Sitefinity Release Notes

What's New

Dev Tools

• Upgraded Kendo UI to version 2013.3.1119
• Upgraded RadControls to version 2013.3.1114 ( 2013 Q3 SP1)
• Upgraded OpenAccess ORM to version 2013.3.1211

SEO Improvements

• Custom URLs for pages: editors have full control over page URLs and can shorten them notwithstanding the page position in the site hierarchy (PITS)
• Home page opens site root: admins can set the URL of the Home page to be the same as the domain (in Advanced Settings > Pages)
• Absolute URLs: admins can set all URLs on the site to include absolute and not relative paths (in Advanced Settings > System > Site URL Settings)
• Settings for URL generated from Title: admins can set on central location the rules for generating URL from content title (in Advanced Settings> Site URL Settings)
• Trim special symbols from URL: special symbols in the beginning or the end of item title are not included in the generated URL for this item
• Title edits of Published items do not re-generate the URL of the item

Widgets

• Revision history for widget templates: option  to track changes in old version of widget templates
• Content widgets: Ability to filter content by custom taxonomies, in addition to the built-in ones (PITS)
• Image Gallery, Video Gallery, Download List: Option to display items from selected library and not from its sub libraries

Module builder

• Module configurations are exported/imported together with the module structure. All customizations made in the configurations are imported together with the module
• Dynamic module structure and configurations can be updated through import package. This make easy moving module modifications between different environments using import/export functionality
• Deleting dynamic module field/type drops related objects (columns and tables) from the database

Comments

• Subscription for Comments notifications. The  option is available for registered users and can be enabled per Content Type (in Advanced Settings> Comments Module) (PITS)
• Comments controls are reworked to consume the new RESTful web service (built with ServiceStack).  The existing WCF web service is obsolete
• Public events can be used to customize the default behavior of comments and to cover scenarios such as additional spam protection, custom notification logic, etc.

Site Sync

• Synchronization of Form definitions
• Option to stop gracefully or abort synchronization
• Improved pending items selection screen with sorting by column, a new "parent" column, and filtering by taxonomies

Mobile

• Mobile devices preview updated with 20 new phones and tablets in Page editor and Personalization preview: iPhone 5, BlackBerry Curve 8300, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Storm 9900, LG G2, LG Optimus G, Nokia Lumia 1020, Nokia Lumia 620, Nokia Lumia 710, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Samsung Galaxy S4, Sony Xperia Z1, HTC On, iPad Air, iPad mini, Samsung Galaxy Tab (New version), Google Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, Microsoft Surface Pro

Styling

• The built-in Pager control exposes properties for the text and CSS class name of the rendered links
• (beta) Front-end theme based on LESS is available for download from GitHub. Contains styles for: buttons, typography, tables, etc. as well as for Sitefinity front-end widgets: News, Events, Forums, etc. 
• (beta) LessModule is available for download from  GitHub  both source and  DLLs are compiled for Sitefinity 6.3

Error Logging

• New logging is introduced by the Error Logging Modules and Handlers (ELMAH) as a plug-in to the Enterprise Library. For more details, see Logging.

Analytics

• Content items display icon for quick access to analytics statistics in the grid and item detail view
• Multisite support: Analytics can be setup to work for multiple Sitefinity sites

Ecommerce

• Tier pricing:  shop owners can specify different prices depending on quantity (PITS)
• Taxes: Import and export to CSV file, bulk deletion of taxes
• Thumbnails support in ecommerce widgets: thumbnails generated with Sitefinity can be used in the Ecommerce widgets  (PITS)
• Comments for products - comments can be enabled for products (in Advanced Settings>Comments Module) (PITS)
• Products widget> Advanced Settings: added field “metaTitleField” which can be mapped to a product custom field and be used for inserting custom titles for products (PITS)

Other

• Project Manager: During upgrade the Project Manager updates the web.config files with the changes introduced with the new release.Web.config updates are applied for all versions since Sitefinity 5.4 HF3 (5.4.4040)
• Pages, Taxons, Forms: Option to use custom attributes in the Backend (see video)
• Content widgets: Ability to filter content by custom taxonomies, in addition to the built-in ones (PITS)
• Image Gallery, Video Gallery, Download List: Option to display items from selected library and not from its sub libraries
• Forms: Possibility to specify custom email addresses as recipients of forms responses (PITS)

• Events: Option to filter events in Calendar view by taxonomies (PITS)

• Multilingual> Page Selector: Functionality to select language of the page to link to
• Forums: Allowed attachment file extensions can be specified on forum level
• Workflow: Enabled workflows to run InProcess (instead of XAMLX WCF services)

DAM / Sitefinity Desktop Application

• Filtering for media and content items
• Search for content items
• Multiple providers support for content items
• My recent items include media items
• Improved browsing experience for dynamic modules with multiple content types

Connectors

Share Point

• New version and version comment is added when synchronizing events or documents
• Synchronization between SharePoint approval status and Sitefinity workflow status
• Option to skip synchronization of items that are not Approved (in SharePoint) or Published (in Sitefinity)
• Ability to synchronize filtered items from SharePoint list, calendar or library. Tags synchronization and filter by tags or custom flat classifications.

