Release History

What's New

Mobile App Builder

• Mobile App Builder is the newest addition to the Module Builder, which allows you to automatically build HTML 5 mobile applications based on the dynamic modules, taking advantages of the actual mobile devices and its features. Just as with Module Builder, developers are able to enhance and extend the mobile apps built with Mobile App Builder
• Sitefinity Box is a mobile application which connects to a live instance of Sitefinity to provide the option to load every published mobile application built with the Mobile App Builder. Sitefinity Box on App Store, Sitefinity Box on Google Play
• The mobile application can use either Sitefnity database or Telerik Everlive cloud persistence service for storage

Module Builder improvements

A new Address field is introduced for the dynamic modules built with the Module Builder module. It allows you to fill out the address and the Geo location(GPS) of your dynamic items

Connector for SharePoint

The Connector provides full connectivity to SharePoint in three different modes: Two-way synchronization, SharePoint to Sitefinity and Sitefinity to SharePoint. The SharePoint data that can be synchronized with Sitefinity is - Lists, Document and Images libraries and Events. When working with Document libraries, the connector is able to synchronize the entire hierarchical structure with Sitefinity. All items that appear in Sitefinity benefit from the CMS features, so you can set permissions, classifications and choose where and how these items should appear on the Sitefinity web site. Powerful customization options allow you to choose what fields to be synchronized to what types and dynamic modules in Sitefinity, and how often the sync process should happen in the background.

Everlive Cloud Connector

New Everlive connector for synchronizing content between your custom module and the cloud. You can choose to sync any custom module of Sitefinity in well-defined intervals. Sitefinity will take care of scheduling the synchronization and any conflict resolution required to synchronize the data. Any apps generated with the Mobile Application Builder based on modules that are synchronized with the cloud will by default work with the cloud to deliver exceptional experience for your Sitefinity Box or native app users! You have to only provide your Telerik credentials and Sitefinity will automatically provision your infrastructure in the cloud.

Media libraries improvements

• Hierarchical libraries. The Libraries module now supports organizing your images, documents and videos in hierarchical fashion (PITS)
• Integration with SharePoint. Sitefinity libraries can be synchronized with a corporate SharePoint libraries
• HTML5 based uploading of files which replaces the existing Silverlight control (both upload options are kept and the system can be switched to use one or the other by configuration settings).

Events module improvements

• Support for recurrent events  (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and more complex recurrence patterns)
• Support for multiple calendars. Now each event belongs to a calendar and  users can filter to show events from one or more calendars in the Calendar view.
• Events widget is reloaded with the new powerful “Calendar view”. Here the users can easily see and update(create, update ,delete) events filtered by day, week, month and calendar. Updating of events is available only for backend users.
• Events widget provides the ability to export events to your personal calendars such as Outlook and Google Calendar
• Integration with SharePoint - Sitefinity events can be synchronized with a sharePoint instance

Site Sync improvements

• Synchronization of dynamic modules - both changes in  structure and data.
• Synchronization of  E-commerce products and product variations (PITS)
• Usability improvements

 SEO improvements - Canonical Url support 

• Now all Sitefinity pages with a Content view widget (news,event,blogpost etc.)  issue a Canonical URL tag element in detail mode. Thus Sitefinity helps avoid eventual duplicate content indexing by search engines. This also helps in cases where the same page is addressed with different domain (for example without www.), different URL casing or trailing slashes.
• The scenario where the same content is shown on more than one page is also covered - for example - if you have a mobile and desktop page. The mobile page can point to the desktop page as a primary URL for indexing. About Cannonical Urls.

