I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 6.0.2 is officially released. This maintenance release further solidifies DotNetNuke 6.0 and resolves a few outstanding issues which were not addressed in the 6.0.1 release. Like with the 6.0.1 release, our goal was to continue providing quick resolution of outstanding issues to ensure that customers could upgrade to the 6.x platform with little difficulty.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 6.0.1 is officially released. This maintenance release was focused on resolving a number of issues that were found in the 6.0.0 release. Given the extensive set of changes in DotNetNuke 6.0 we recognized the need to quickly identify and resolve issues discovered by our customers as they tried the new release in production environments. This maintenance release further improves what many customers have already told us was a pretty stable release.

I am pleased to announce the launch of DotNetNuke 6.  This release marks a significant milestone in the history of DotNetNuke platform.  Keep reading to find out all that DotNetNuke 6 has to offer both seasoned users and those just seeing the platform for the first time.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 5.6.3 is officially released. This release resolves a number of security issues with previous versions and resolves a few outstanding issues from 5.6.2 including:

• Updated Telerik Version – 5.6.3 includes the Q1 2011 SP2 version of Telerik ASP.Net AJAX controls. This version of Telerik includes support for the final version of IE9 along with dozens of bug fixes.
• Improved Security – This release includes 6 different security enhancements and fixes.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 5.6.1 is officially released.  This release resolves a number of outstanding issues with the 5.6.0 version and adds a few new significant enhancements including:

• Razor Scripts – 5.6.1 includes the new RazorHost module which allows you to use Razor scripts in your DotNetNuke installation.  For an example of what can be accomplished, checkout the recent entries in the Razor Hackathon.
• Child Portal Aliases – In the past you were forced to designate a portal as either a child portal or parent portal at the time the portal was created.  In 5.6.1, you will be able to add Child Portal Aliases at any time, to any existing portal.
• Improved Portal Alias Handling – In the past, it was possible to create multiple Portal Aliases for your site.  This has always caused potential SEO issues.  In 5.6.1 we have taken portal aliases one step further.  You will now be able to designate a single portal alias as the default alias.  The administrator can specify special handling for the portal aliases including the ability to use the default portal alias as the base domain for the “canonical url”.  Alternatively, the administrator can choose to use a 301 redirect so that all portal aliases will be redirected to the default portal alias.

During the 5.6.1 development cycle our security team received a few reports of security issues that affected previous versions of the platform.  Based on these reports we did further testing on the platform and identified additional areas that we felt warranted additional hardening as a preventative measure.  Because of the number and seriousness of the issues identified, and the additional hardening work done to the platform, we recommend that everyone upgrade to the 5.6.1 version to ensure your sites remain secure.

The beta release of DotNetNuke 5.6.1 is now available for download on CodePlex.  In the past we have not made public beta’s available for the maintenance releases because there wasn’t much time between when we started QA and when we actually released.  Given the recent change in our maintenance release to every 2 months, and the extra time afforded by the winter holidays, we have decided to release a beta for 5.6.1 so that people have a chance to test what we’ll be releasing in January. 

At this point, the code is pretty stable and we have a very small list of outstanding regression issues we are working on for this release.  You can see the list of outstanding issues on the DotNetNuke Roadmap for 5.6.1.  If you find an issue, please log it into Gemini and we’ll take it from there.  It is unlikely that any bugs found at this point will make it into 5.6.1, but it will give us a good head-start on identifying issues to be fixed for 5.6.2.

I am happy to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.6.  In 5.6 we spent a lot of time enhancing existing features addressing bugs and including a few minor features.  One of the goals during 2011 will be to not only add great new features, but to also add some depth to existing features.  The 5.6.0 release is a good first step in that direction.  The DotNetNuke Community Edition 5.6 includes new features such as:

• Improved Search: 5.6.0 includes an enhanced indexing capability which allows the standard core search feature to index page names, tag attributes and other metadata for improved search results
• Performance Enhancements: Optimizations to the database architecture and handling of web analytics tracking codes which will result in faster performance for all Editions of the product
• Configuration Manager:  A new configuration manager provides DotNetNuke administrators with greater access and control over their website configuration files without requiring the user to have direct file access.

DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise users also have some significant new enhancements as well including:

• Site Search: Exclusive to the Professional and Enterprise Editions, the new Site Search engine allows site users to quickly locate files and pages in the site. The search engine includes rich query syntax with support for Boolean searches, phrase searches, relevance searches, wild cards, fuzzy searches, and groupings. Based on Lucene, the system includes a true web spider that is capable of indexing any site, whether it is built on DotNetNuke or not.
• Enhanced Analytics Support: The DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise Editions include Enhanced Analytics Support, which allows users to take full advantage of Google Analytics. The system has been upgraded to the latest integration best practices from Google and now enables tracking of sub-domains as a single entity as well as the use of up to five segmentation rules per page.
• Content Approval Workflow Enhancements: The Professional and Enterprise Editions now allow managers to configure approvals in a top-down hierarchy at the site, page, and module level. In addition, content locking improves efficiency and reduces the chance of workflow conflicts. Approvals ensure that users throughout the organization that are impacted by a content change can review updates before they are published. The business rules engine enables workflows with an unlimited number of states and reviewers.

I am happy to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.5.1.  This release includes many bug fixes for the most critical issues identified in DotNetNuke 5.5.0 which we released last month.  As a result of the recent ASP.Net Padding Oracle Vulnerability, which was discussed by Shaun Walker and Cathal Connolly in their recent blogs, we have added additional checks and upgrade enhancements in this release to ensure that DotNetNuke sites running the latest version are using the recommended CustomErrors configuration.  

As we have noted in many of our recent releases, we continue to increase our Quality Assurance efforts with each release.  Given the critical nature of the ASP.Net vulnerability, we paid extra attention to more than 40 different upgrade scenarios to increase the stability and reliability of the upgrade process, and to ensure that once upgraded your site would be protected.  As always, even for those unfortunate few who have issues upgrading, the community stands ready to assist you with any problems you may encounter.  We highly recommend that everyone upgrade to the DotNetNuke 5.5.1 release as soon as possible.  For those who are unable to upgrade their sites we anticipate having a standalone module which we will make available later this week which provides the same benefits against the padding oracle vunlnerability as the core enhancements made in 5.5.1.

I am happy to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.5.  Since we first released Localization support in DotNetNuke 3.0, we have known that the story was not complete.  With DotNetNuke 5.5, I am pleased to say we now have full localization support.  This was one of the main features that we laid out in our DotNetNuke 5.x vision at OpenForce 2007 and was the last major feature missing from our original roadmap for the 5.x platform. 

Content localization in DotNetNuke 5.5 will allow you to easily manage your web pages in a primary language and then utilize translators to keep the content synchronized in multiple secondary languages.  Whether you are maintaining your site in a single language or dozens of languages, the content localization system will help guide your content editors and translators through the process.  Although content localization required extensive changes to the core platform, we have been able to add this new feature while still improving overall system performance.  In addition, with the hundreds of other changes, enhancements and bug fixes, people are already saying that they are finally ready to migrate off the 4.x platform.

DotNetNuke 5.5 also marks another milestone: earlier today we announced the immediate availability of DotNetNuke Enterprise.  DotNetNuke Enterprise adds Content Staging to an already impressive list of features available in the DotNetNuke Professional platform.  As we have done with DotNetNuke Professional since we originally launched it 16 months ago, we will continue to expand and strengthen the features of the DotNetNuke Enterprise platform over the coming months to ensure our customers are receiving a great return on their investment.

Last year at OpenForce Connections in Las Vegas, Shaun Walker announced an updated release policy.  The goal in 2010 was to move to a monthly maintenance release schedule along with Quarterly major releases.  Prior to this policy announcement, releases were quite sporadic which made it difficult for our internal planning purposes, and also made it difficult for our users to schedule their own upgrade testing and deployment.  When we first committed to...

Last night we posted another beta of DotNetNuke 5.5 which you can access from the beta release page on DotNetNuke.com.  This is probably your last chance to provide feedback on the 5.5 release as we are nearing completion of the testing cycle.  You can have a direct impact on the quality of the 5.5 release if you act today.

Since the last beta release 2 weeks...

I am pleased to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.4.4.  This maintenance release resolve’s two significant breaking changes that slipped through in 5.4.3 and resulted in us pulling the 5.4.3 release. Below are the highlights from this months release. As usual, you can see a full list of changes in the changelog.

Major Highlights Fixed issue with ExecuteSql method overloads to be able to handle ExecuteSQL(string,...

I am pleased to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.4.3.  This month’s maintenance release focused on resolving major issues with page management and with the Telerik HTML Editor Provider.  The page management fixes should resolve all major outstanding issues in this area.  The HTML Editor Provider fixes addressed some of the larger issues with the provider, although we recognize there are still several fixes and enhancements that remain for this particular item which we hope to address in the upcoming 5.5 release.  The 5.4.3 release also includes a number of security fixes.  As always our community continues to work...