SalesForce

• Ability to map user and form fields with fields in SalesForce contact or lead in the UI
• Validation for the SalesForce filter field selector

Marketo

• Improved performance when loading pages which contain a Sitefinity FormsControl while the Connector for Marketo module is enabled
• Improved performance when using personalization based on Marketo lead score or lead fields by using cache for the leads

What's Fixed

Pages

• In the Backend, parent page collapses unexpectedly when the user is done editing a child page (PITS)
• Content block hyperlink manager presents incorrect URL to pages (PITS)
• Split pages queried with SiteMapBase return the incorrect language node (PITS)
• When editing the URL of a page, a trailing white space can be added, causes 404 (PITS)
• Adding a translation of a duplicated page under a split page (PITS)
• Problem with editing non default language translation of child under a page which has the same URL for both languages
• Backend search for pages in ML is case sensitive (PITS)
• In Multilingual mode, creating a translation which has been deleted previously, restores the content of the page as well (PITS)

Module builder

• Dynamic module cannot be deleted in Firefox 25
• Dynamic module cannot be deleted in Multi-Table Entities mode
• Dynamic items cannot be unlocked in non-default provider
• Paging and filtering is not working with EvaluationMode=QueryString.
• Unit information of Number field is duplicated every time an item is Published (PITS)
• Importing a wrong zip file do not provide any error message (PITS)

Images

• Changing image URL with the URL of another image doesn`t alerts the user (PITS)
• Sitefinity doesn’t serve the correct mime type (PITS)
• HTML Editor> Inserting Image: Option 'Clicking the resized image opens the image in its original size' is missing (restored for insert only)

Comments

• Comments widget is serving up the avatar full original sized images and not thumbnails
• Comments submit form template is missing in widget templates
• Invalid empty screen in Comments section when accessed by non admin user
• The name and email fields are editable
• Performance degradation in content backend  sections (Images, Blogs, News, Events) for projects that contain many Comments

Taxonomies

• Tags are not ordered alphabetically when creating a new content item
• Categories are not ordered alphabetically when creating a new content item
• Content>Backend: Selected categories per content are not saved when "Done" button in the category selector is not clicked

Email Campaigns

• Email deliveries are counted as delivered when they have actually failed (PITS)
• OptimisticVerificationException is received when updating campaigns statistics (PITS)
• Statistic is not correct when there are missing headers in the email

Search

• Removing forums module breaks search indexes even when they are not indexing forums
• Document titles are not indexed, if the document format is not supported for content extraction (PITS)

Site Sync

• After recycle a synchronization in progress does not resume
• Items are synchronized in random order
• Removing the parent of a child dynamic module (thus moving it to the root) is not synced correctly
• Deleting a target server should remove scheduled tasks for this server
• Timeout exception is thrown when syncing unpublished product item which has associated taxa
• After a module is synced the details log does not show that the type is synced, it shows only the items
• The ContentLink.ChildItemAdditionalInfo property is not synchronized
• "Everyone" permission is added for a widgets on the destination

Feeds

• Twitter feed widget does not support twitter avatars
• Cannot add more than one Twitter feed widget on a page
• Twitter inbound pipe duplicates the items when tweets are fewer then described in pipe's setting

Analytics

• Set up errors when there is a user without user profile (Created through API) (PITS)
• JS code from the backend does not work (PITS)
• Analytics loses its settings occasionally
• Multilingual pages do not opens proper analytics statistics
• When there is a country with zero visits the map throws an error on click
• Content Edit shows analytics stats and link when the Analytics module is deactivated

• Navigating to another page while analytics report is loading shows alert with JSON data in it

Ecommerce

• Filter/Sorting options are lost after user click on [Items per page] (PITS)
• Wrong card number showed in the backend (PITS)
• Filter By Price in Non-USD currency has gaps in price ranges
• Product filter not correctly filtered products by price when there is expired SalePrice
• Product Details> [add to wish list] link is visible even [Allow user to add products to wish list] is false

Other

• Security: Administrators cannot reset the password for a locked user (PITS)
• Content Widgets: Filtering content in a widget designer by many categories throws error on Publishing the page (PITS)
• User Profiles: Avatar Upload in profile widget does not work in multilingual on a translated page (PITS)
• Taxonomies: Having many tags assigned to a Dynamic content item leads to 400 Bad request when editing the item (PITS)
• Dashboard: Adding combineScriptsBackEnd="false" in PagesConfig.config causes the Dashboard widget designer to crash (PITS)

