Release History

By product

Sitefinity CMS 8.2.5900

October 25, 2015

This version includes flexible Personalization and analytics, Forms on MVC (Feather), Performance and Upgrade improvements, Scaling support for Azure and Amazon Clouds.  

What’s New 

Digital Marketing 

Personalization per Widget in Pages and Templates  
Users can personalize on widget level without having to create new personalized versions of the page or template. This speeds the creation of personalized areas across the web site, and eases the management of updates over time. Personalized widgets in page templates allow the reuse of personalized blocks across multiple pages.
The following widget support personalization:  Content block, Image, and Card (new). Custom widgets can be personalized as well.  

Personalization for Multiple Segments  
Personalization per widget empowers marketers to personalize a page for multiple segments. When a visitor in multiple segments opens a page, she sees all widgets personalized for those segments, and not only for the highest priority segment, as it was before.   
In the backend, editors previewing personalized pages can filter by more than one segment to see how a page will display to users in multiple segments.  

Multilingual Support for Personalization  
On multilingual sites, visitors browsing a language version of a page, will see only the personalized versions for this language.  

Card Widget 
The Card widget is a collection of content elements, which create a teaser to more detailed information or a conversion goal on a website. It can be used for content summaries, page headers, teasers, and announcements.   
Out of the box, the Card widget contains: Heading, Text, Image, and Actions, as these can be easily customized. The content of the widget can be personalized.  

Digital Experience Cloud 

Personalization Analytics and Reporting 
Marketing professionals can measure the results of their Page Personalization campaigns. For each personalized page, they can track how many times it has been visited by each segment, and how that compares with the trend of non-personalized visits of the same page.  

 

 
Custom Contact Properties 
Contact demographics are now configurable. The local administrator can able add, edit or remove the key contact properties which are shown in the contact profile. The same properties are automatically enabled for audience segmentation, both as part of the general contact management functionality and part of the Conversion Tracking segments definition.  

 
Data Connector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM On-Premise 
System integrators can connect to local instances of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The templates offered out of the box allow the upload of contacts and their key interactions to the Digital Experience Cloud, and utilize that data for audience segmentation. 

 
Authorized Applications 

The new Authorized Applications tab allows users to grant permissions to third-party applications to use all Personalization capabilities of the system. This way, personalization by Persona, Lead Scoring or Predictive Campaigns can easily be done using custom logic, including but not limited to third-party WCM systems, custom web site widgets, or mobile applications. 

 
Lead Scoring Event Triggers 
.NET SDK allows system integrators to consume Lead Scoring events directly from the cloud, which enables them to initiate any custom workflow based on those events in a third-party system, such as Email Marketing.  

MVC and Front-End Frameworks
(Feather

Forms on Feather  
Support for the Feather UI framework is enabled for Forms. That empowers editors to create forms in MVC mode, which leverage the look and feel of MVC websites. Front-end developers have full control of the markup and validation of form elements, and can easily extend them.  

Feather support is added for: Form widget, Form Builder widgets (Textbox, Paragraph text, Checkboxes, Multiple choice, Dropdown list, Section header, Content block, File upload, Captcha), and Form Builder layout grid. 

Other improvements in Forms:  

  • Textbox widget: Added support for setting input types: email, date, etc.

  • Re-captcha: Sample is available.  

Cloud Support & Deployment 

Sitefinity CMS includes improved support for the popular cloud platforms, which allow administrators to benefit from the high flexibility and scalability of deploying to the cloud.   
 
Microsoft Azure Apps Service  

  • Multi-instance and Auto Scaling support for Azure Web Apps (via Redis Cache)  

  • Improved deployments  

Amazon Web Services  

  

Upgrades 

  
Application Status Page 
A new status page shows during application startup or upgrade. It is a helpful resource for administrators who want to observe the status of those processes via the interface, and wish to issue a friendly message to the visitors on their sites during site downtimes or restarts. The page displays the current status, and provides a detailed log of all processes, errors and warnings as these occur.  
 
Database Schema Change Log  
Updates to the database schema done during upgrades are logged in the UpgradeTrace.log. This adds visibility into the upgrade process, and provides detailed info, which can be used for troubleshooting.  
 
Database Upgrades Improvement  
When you connect an older version of Sitefinity project to a newer upgraded database, an exception that downgrade is not allowed is thrown. Administrators can avoid this exception using a new setting.  This mode allows for uninterrupted service during upgrades as the current version of Sitefinity still serves site visitors, while  the new version  upgrades the database in a parallel node.

Performance 

Performance Optimization Page  
This page provides an overview of common settings that affect website performance. Administrators can use it to view the current state of the system and the overall degree to which the web site has been optimized. 

