Sitefinity CMS 14.0 Beta is Now Available
Dear Sitefinity CMS customers and partners! We are excited to invite you to the Sitefinity CMS 14.0 Beta program, which is open for participation starting today until August 16th.
We look forward to supporting you as you test drive the Beta version of the next major upcoming release in your environments. Most importantly, we are eager to gather your comprehensive feedback so we can evolve Sitefinity 14.0 to be the most valuable release for you yet. At the end of the Beta period, we'd like to invite you to share your thoughts on the latest functionality with the rest of the Sitefinity community and market via testimonials for our website, press releases and campaigns.
Below you will find the details about what is included in this Beta release, how to obtain the Beta software and how to communicate with us if you have any feedback.
How do I get the Beta release?
Only current Sitefinity CMS customers with active maintenance and registered Sitefinity partners are eligible to participate in the Beta program. Sitefinity CMS 14.0 Beta is provided to customers via their customer accounts. To obtain the Beta installation,
login to Your Account and click on Downloads → Sitefinity CMS. Switch to the Betas tab, where you can find the download link to the Sitefinity CMS installer and the Beta license file, valid for
30 days.
When you install the Beta version, as usual, you need to accept the Terms and Conditions for the Beta program as a click-through agreement. We do not recommend updating your production environment to the Beta release, as we will not
support version upgrades from the Beta versions. However, you can certainly use our Export/Import option to recreate a version of your site for working with the Beta version.
If you are using NuGet, NuGet packages are available on http://nuget.sitefinity.com/ (use
pre-release tag) and the package name is 14.0.7650.0-beta.
How do I communicate with the Sitefinity team regarding Beta?
Please feel free to initiate threads in the Progress Sitefinity community group on community.progress.com as well as the Progress community Feature Preview and Betas group for broader discussions concerning the Beta program. We will monitor these forums.
What do we expect from Beta participants?
The Sitefinity team is very grateful to all participants who will dedicate their time to help us validate our new release. This is a feature-rich release, and it will be impossible for Beta users to examine all the new features and updates. Therefore,
we recommend that you focus on those (few) that are most applicable to your current or anticipated usage of Sitefinity CMS. We have been in contact with a good number of customers and partners to review the features in the design phase, and we expect
these users to focus on the features that we have discussed, as that fits their context best.
It would be ideal if you, as a Beta user, prepare a Beta report at the end of the Beta period. This will inform us which new features you evaluated, whether everything worked in accordance with your expectations, and whether you have any further suggestions
regarding the features. In any case, should you need to communicate anything to us as the Beta program goes on, please use the Beta program email.
We also intend to send a Beta survey at the completion of this Beta program to all of you who downloaded the Beta. Thus, you can provide us with any valuable feedback, comments, and suggestions about the Beta features at the end of the program through
the survey.
What's New in Sitefinity 14.0 Beta
Expanded system integration via business events and service hooks
To improve Sitefinity's extensibility and allow you to integrate with practically any third party service, we introduce the Service hooks module. Service hooks allow for easier integration of Sitefinity CMS with third party systems. With them you
can run tasks on other services when an event happens in your Sitefinity CMS site. For instance, you can send a notification to an app when a news item has been published. In the Service hooks UI, available for some license editions, you can now create
custom triggers or choose between more than 20 trigger events out of the box that can send data to your integrated services. Although the Service hook module replaces the Webhooks module, Webhooks remain available to everyone in advanced settings
and are automatically migrated to Service hooks when you update to 14.0.
What to focus on:
- Create service hooks with the UI.
- Configure authentication for service hooks
- Create custom actions and triggers
Learn more...
New Progress NativeChat chatbot widget
NativeChat is a cloud service for creating chatbots and easily integrating them with existing systems. Chatbots can interact with users naturally by understanding natural language expressions. Then they can generate reactions and responses based on a
cognitive flow definition. As a Sitefinity CMS user, you can easily consume existing NativeChat chatbots and show them on your sites. To do this, simply drag and drop the newly introduced NativeChat widget into your page or page template, configure
your widget to use a specific bot with the widget designer, and Sitefinity CMS will take care of the rest.
