For anyone new to DotNetNuke and that hasn’t been a member of the DNN Community for long then they wouldn’t understand the significance of this date in the history of DNN. On December 24, 2002 the first release of IBuySpy Workshop was released to the community on the ASP.NET forums that hosted the discussion's surrounding the IBuySpy Portal Starter Kit. That was the beginning of the tool that is now known as DotNetNuke.
So as I like to periodically check for new updates and see if I can catch them happening. I did notice the change start on Christmas Eve day for the release of DNN 4.9.1 and 5.0.0. I was excited but I let it ride till I could check it out on Christmas Day after the presents were unwrapped and before I rushed off to have dinner with the in-laws.
DNN 5.0.0 has been a long anticipated release with much discussion about the feature set and what would be available when it was released. What I have seen of the 5.0.0 RC2 release was exceptional and will provide many opportunities to extend this many new features for skin developers and module developers alike.
DNN 4.9.1 is a stabilization release to fix some known issues and bug patches to the community. There is a critical security issue that has been fixed so an upgrade to this release is strongly suggested.
DNN 5.0.0 Major Features
- Added jQuery support to the core platform. jQuery will now be distributed as part of the DotNetNuke installation and will be available for use by module developers.
- Added support for Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices. Administrators can configure any module to use IE8 Web Slices including the ability to set time-to-live and expiration values.
- Removed distinction between admin modules and pages and normal pages. This allows administrators to easily delegate access to any portion of the application to any group of users.
- Updated the installation services to support manifest files for all extension types. Now skins, containers, providers and modules are all first class citizens that can be installed and uninstalled.
- Expanded XHTML, WCAG and ADA compliance.
- Refactored core to improve support for Unit Testing. Refactored several core classes to use interfaces and added a simple component factory to provide dependency injection support.
- Added ability to deny permissions in the permissions grid. This new feature extends the permission framework to give administrators greater flexibility in defining permissions.
- Added Widget framework. The new Widget framework allows you to quickly add JavaScript/html widgets to your site with very little effort. The framework supports the use of a simple object tag based representation which means you don’t have to know JavaScript in order to add the widgets.
- Added new Object notation for using skin objects in Skins. Skin designers will no longer need to include separate XML files when creating and packaging skins. No more funky “[SKINOBJECT]” tags littering your html. This significantly simplifies the process of creating skins and further opens up skin development to a broader group of designers. If you include a simple JavaScript reference in your HTML skin, you can even get a full WYSIWYG experience when designing your skin.
Security Fixes
- Includes a rollup of all 4.x security fixes
Updated Modules/Providers
The following modules and providers have been updated in the 5.0.0 packages. Please see the specific project pages for notes on what bugs or enhancements were corrected with each release.
Providers
In addition to these highlights there are literally hundreds of bug fixes in this release.
For more information about a specific issue please refer to the official change log.
DNN 4.9.1 Major Features
- Fixed issue with the cache which was preventing proper operation of the scheduler.
- Fixed issue with web crawlers which could cause thrashing in the cache
- Fixed issue with the EventQueue to remove events that result in an error. This prevents an event from filling the event log with errors.
- Fixed issue with the RoleController.GetUserRoles method which introduced a breaking change in 4.9.0.
- Added a new column to the version table to distinguish between Community Edition and Professional Edition installs
- Added a new feature for logging server restarts in a web farm environment.
- Added a new admin Dashboard page. The dashboard provides a single page where hosts can view an overall snapshot of their site.
Security Fixes
Updated Modules/Providers
The following modules and providers have been updated in the 4.9.1 packages. Please see the specific project pages for notes on what bugs or enhancements were corrected with each release.
Modules
Providers
As always the new releases can be downloaded at the DotNetNuke web site.
