Release History

What’s new

Forums Module

Forums module enables your Sitefinity site to have Forums functionality. The module allows easy management of forum groups, threads and posts. In contrast to the 3.x Forums module, this implementation provides search, permissions, file attachments, e-mail notifications and feed subscriptions management. The performance is also taken in mind – Statistics subsystem takes care of all the visible forum counters (views, number of threads, forums), so that even large forums are performing really well. 

Claims Authentication

This feature is based on Windows Identity Foundation. It opens the doors to Windows Authentication and Single Sign On support. You can configure several Sitefinity instances to work in Single Sign On mode. The implementation is done with FIPS standards in mind.

Mobile & Responsive Design

Sitefinity can now serve content ready for mobile devices. The content can be transformed in flexible and customizable way – for tablets, smartphones or any devices with custom resolution. The rules of content transformation are up to you and your target set of devices. The feature allows preview and rules management from the UI.

Sitefinity Thunder

This is a new developer productivity tool that is integrating with Visual Studio in order to help developers manage (create/edit/delete/deploy) Sitefinity assets on the fly. The Visual Studio plugin can connect to any Sitefinity instance even on a remote server. This speeds up the development and the support of any Sitefinity web site. The extension is be able to install new assets through templates – for example in this version, all files and folders needed for a Sitefinity theme can be installed with a click.

You can download Sitefinity Thunder from the Visual Studio Gallery

Module Builder Import/Export

Sitefinity 5.0 brings dynamic modules import and export functionality, dynamic module deletion and module data export to excel tables. This allows the developers to simply pack the modules as zip files and import them in any existing Sitefinity web site. The Module Builder also features new dynamic field types, which allow the developer to create one-to-many relationships in dynamic modules - Blog Post.

Ecommerce

The Ecommerce module has added functionality to allow merchants to sell Downloadable Goods.  Downloadable goods can be any type of media, images, pdf’s, music files, docs, text files, etc…  Customers can purchase the Downloadable goods and then download them from their “My Account” after they’ve logged in.  The Ecommerce module also offers a new pre-processing hook that allows developers to cancel an order based on some custom order processing before an order is placed.  The merchants can now filter orders for a specific date range.  And lastly, merchants can define multilingual product variations.  

Migration Module

• Support for multilingual sites migration
• Support for user profiles migration

New Widgets

• Breadcrumb widget – by popular demand
• Page social sharing
• Video widget now supports social networks sharing
• User Registration widget
• Login widget using Cache Substitution Implementation

Upgraded Developer Tools

• OpenAccess is upgraded to 2011.3.1320.1

What’s fixed

Modules and Content

• Image inserted in the RadEditor, disappears in some cases when new paragraph is created - PITS 
• RSS feeds does not validate against W3 policies - PITS
• Deleting media fields after a module is created disables creating items for the custom content type - PITS
• Module Builder field designer’s Cancel button is not functional - PITS
• Links for bookmarks (#top, #bottom etc) in e-mail campaigns do not work - PITS
• Deleting an image field causes errors in the module's page widget
• From name is not displayed in the email received by an email campaign subscriber
• Previewing e-mail campaigns sometimes fail with invalid markup

Widgets and Pages

• Reject reason not visible for the author of the page - PITS
• Page loadings hangs when you move from an SSL to non-SSL page mode in IE 8 - PITS
• URLs cannot be resolved when Page SSL is On with ports different than the default ones - PITS
• Restored widget template from module builder results in blank template - PITS
• Widget templates for the custom content types cannot be created – PITS
• Widget Templates module cannot create new templates for external controls - PITS
• “Page not found” error when filtering page by taxon - PITS
• Viewing a page waiting for approval causes 404 Error in some cases - PITS
• PageControls widget toolbox cannot be reopened in Chrome when the browser window is resized
• Having more than 100 pages on one sitemap level results in a 404 error when creating a new page
• Search in Widget Templates does not work in Multilingual mode
• Requesting split hierarchical page in multilingual mode returns 404 error.
• New widget templates for custom modules are not visible in Widget Templates section
• Setting ShowPrevAndNext="false" for the Paging settings of the widgets does not hide the Prev/Next links

Security and Permissions

• Changing library content items permissions and working with several libraries providers causes “Object references between two different object scopes are not allowed.” error - PITS
• When a certain role is not granted permission to "Modify page properties", editing a page with a user from this role leaves the page locked
• Sitefinity cannot connect to LDAP with the credentials of the user running the Application pool

 

Taxonomies

• Cannot move up/down categories in Standard Edition site - PITS

Ecommerce

• Custom Field labels are not shown in single item product details page – PITS
• Department filter is lost when paging on product details is used - PITS
• Item count is not updated when product item is deleted - PITS
• Applying coupon through Shopping Cart does not reflect on the order in some cases - PITS
• Product with empty title could be created while this is not allowed - PITS
• Orders filters don’t work correctly
• Checkout while using the LDAP provider causes 'Object reference not set to an instance of an object. ' error
• Discounts could be larger than the order amount
• Non Administrators can access ecommerce Configuration and Reports
• Orders - Prices don't reflect price settings catalog
• Countries are not sorted in the Checkout countries dropdown widgets
• Deleting a Product variation while it's in someone’s shopping cart will not inform the user or prevent checkout
• Card name doesn't get passed to the IPaymentRequest
• A Discount with a blank coupon code can be created
• Order list widget> Select page shows pages on the wrong places
• Customers > Money spent shown in default currency culture
• Multiple discounts> Amount discounts are not calculated progressive
• Order Info > order overview doesn’t show discounts when ‘zero’ discount is shown.
•  Customers checking out on pages in languages using ',' for decimal separator are charged 100x as much shipping using offline shipping methods

Search, Publication System and Workflow

• Publication pipe scheduled with option 'Daily' causes the scheduling task to cycle indefinitely - PITS
• Search does not return results when searching with words with special characters in them - PITS
• Workflow triggered email notification is not sent to LDAP users - PITS

Known Issues

Modules

• Windows Azure is supported only in Forms authentication mode.
• Previewing news item does not work as expected before publishing this item for the first time
• Module Builder's Import/Export functionality does not support modules with custom classifications field
• Email campaigns bounce-tracking service is not called
• Recreating a field with the same name but different type in a custom module built with the Module Builder causes exception -  KB Article
• Back-end user cannot add Forum attachments when creating a new thread
• NLB: Uploading several files at once in Libraries may result in “Row not found” error
• Adding downloadable file hangs if file size is over 100MB.  2 solutions:  1) Set the MaxRequestLength on the httpRuntime can be configured in the web.config or 2) go to User Files and upload the file into Downloadable Goods library and then select the file from the Edit Product backend page.

Permissions

• Users in Moderation role see also Pages, Content Blocks and Responsive and Web Design

Upgrade Instructions

There are certain instructions you should follow in order to successfully upgrade your web site to Sitefinity 5.0. Please see these instructions here - Upgrade Instructions