• Custom fields: Deleting custom field from static module doesn’t the corresponding columns from the database
• Forums: Forum page selector returns disabled selection in multilingual
• Forms: JavaScript error during submit when using CAPTCHA in form (PITS)
• Inline editing: Required validation is not working for Date fields
• Multilingual>Breadcrumb: PagesSelector in breadcrumb widget doesn`t allow selection of pages in multilingual sites (PITS)
• Personalization: module cannot have custom Personalization criteria Content Locations Service: A location is added even the if the ContentView control is set to display items in a different page
• Module app builder: Mobile application cannot be open for edit in Firefox 25
• NLB: When a node is down the rest nodes could be slowed down (e.g. on publish item)

  Connectors

  
  

  SharePoint

• Error is thrown when synchronizing libraries to dynamic content
• Sitefinity fields, used as filters, are not updated for the newly created items
• Issue with the synchronization mapping when syncing libraries to dynamic modules
• Issue with SharePoint sync performance when syncing large lists

  SalesForce

• SalesForce field is not cleaned after changing the direction of sync
• Sitefinity form fields in the field mapping screen are displayed with developer name
• The PK field when syncing with SalesForce is not calculated in the Backend
• There is no check for incorrect account
• If you have '(' symbol in the contacts filter, value synchronization is not created properly
• Cannot sync Sitefinity users to SalesForce leads with some of the filters

  Marketo

• Removed the custom PersonalizationConsole, PersonalizationService and PersonalizationTestContext
• Removed the MarketoConnectorInstaller which was called on PreApplicationStart

  DAM / Sitefinity Desktop Application

• Discrepancies between allowed file formats for media fields in Sitefinity and DAM
• Choices field selection is not persisted when the created field value type is different from integer
• Cannot open Address field when Country has additional selector for province, e.g. states in USA

   

  Known Issues

  • Sitefinity 3.7 Migration Tool: Comments are migrated but not displayed on the new site
  • Forms: Deleting form or form field doesn’t remove the corresponding objects from the database 
  • Analytics: Dynamic modules created prior to 6.3 or with inactivated Analytics module,  will not have links to Content Analytics in the Backend out of the box. To enable the links, follow the instructions in this KB

  Breaking Changes

  SiteMapBase

  The following protected methods were removed:
  • protected virtual PageSiteNode FindAdditionalUrl(string[] urls, string rawUrl, out string[] parameters, out bool paramsMismatch)
  • protected internal PageSiteNode FindAdditionalUrl(string[] urls, string rawUrl, bool ignoreCulture, out string[] parameters, out bool paramsMismatch)

    The new methods to be used instead are:

  • protected virtual PageSiteNode FindNodeByAdditionalUrl(string rawUrl, string[] urlSegments, out ISiteMapAdditionalUrl additionalUrlInfo)
  • protected virtual string[] GetAdditionalUrlParameters(PageSiteNode node, ISiteMapAdditionalUrl additionalUrlInfo, string rawUrl, out bool paramsMismatch) protected IList<AdditionalUrlProxy> GetAdditionalUrlsByRoot(string urlRoot)

  Comments

  • All base interfaces related custom events in Sitefinity are moved into a newly created assembly named Telerik.Sitefinity.Services.Events. As a result you can declare custom events without the need of referencing Telerik.Sitefinity assembly. Note that you must add a reference to Telerik.Sitefinity.Services.Events.dll in each project that consumes/produces events otherwise you will get a compile-time error.
  • Use spam protection image setting in comments module configuration is now moved from Default settings and Commentable types into root level. The reason for this change is to easily enable/disable captcha protection on your web site instead of doing this per content type.
  • UpdateComment and UpdateThread methods of the CommentServise are modified to return the updated comment.

  Ecommerce

  • Ecommerce Thumbnails  To make use of the thumbnails, it is strongly recommended to update your css and Ecommerce widget templates if you use custom ones. Before version 6.3 system thumbnail was used on all ecommerce widgets. Now this thumbnail is used only if no thumbnail size, or if the thumbnails for the selected size are not generated. There are new css classes added for each default thumbnail profile as a fallback for css resize if one of the images doesn't have generated thumbnail.
  • DoNotSyncInventoryAfterInitialSync Before version 6.3 on site sync all content for a product was been synced from source to target server. In version 6.3 we added an advanced property defined in Catalog Config section called DoNotSyncInventoryAfterInitialSync which is TRUE by default which means that we will not override inventory for products that have been already synced at least ones. If you want to work as before and sync everything always (the inventory as well) you need to set this property to FALSE.