Content modules

• Real Preview. The Preview functionality of Sitefinity content modules is now enhanced so that any changes to your content can be previewed immediately on the frontend. Users can preview Draft content without the need to publish it first. The Preview links also show all the frontend pages where the content should eventually appear - thus avoiding potential duplicate content issues.
• Content locations management. Sitefinity now includes a content locations screen accessible from each Content module backend page. This screen allows to see which pages include the specific content(news,event,blog etc). The content locations screen also allows for fine control of the Canonical URL functionality. By setting the priorities of pages showing the same content - one can establish which is the canonical page and which is an alternative page(say mobile version).
• Canonical URL Service API. Addition to our API that can be used to get the canonical URL of any content item by passing just the type, Id, Provider and the desired language of the item. The API can be used to also get all the pages where this item can appear.

E-commerce

• Multisite Implementation - Ability to define multiple sites for Ecommerce using three Ecommerce providers (Catalog, Shipping & Orders) and settings for each site.
• Product Lifecycle & Workflow - Products now have lifecycle (ability to exist in draft/published states) and workflow support (ability to have workflows per product type)
• Site Synchronization Implementation - Ability to Sync Products and Variations (including attributes and values) (PITS)
• Shipping Provider Model -Ability to have true pluggable online shipping providers. Existing providers have been moved to the new pluggable model
• Additional Multilingual Support- Added support for a true multilingual store, by adding multilingual support for Shipping methods, Payment methods, Discounts, Product Types, Custom fields for product types, Discounts, Taxes and Tax classes. (PITS)
• Order Status History & Shipping Tracking Number - Ability to have an order status log and enter shipping tracking number for an order. (PITS)
• Additional Enhancements - A new Top Selling Products report has been added. Also addressed a number of user experience scenarios with backend screens (PITS) (PITS)
• New Business Service Layer - Two new business services have been added for developers to make modifications to the payment and shipping methods, this will be part of continuous ongoing effort where we will expose more services in coming releases. (PITS)

Responsive Design

• Ability to hide/show layout sections based on the rendering device

Pages

• Page Preview for smartphones and tablets
• Creating a group page under split pages returns object not set to an instance error. (PITS)

Blogs

• Ability to move blog posts to different parent blogs

Social widgets

• New Twitter Widget to replace the existing Twitter Feed widget. Due to retirement of Twitter API v1 users now have to build embedded Twitter widgets from their Twitter account settings page and then place the resulting widget on their website.

What’s Fixed

Pages

• The default page SEO title field validation is relaxed to allow some commonly used characters

Module Builder

• The dynamic type master list view does not contain a filter by taxonomies widget when the type contains a taxonomy field
• Removing a taxonomy from dynamic content type leaves the filter in the back-end grid and when filtering by the taxonomies there is an error;

Libraries 

• Images/Documents/Videos are not visible for non-administrators if the default library is deleted (PITS)

Email Campaigns

• Bounce collection time is not configurable through the advanced settings
• Delivered emails show negative value when there are bounced emails
• Mailing lists grid is not rebound on delete from Actions menu in Chrome
• Subscribers from dynamic lists get broken tracking image
• The issue is not sent when Reply to email textbox contains space

Multisite

• Create a site: Duplicating pages from existing site does not duplicate correctly the translations
• Multisite Management -> Duplicating site pages when creating a new site is not working property in Multilingual. Also now Draft pages are no longer duplicated.

Content blocks

• Content Block widget: does not get back to "used by" dialog after selecting from shared content

News module

• Telerik.Sitefinity.Modules.News.Web.UI.MasterListView has a hardcoded value in GetItemsList() method - URL evaluator receives as parameter PublicationDate instead of this.Host.DateEvaluatorPropertyName

Windows Azure

• When uploading Sitefintiy project in Azure an "Invalid time zone ID" error is thrown (PITS)

Search

• Some PDF documents cause re-indexing to hang in an infinite loop (PITS)
• In multisite mode, wrong URLs for forum posts result in YSOD

Site Sync

• The synchronization never ends, if the count of items which failed for specific type is bigger than the internal chunk size (20)

Feeds

• Publishing to Twitter does not work on Cassini (works on IIS)

Forums

• Multiple .aspx extensions in the permalink, when using .aspx extensions for page URLs
• Issues with the .aspx extensions in thread list view with paging enabled
• New threads go to the default provider instead to a custom one, if the default provider has a forum with the same name as the one in the custom provider
• Forums when Deleting a parent post  which has reply posts the Thread is not visible in front-end