Learn more...
Expanded SiteSync functionality for Content editors - allow Content Editors to sync unpublished, scheduled for publish/unpublish and deleted items and pages
Content editors, depending on permissions, can now sync single or multiple items and pages with different states. This makes it easier to make small changes, such as fix typos, and allows administrators to focus on other tasks.
What to focus on:
- Sync content items with backend users.
- Sync items in different states.
- Sync items in bulk.
Learn more...
New authentication protocol
The new authentication protocol is intended to obsolete SimpleWebToken - SWT and OpenId which rely on the use of internal identity providers shipped with Sitefinity. This will significantly reduce complexity (both for development and for customer
use) and improve performance as well as maintainability and ease the migration path away from .NET Framework to .NET Core.
Learn more...
External app authorization
Independent from any identity provider support for OAuth2.0 authorization code, implicit and resource owner flows is introduced with the new authentication protocol. For machine to machine authorization Sitefinity access keys can
be used in both OpenId protocol and Default protocol.
Learn more...
Sitefinity Component Framework
An npm package containing reusable Angular elements, such as components, directive, services and helpers, built following the design principles of Sitefinity, and serving as building blocks for creating a user interface.
Learn more...
Measure content views and attribution for videos and video galleries hosted in Sitefinity CMS
With Sitefinity CMS and Sitefinity Insight, you can analyze the performance of your content by counting views of content items and by measuring their impact on conversions. We are introducing the ability to track videos and video galleries in addition
to the already supported content items.
Learn more...
Reinvented UI - moving towards complete feature parity
Mobile Preview Redesign
The Mobile preview functionality is now available with a reinvented look and feel. You can preview how your pages look on mobile devices with various resolutions.
Learn more...
Page Templates Management Redesign
Feature parity for template management - list and operations. It is now easier filter templates with the Filter templates menu and you can sort them directly in the page.
Learn more...
.NET Core Renderer [CTP]
Continuing the improvement of the .NET Core application, with this release we added more widgets and improved the functionality of the new page editor:
- Page and Widget based personalization for the .Net Core based pages.
Learn more...
- Introduction of the Navigation widget
The new Navigation widget provides ready to use templates for Horizontal, Vertical, Tabs, Accordion widget views.
Learn more...
What's improved
Improved tracking of YouTube videos
Sitefinity CMS now automatically reports visitors interactions with YouTube videos to Siteifnity Insight. Your marketing team can then use this information to track their marketing goals and improve customer journeys.
Learn more...
Improved Headless API documentation section
New samples and new API reference added. New API extension procedures.
Learn more...
- TelerikUI for ASP.NET AJAX updated to 2021.2.511.45
- TelerikUI for WPF updated to 2021.2.511.45
- Kendo UI updated to 2021.2.511
- HtmlSanitizer updated to 5.0.376
- ServiceStack updated to 5.11.0
- Microsoft.Azure.Search updaed to 10.1.0
- Elasticsearch.Net and NEST updated to 7.12.1
- AWSSDK tooling updated to 3.7.0.11 and AWSSDK.S3 to 3.7.0.12
- .NET Runtime package updates for System.Runtime.CompilerServices.Unsafe and System.Text.Encoding.CodePages to 5.0.0
Known issues:
To trigger migration of Webhooks to the new service hooks Service hooks module have to be uninstalled and then installed again - after the upgrade to Sitefinity 14.0 Beta Service hooks module will be installed and run automatically but if there are any
Webhooks configured beforehand they will not be migrated until re-install of the module is performed.
Deprecated capabilities
- Sitefinity's built-in Ecommerce module is deprecated. All Ecommerce assembly files and APIs are removed from the project source code. Progress has partnered with Ucommerce to provide a comprehensive, feature-rich replacement. Learn more...
- Forms and SWT authentication mechanisms are deprecated. The basic settings authentication screen has been removed for new projects and is visible only for projects that use Forms authentication. Learn more...
- Sitefinity implementation of GitHub authentication provider won't be supported. GitHub announced that they are deprecating API authentication through query parameters as of September 8, 2021 Learn more...
Regards,
Progress Sitefinity Team