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Sitefinity 8.2 Beta Announcement

Authors

So this was quickly posted and yanked, but there’s lots of great stuff here that some people might not want to wait to see :)

This version contains Personalization per widget, Froms MVC widgets support, Performance and Upgrade improvements, extended Cloud Support for Azure Websites and more.

**Please, take a look and let us know what you think!

Important Note**: Sitefinity 8.2 Beta is not production ready and should not be used on live sites. Upgrades from and to it will not be supported.

What’s New

Online Marketing

Personalization on Widget Level

(documentation)
When editing a page or page template users can personalize on a widget level without having to create a new personalized version of the page or page template. This speeds the creation of personalized areas and eases the management of changes over time.

Personalizing widgets in page templates empowers users to reuse personalized blocks across numerous pages. Personalization support will be offered for the following widgets: Content block, Image, and Custom widgets.

Personalization by Multiple Segments** When a user in multiple segments loads a page, she sees all widgets personalized for those segments, and not only the widgets personalized for the highest priority segment, as it is now. In the backend, users previewing personalized pages can filter by more than one segments to see how the page will display to users in multiple segments.

Project Feather

Forms MVC Support (documentation)

Users can create forms that leverage the look and feel of an MVC website. Developers have full control over the markup of all form elements and caneasily customize and develop new custom forms widgets following Feather conventions.

The following features are included:

  • Form widget on MVC
  • Form Builder widgets on MVC: Textbox, Multiple choice, Checkboxes, Paragraph text box, Dropdown list, Section header, Instructional text, File upload, Forms Captcha, and Submit button
  • Form Builder layout widgets as in the Feather resource package

Unification of the Grid Widgets

The Page toolbox now dispplayes only one set of grid widgets, instead of separate section for the each packages. The templates of the grid widgets are loaded dynamically depending on the package on which is based the page.

(Note: NuGet packages are available on https://nuget.sitefinity.com. The packages are beta version with number 8.2.5880.0, so you need to switch to “PreRelease” version of NuGet Package Manager)

Cloud Support

Deployment to Azure Web Apps**

(documentation)
Admins can easily deploy Sitefinity projects to Azure Web Apps using Visual Studio or PowerShell scripts.  Redis is used for NLB communication.

Upgrades

Data Base Schema Changes Log 
(documentation)
Updates to the database schema done during upgrades are logged in the UpgradeTrace.log. This adds visibility into the upgrade process, and provides detailed info, which can be used for troubleshooting.

Performance

Performance Optimization Page (documentation)
In the Backend, a new page provides an overview of common settings that affect website performance. Administrators can use it to view the current state of these settings and the overall degree to which the website has been optimized.

SSL Offloading (documentation)
By using SSL offloading, Administrators can transfer the processing of SSL encryption and decryption from the webserver(s) to the load balancer or other device. It is useful when you have many HTTPS requests.

Dev Tools and Frameworks

What’s Fixed

Analytics

  • Changing a site domain and not updating Analytics data generates an error in the error log that cause performance issue (FP)
  • Filtering the analytics dashboards by visitors, languages, devices, etc creates an error log (FP)
  • Navigating to Marketing->Analytics after having active analytics connection generates error log (FP)

Core

  • Changing library root URL causes sitemap problems. (FP)
  • Widget Templates search doesn`t open the selected widget template. (FP)
  • The user activity is not updated when changing the user type from a backend to a frontend. (FP)
  • Replacing a picture with another one when using Azure blob storage provider cause an error “The specified blob does not exist” (FP)
  • Thumbnail Generation should not fail on missing file (FP)
  • Reordering: Generated duplicate ordinals (FP)

Comments

  • LDAP users do not see their names on comments. (FP)
  • Custom field of type “Number” with decimal places rounds the entered number (FP)

DataAccess

Email Campaigns

  • Email campaigns are sent with wrong hyperlinks when The Host property is not set (FP)
  • Campaigns in Multilingual: Issue cannot be send if the page contains News widget with selected option(FP)

AuditTrail/Search - Elastic

  • Add failover support for Elastic clusters to eliminate single point of failure.

Ecommerce

  • Shopping cart persists items between sites when they use the same domain
  • Navigating to a page with checkout widget with empty shopping cart throws Object reference
  • Shipping/Payment methods: translation status disappear when method is set to inactive
  • Requests to payment provider are always sent in the default currency (FP)
  • Overwrite the default ShoppingCartAdder (FP)

Events

  • Events with timezone different than UTC will be shown incorrectly in iCal on iPhone devices (FP)
  • Exporting all day events to Google calendar/Outlook/ICal (FP)

Feather

  • Using webforms widget on a hybrid page based on Bootsrap template throws ScriptManager object is not set to a reference
  • Feather assemblies that come from official distributions are signed.Since version 1.3.300.1 all feather packages contains signed assemblies. We updates some of the packs on thehttps://nuget.sitefinity.com and you might need to clear your NuGet cache in case you have already downloaded one of these packs.
  • Fixed issue with nuget ugprades of ResourcePackages when the folder and its content is not included in the csproj file.

Field Controls

  • Automatic migration of all TextFields of type NUMERIC and CURRENCY in order to continue to function properly after an upgrade to 8.1. Details: If you have a non-required custom field of type number after an upgrade to Sitefinity 8.1, leaving the field empty results in error “The value cannot be parsed as the type ‘decimal’” and the content item is not saved.

Forums

  • Forum attachments of posts/threads are not deleted (FP)
  • ForumsBreadcrumb: Selecting “Include full path starting from Home page” in the Forum widget designer doesn’t work in multisite environment

Inline Editing

  • Editing link is broken, when “Page from this site” option is selected and page from different site is chosen.

Login/Security

  • Add a configuration that allows to use frontend login page instead of backend login page.
  • Forms authentication doesn’t allow access to Sitefinity/Public and Sitefinity/Frontend to everybody.

Pages

  • Additional urls redirect to the default one option does not work correctly when configured for pages
  • External redirect pages are not listed in the navigation.
  • Wrong SiteMapNode Description in Multilingual (FP)

Module Builder

  • Moving configurations to database breaks the export of dynamic modules structure for modules created before configs are moved to database (FP)
  • Dynamic content items links are not resolved in search results after reindex (FP)
  • When exporting the dynamic content items Deleted items are also exported to the Excel file.

MVC

  • Page based on layout file will not be indexed if the Description and/or the Keyword properties are set
  • Html.RenderAction() throws and error when page is cached in some cases. (FP)

Personalization

  • Location criteria doesn`t include the state of the City selected (FP)
  • Can not change the SEO title of personalized page(FP)

SiteSync

  • SiteSync, Multisite: Related media and related data items are not visible on target server if they are limited to only one item (FP)
  • Sync all sites skips the sites that are on the second page of the sites list (FP)

Scheduling

  • ScheduledTasks: LastExecutedTime is not set (FP)

Taxonomies

  • Taxonomy synonyms are the same for all languages (FP)
  • Synonyms for tags do not appear in autocomplete (FP)
  • Tag synonyms doesn’t work when your synonym is more than one word(FP)
  • Deleting flat taxonomy synonyms throws an exception.
  • Deleting single tag synonym duplicates it.

Translations

  • Importing Xliff file with translation in Target section results in empty translation

Other

  • File not found in jquery.ui.theme.css (images/ui-bg_flat_75_ffffff_40x100.png)
  • Hyperlink manager modal window has wrong styles
  • Exposed DiscountCalculator
  • Improvements in Sitefinity installer and ProjectManager regarding trial installations of the product.

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