Sitefinity 5.4 and beyond, more work to do

Ok, so 5.3 is here and gone, last update for 2012…what are your thoughts?

Me personally?  This was sold as a polish update from day one no new features. So did we get polish…using my obnoxious giant list as a reference…I’d say no :)  Or at least yes, for a couple things.  Perhaps this is what Ivan meant by 5.3 won’t be the only release sold as polish.

Now doesn’t mean it’s still not a good update, we cleaned off two MAJOR missing (requested) things in ML Modules, eComm inventory, edit module builder items (although you should have let us edit the field control types too), and Shared Content (plus some more performance improvements)…but…

• I’m still staring at scrollbars
• Still no sorting of picker content
• I still can’t deliver forms results to my users in an usable format
• Libraries are still not nestable by users
• Still can’t edit all widget templates in the backend, and changes aren’t versioned
• Still no UI for page custom fields
• The code fix I submitted LONG ago, still not there.  Even a new one which would put SEO meta-data onto dynamically generated pages was shot down as “potential regression”…which is just outright incorrect.
• etc etc etc

So from my end, the sites I do\have done…I install 5.3…and there’s nothing new in here for me.  My users won’t notice any of the bug fixes listed (outside of more ajax loading icons, wish I took inventory of those before the update).  Certainly expertly executed the monumental task of delivering this in no time at all, don’t get me wrong…but this was not our promised polish update.

Perhaps it’s a terminology disconnect maybe?  We want a “fluff” update…something to show the users that the annoying things they complain to us about are gone.  Again we’re not talking about bug fixes like “Reindexing doesn’t work with Oracle”, we assume those things are gonna be fixed and snuck in under the hood. ome weird important bugs that 2 of 100 users experience is something that’s just invisible to our users.  If it took 5 hours to fix, great, needed to be fixed, a bug is a bug, but our users do not see it.

The big new features (enhancements) listed above are what we’re talking about.  If it took 100 hours (as an example) to implement the one ML dynamic module feature, we were hoping instead we’d get 20 smaller fluff annoyances out of the way.

Not even that ML and Shared content shouldn’t have been there and planned, but give us just one and have the other teams crank out the fluff…I’m sure it wouldn’t have taken very long for someone to just change\set sorting on the media item pickers…then there’s till more time for other stuff.

Telerik did do a good job with this update!_ …it’s just not the update we were hoping for.