Email Campaigns
The module has been completely revamped according to your feedback. There are new wizards for creating campaigns, report tools that track the effectiveness of those campaigns. We have implemented our own CSS transformation algorithm for conversion of external css styles to inline ones for maximum compatibility with all the mail clients. Last but not least - you would love the new A/B campaigns tests management capabilities.
Asp.Net MVC3 support (surprise!)
With the 5.1 release, Sitefinity becomes the first CMS ever to provide the developers with the option to choose the platform they would like to use for their pages and templates - traditional Web Forms or MVC. There are 3 modes for pages and templates - Web Forms, MVC and mixed mode in which you can have both MVC controllers and Web Forms controls on one page. This is not an emulation of MVC, but a native support - as such, the designers can enjoy Razor templates and the SEO geeks - minimized and clean HTML output.
Needless to say, once MVC4 is released, we will bring the support for it as well.
Generic New Features and Enhancements
Support for custom URL extensions in pages and content (by popular demand)
Faster page publishing
Search in Users management screen (by popular demand)
Forms Module e-mail notifications (by popular demand)
DocumentService - API for extraction of text from PDFs and MsOffice documents
eWay payment provider and customer profiles in the Ecommerce module
Merchants can now create states, provinces or territories for each country through the administrator settings - PITS
Modules and Services Management UI
Sitefinity 5.1 brings the functionality for turning on and off modules. In order to save memory, you can disable certain modules that you don't use for this web site - their navigation links and widgets will be hidden and disabled. The less modules load, the faster the startup times are.
Document Search
The search service has been enhanced to index PDFs, Microsoft Word .docx documents, RTF, HTML and text files stored in the Documents module. We have introduced UI for customization of the fields to be indexed and to be searched by.
There are also performance improvements in the search results retrieval/display times.
Module Builder Enhancements
The Module Builder handles multiple (and hierarchical) type relations. As usual, all widgets and services for hierarchical content types are generated automatically. Permissions by types and fields as well as additional URLs for custom items are also parts of this release.
Introducing the Events Driven Infrastructure
With Sitefinity 5.1 we are putting some of the foundations of an event-driven infrastructure (EventService) allowing many of the benefits of event-driven development, like “loose coupling” of the code among others. A number of basic CRUD events have been exposed by some of the data providers and the communication with the publishing system (including search and site synchronization) has been re-implemented to take advantage of this infrastructure and to decouple the code internally. This allows user code to subscribe to any of these events without performance degradation of the system, and also makes hooking to the internals easier and more elegant than ever.
Sitefinity Thunder Features Sitefinity Thunder is now capable of:
Creating page and form widgets with designers
Generating content selectors for images, documents and dynamic content (by popular demand)
Creating layout and field controls
Creating custom modules and configuration sections
Automatic templates uploading
Intellisense in widget templates plus auto-completion of the CSS styles presented in the selected theme
Developer tools
RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX updated to 2012.2.607.40
OpenAccess ORM updated to 2012.2.628.2
What's fixed:
Pages and Templates
Restoring basic templates to the default ones does not remove the base template if it is set - PITS
The content of a page that uses a template based on another template (master page template) doesn't get updated
Changing a template based on .master file to be based on some default Layout template preserves the old .master page settings
Error when duplicating pages translated in all languages
Caching settings are not preserved when duplicating a page
Pages definitions constants are internal, they are not set to public
Email Campaigns
Importing user file different from .csv and .txt it results in error
Small Business Edition, Mailing lists: adding a connection results in error for missing Forms module
Deleting the search string in Mailing List selector causes the full list of records not to display again
Unsubscribe widget: no proper message if you try to unsubscribe a non-existing subscriber
Subscribe widget: duplicate emails if you subscribe user in a few mailing lists
Wrong notification message if you send a test campaign but SMTP settings are not set
Slow loading of the Like a web page grid in Firefox
Concurrency issue when editing a campaign, AB test, mailing list, message template or subscriber
Module Builder
Taxonomy control doesn’t show taxa that have been applied to custom content items
Paging for custom types is not working on the front-end for more than 20 items
Cannot create custom module with a choices field that has many options - PITS
Issues with identifiers when the field for URL generation is changed - PITS
Search indexes are broken when the field for URL generation is changed - PITS
ContentViewDisplayMode does not work with Custom Modules - PITS
Publishing/Saving an item with Media field duplicates the ContentLink records in the database - PITS
Two or more content items can be created with the same URL name - PITS
Search indexes for custom content types search only in the Title field - PITS
Widgets
Content block's "Table Properties" and "Copy From Word" dialogs don't show up correctly when editing in Full Screen
Insert link dialog: "Page from this site" tab is read-only and will not let you select a page to insert a link to - PITS
JavaScript exception is raised when in controls inheriting from LoginWidget
AppyCss dropdown doesn't work in content blocks put on pages - PITS
JavaScript error is showed to anonymous users browsing pages that have twitter feed widget
Facebook like widget - js error "relation is null or not an due to Facebook API change
Categories widget doesn't filter content by custom classification - PITS
"A potentially dangerous Request.QueryString value was detected from the client…" exception when editing permissions of the Login widget - PITS
Search, Publication System, Site Sync
Images stored on the file system cannot be synced
Images stored in blob storage other than the default one cannot be synced
Syncing images does not preserve the image ordering in the Images module
Changing data while it's being synchronized causes an error
Search index is not updated when one of the multilingual versions of a page is deleted
Choosing “Show search box above the results” functionality in the Search widget causes incorrect search results
Searching content in different culture variations returns zero search results (requires re-indexing) - PITS
Cannot filter news and event items by tags and categories in inbound pipes
Search does not return results when the search term has special characters
ECommerce
Taxes by billing are not applied correctly. - PITS
Cannot view or create users in Internet Explorer 7 - PITS
File Manager grid: Clicking outside of one of the checkboxes selects the App_Data folder - PITS
Backend users see Pages and Content blocks
Files without extension break the master page selector - PITS
Files without extension in root folder break the JS and CSS widgets
Forums file attachments size is in bytes but measurement is in KB
NLB setup not working as expected when both sites are configured without trailing slashes
RecoveryMailBody and RecoveryMailSubject properties do not work properly
Cannot register new twitter application after all aplications are removed
Filtering of content by tags is lost in some cases when categories filtering is also applied
Clicking the browser's back button while in Forums causes “Webpage has expired” message
Deleting forum's user causes threads with his posts to appears empty
Unnecessary db calls is done even when Responsive Design is turned off
Fixes on migrating additional URLs for content modules, when doing migration from Sitefinity 3.7
Known Issues
When splitting a published page, the translations should be republished.
URLs extensions should be the same on all page translations
Redirect pages are not working properly under split pages.
Switching from monolingual to multilingual mode, requires a reindex.
Ecommerce -> Products list widget - Sort by Name (localized). This is a known issue and happens throughout Sitefinity. Merchants should create the languages they are going to use for the storefront before they start adding products or they can go back into each product and resave it so that it has the titles for each language and they are not null.
We removed the Customers (ecommerce) role from the dropdown when editing a product in the backend because if the customer is a registered/logged in user they will automatically get assigned to the Customers (ecommerce) role after they checkout. This should be used for roles such as “Gold Membership” or “Silver Service” or with selling content, membership, etc…
Post action on an MVC home page generates an error
Email campaigns are inactive after upgrading to Sitefinity 5.1 - KB article
Shopping Cart and ShoppingCartSummary custom templates have to be recreated with the missing controls. Those missing controls can be taken from the default widget templates.
API Changes can be found in the forums. Please make sure to check our online Upgrade Instructions in case you upgrade to Sitefinity 5.1.