Taxonomies

• Tag/Category Counter is not updated after item has been unpublished

Authentication

• Unable to authenticate when the culture is set to "ar" (Arabic)

Comments

• Numeration next to the comments in the frontend is not correct - it is in reverse order compared to the publication date

Mutli-lingual mode

• Errors are raised when adding a custom culture to Sitefinity

E-commerce

• When in Multilingual mode, Product Filter widgets doesn't support decimal prices with commas.
• Product Filter widget "500-Above" filter doesn't take 500 into account.
• When inventory is tracked at product level, variations say “Out Of Stock”
• Delete single Attribute Value translation deletes all translations
• Products page, JavaScript error is shown when user select product with sidebar template and social sharing enabled
• Error is not shown on Checkout, when an applied shipping method is deactivated
• XE Payment processor throwing an "XE Rate Service Error" message when configuration is wrong
• Price Control markup doesn't need <contenttemplate></contenttemplate> in the template
• Offline payment method name not saved in Database
• Shopping Cart shows incorrect number of items after clicking checkout when a product is deleted or deactivated
• Error occurs when switching availability of default field in Product Type to different status
• BE->Customers totals for other currencies are incorrect
• Removing out of stock item from shopping cart, removes other products from shopping cart
• Changing price of variation in BE changes price in shopping cart
• Resource String is incorrect for Wish List
• New email templates cannot be created for checkout widget (PITS)
• Anonymous checkout breaks with custom membership provider (PITS)

Preview

PITS issue 7226 - Preview Button Uses Port Number

MVC

• In MVC Widget with Designer the field value is not populated.

Known Issues

  Connector for SharePoint

• One SharePoint item cannot be saved in multiple libraries and modules. It can only be part of one Library or Dynamic Module
• When syncing Document Library in SharePoint to a dynamic module in Sitefinity, the Document Hierarchy is not preserved, and only root level items are synchronized. To sync the entire hierarchy, sync to Document Library in Sitefinity
• Renamed folder with new items added to it on SharePoint - in Sitefinity old and new folders are not merged, but instead there are two folders with all the items.
• MySQL and Oracle are not supported with this feature

Everlive Cloud Connector

• When syncing large false/many items there is no indication that synchronization is in progress, because everything is asynchronous
• When you have 2 media fields that point to the same file from a library, only one of them is synced
• If you sync a module, then delete it and recreate it with the same name, you won’t be able to sync its items
• Only media fields that can select single image/video/document are currently supported for synchronization

Site Sync

• Events calendar deletion is not synced correctly in multilingual mode
• Removing the parent of a child dynamic module (thus moving it to the root) is not synced correctly
• E-commerce Department taxonomy statistics are not synced correctly

E-commerce

• Need to re-select products in Buy Now widget when upgrading from 5.4
• In Site Sync deleting multilingual products is not fully supported.

Mobile Application in Icenium Simulator

Events module

• Events widget: if you have custom events frontend view, after upgrade the events widget returns error “An item with the same key has already been added.”. Workaround: you should delete the widget and configure it from scratch.

Breaking changes

Feeds

• For any feeds that import events set the calendar in which the events will be imported

Site Sync

• The "sync all" mode was removed, as its different behavior proved to be quite misunderstood and confusing, especially as a default option

API

• New method of IDataProviderDecorator: T GetOriginalValue<T>(object entity, string propertyName) – called in DataProviderBase. GetOriginalValue to get the original value of a specific dirty item when committing a transaction.

Libraries

• There are breaking changes in Media content widget designer ascx templates and API (details to be found in Sitefinity documentation)

E-commerce

• Products IsActive field is no longer used, status column along with Lifecycle should be used
• Countries and States configuration under Ecommerce has been moved to Locations
• Existing online shipping providers in configuration node are no longer supported. Shipping methods screen should be used to configure them going forward.