Written by: Joe Brinkman
12/26/2008 12:02 AM 

Christmas Eve was very busy for the DotNetNuke Team as we did a double release of both DotNetNuke 4.9.1 and 5.0.0.  This was my first time handling a double release and it was a lot more work than I anticipated.  Not only did we do a double release, but we also changed where we are hosting our downloads.  That is a story for another blog post.  Unlike 4.9.1, DNN 5 was a massive change that involved hundreds of bug fixes, changes and enhancements.  A large number of the bug fixes and a few of the changes were backported to the 4.8.x and 4.9.x branches, however there are still many bug fixes and enhancements which are only available in DNN 5.  At this point there are not plans to port any other changes back to the DNN 4.x platform as we will once again shift our focus to maintaining a single product branch. 

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DotNetNuke 5.0 is the culmination of over a year of development and testing.  Without a doubt this is the most tested version of DotNetNuke ever released.  That is not to say there won’t be bugs found, but just that we spent a lot of time in this release trying to make sure we were not breaking anything in our efforts to refactor the codebase.

As we have said many times in the past, DotNetNuke 5.0 is not intended to encompass the entire Cambrian Vision which we first laid out at OpenForce ‘07.  However, DNN 5 does include many fundamental changes in the architecture which will make it much easier for us to incorporate and test future features.  With that said, there are still a number of great enhancements that we were able to include in this release.

As always you can see a complete list with all the details of each fix/change in the ChangeLog.

Major Highlights

• 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

• AD Authentication Provider 05.00.00

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