t work (Forum Post)
- ASP.NET SQL Membership provider: Clicking on ‘Forgot your password’ link on the login screen results in error (PITS, PITS)
Email Campaigns (previously: Newsletters)
- Attempt to open the link manager while editing a temple, throws a JavaScript error(PITS)
- Subscribers list is not sorted correctly by email(PITS)
- No validation for proper email is made on the Subscribe widget(PITS)
- Importing users doesn’t update the number of subscribers on the Overview page(PITS)
- Accessing a Sitefinity page with URL “[server]/newsletters” results in server error(PITS)
- Sending a test message produces an email message without content (PITS)
- Importing a list of subscribers twice duplicates the records although option 'Imported subscribers with emails that already exist in the list should replace existing subscribers' has been selected (Ticket ID: 404433)
Ecommerce
- Deleting a product which participates in placed orders, results in error when viewing the orders (PITS)
- Deletion of a tax which has been applied to a product, causes error when opening this product (PITS)
- Creating a tax doesn’t update the taxes grid (PITS)
- In Checkout Overview step some fields show wrong content (PITS)
Multilingual Support
- Pages: A link inserted to a translated page in split mode is not resolved properly (PITS)
- Pages: Unnecessary messages appear when publishing/unpublishing a split page or a page that has only one translation (Forum Post)
- Download list widget: Opening the ‘Download list widget’ and selecting ‘From selected library’ displays search option in the default language only (PITS)
- Content: Deleting a language version of a content item doesn’t hide it from the public site (PITS)
- Content>Images: With one language, saving an image displays unnecessary warning (Forum Post)
- Content>Forms: When translating a form from the default to another language, the labels are missing (PITS)
Other
- Themes: Adding a theme in ‘Settings>Appearance>Frontend themes’ and applying it to a template results in ‘CSS files not found’ errors (Forum Post)
- Feeds: Dropping an RSS widget to a page which has a parent page, breaks the URL address of the RSS feed
- Backend Pages: Attempt to edit Dashboard widgets causes error (PITS)
- Backend Pages: Search for items containing an ampersand & causes error (PITS)
- Workflow: Administrators can skip workflow steps even if option 'Allow administrators to skip the workflow’ is set to false (PITS)
- Workflow: JavaScript error shows when there are 100 users in the application, and someone clicks on ‘Select users’ during Workflow creation (PITS)
- Workflow> Two steps of approval: Users in step 2 of approval can skip the workflow on subsequent edits (PITS)
- IE7: Part of some section titles are not visible in Sitefinity Backend (PITS)
- IE7: An attempt to create a child page from Actions tab results in error (PITS)
Upgrades
- Supported Upgrade Paths: from Sitefinity 4.1, 4.1. SP 2 and 4.1. SP 3
Older versions should be upgraded to one of these first.
- Upgrade Instructions:
Known Issues - Link
Breaking Changes - Link
Best wishes,
Sitefinity team