 
SSL Offloading Support 
By using SSL offloading, administrators can transfer the processing of SSL encryption and decryption from the webserver(s) to the load balancer or other device. Secure requests can be encrypted at the load balancer or a reverse proxy, and Sitefinity CMS can support such setup.  

 

Dev Tools and Frameworks 

  • GeoIP database upgraded with latest changes since October 6th, 2015 

  • FancyBox upgraded to version v2.1.5 

 

Breaking Changes  

What’s Fixed 

Analytics  

  • Changing a site domain generate errors which cause performance issues (FP

  • Filtering the analytics dashboards by visitors, languages, devices, etc. creates an error (FP

  • Navigating to Marketing> Analytics after having active analytics connection generates error log (FP

Dynamic Modules 

  • Moving configurations to database breaks the export of dynamic modules structure for modules created before the change (FP

  • Dynamic content items links are not resolved in search results after re-indexing (FP

  • Deleted items are included into exporting to excel file 

  • Added error when trying to relate dynamic module items in incorrect statuses (FP

  • Error when creating relationship to a dynamic module item via API (FP

Email Campaigns 

  • Email campaigns are sent with wrong hyperlinks when the Host property is not set (FP

  • Multilingual: Issue cannot be sent if the page contains News widget with selected option <One particular news item only> (FP

Ecommerce   

  • Shopping cart persists items between sites when they use the same domain 

  • Checkout widget with empty shopping cart throws “Object reference” error 

  • Shipping/Payment methods: translation status disappears when the method is set to Inactive 

  • Requests to payment provider are always sent in the default currency (FP

  • Added option to overwrite the default ShoppingCartAdder (FP

Feather UI Framework 

  • Using webforms widget on a hybrid page based on Bootstrap template throws error 

  • Fixed issue with nuget ugprades of ResourcePackages when the folder and its content is not included in the csproj file 

  • Page based on layout file will not be indexed if the Description and/or the Keyword properties are set 

  • Html.RenderAction() throws and error when page is cached in some cases (FP

Forums 

  • Forum attachments of posts and threads are not deleted (FP

  • Forums Breadcrumb: Selecting "Include full path starting from Home page" in the Forum widget designer doesn't work in multisite environment  

  • Email notification is sent when a draft thread is created  

Libraries (Images, Videos, Documents and Files) 

  • Changing library root URL results in Sitemap problems (FP

  • Azure blob storage: replacing a picture provider cause an error "The specified blob does not exist" (FP

  • Thumbnail generation fails on missing file (FP

  • Reordering items and uploading new generates duplicate ordinals (FP

 
Pages 

  • Additional URL redirect to the default one option does not work correctly when configured for pages 

  • External redirect pages are not listed in the navigation. 

  • Multilingual: wrong SiteMapNode description (FP

Personalization 

  • Location criteria doesn`t include the state of selected the City (FP

  • Added option to change the SEO title of personalized pages (FP)  

Site Sync 

  • Multisite: Related media and data items are not visible on the target server if they are limited to only one item (FP

  • Sync all sites skips the sites that are on the second page of the sites list (FP

Taxonomies 

  • Taxonomy synonyms are the same for all languages (FP

  • Synonyms for tags do not appear in autocomplete (FP

  • Tag synonyms don’t work when your synonym is more than one word (FP

  • Deleting single tag synonym duplicates it 

Users and Security  

  • Predefined custom values for profiles are not persisted on user registration 

  • Role Selector for permissions doesn’t show the selected roles (FP

  • Using numeric field in profiles returns no value (FP

  • Regular users cannot edit About field in profile widget (FP

  • Added configuration for redirecting to frontend login page instead of backend login page 

  • User activity is not updated when changing the user type from a backend to a frontend (FP

Other 

  • Translations: Importing of XLIFF file with translated content in target tags results in empty translation 

  • Comments: LDAP users do not see their names in Comments (FP

  • Comments: Custom field of type "Number" with decimal places rounds the entered number (FP

  • Data Access: Fix for SQL Server behavior change introduced by Microsoft related to "select @@version" that DataAccess use to determine the version of the connected SQL Server. Your SQL server might be affected in case you have installed Cumulative Update package 7 for SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 

  • Elasticsearch: Added failover support for Elastic clusters to eliminate single point of failure 

  • Elasticsearch: Custom sorting does not work with Elasticsearch (FP

  • Events: Events with time zone different than UTC will be shown incorrectly in iCal on iPhone devices (FP

  • Events: All day events are not exported to Google calendar/Outlook/ICal as all day event (FP

  • Inline Editing: Editing link is broken, when "Page from this site" option is selected and a page from different site is chosen. 

  • Widget Templates: Search doesn`t open the selected widget template (FP

  • Scheduled Task: LastExecutedTime is not set (FP

  • File not found in jquery.ui.theme.css  

  • Getting resource throws an error (FP

  •