I am happy to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.4.1 which corrects the major issues which slipped through the QA process for 5.4.  While we try to do a good job in testing our releases, our recent efforts for 5.3 and 5.4 have fallen short of the mark.  We are currently working with a small team of commercial module developers and the core team to put a better public beta testing process in place that will help augment our own internal testing.  Ultimately, community testing is the only testing that truly scales, and we have struggled with how to effectively use the community even while keeping to a tight release schedule.  While this is not as critical for our stabilization releases where we seem to have no difficulty achieving an acceptable level of quality, it is absolutely essential that we have community feedback and testing of our quarterly feature releases. As usual, you can see the full list of changes for this release on the changelog.

I am happy to announce that the DotNetNuke 5.3.1 release is now available for download.  This release was focused on fixing 3 significant issues with the 5.3.0 release which caused us to remove the release from CodePlex and our DotNetNuke Support Network.  It is never easy to admit that significant issues slipped through testing and made it into a release package forcing you to take drastic actions.  The only thing we can do is to re-evaluate our processes and continue to find areas...

With any software product you will occasionally have a release that you wish you could take back.  Microsoft had Windows Vista, and Tuesday we had DotNetNuke 5.3.0.  We had a couple of significant bugs which slipped through the QA process and which resulted in a major impact to customers.  Rather than continue to compound the problem we have made the decision to pull the 5.3.0 packages from CodePlex and from DotNetNuke Support Network while we test a 5.3.1 release which we expect to release early next week.  5.3.1 is specifically going to address the following issues:

Email is not delivered to end users and instead a significant number of system emails are being sent to the administrator account instead.  This impacts the ability of users to register and to get password reminders and as such is a showstopping bug that will be fixed in 5.3.1. Synchronize and SynchronizeFolder in the...

I am happy to announce that the DotNetNuke 5.3.0 release is now available for download.  This release marks the fourth month in a row where we have hit our targeted release date.  That is a huge accomplishment for the project as the DotNetNuke Corporation engineering team is really starting to gel.  During this release cycle we also had a number of significant contributions by core team members. 

Over the past year, as our development methodology has undergone change and we have hired more members for the engineering team, the core team contributions have dropped off.  This was mainly because it is very hard to manage contributions when our own internal processes are not well defined.  Now that our DotNetNuke Corp. engineering team finally has some stable processes in place, it will be even easier for core team and community members to contribute to the project.  We recognize that sometimes you need to take a step back in order to re-evaluate and re-engineer your processes.  Having spent the last year doing just that, we are now in a much better position to work with the core team and the community to continue evolving the platform at a much more rapid pace to keep up with the ever changing web application landscape.  This is definitely a great time to be a part of DotNetNuke Corporation and the DotNetNuke Community.

The 5.3.0 development cycle has been unlike any in our 7+ year history.  In some respects this is good and in others – not so much.  As I explained in my Just Like Clockwork post, we are working hard to make monthly releases a habit and to have release schedules that are predictable.  DotNetNuke 5.3.0 marks the first major release we have attempted since splitting our engineering group into feature development and maintenance groups.  As always, doing anything for the first time can be challenging.

The maintenance group has gotten into a pretty good grove with our monthly releases, but adding an external group into the mix has added an additional level of complexity.  The maintenance group is able to make our changes in a single branch and quickly test, package and release our monthly stabilization releases.  Unfortunately, the feature dev group works in a separate branch which means code merges, integration testing, lots and lots of regression testing and in general a more complex testing and release process.  We certainly have learned quite a bit from this first cycle which we’ll apply to future major releases.

Another month, another DotNetNuke release.  With each passing month the Quality team continues to get better at building DotNetNuke in a repeatable manner.  Our processes are becoming more and more automated and our QA and maintenance teams are starting to become comfortable with the processes.  It is a marked change from where we were just 12 months ago.  As a stabilization release, we focused this month on closing out the highest profile issues in the issue tracker.  We continued our efforts to solidify the installation experience and have expended additional effort in adding more error handling to the New Module wizard that was added in 5.2.  One major change in this release is that we are moving away from doing any significant enhancements during a stabilization release.  Occasionally we will have a minor change to existing functionality that is aimed at providing better feedback or otherwise resolving a usability issue.  Outside of these issues we will do our best to avoid introducing any new or changed behaviors which are more likely to introduce new defects into the product.  We do have one significant change in this release in the form of support for the PayPal sandbox which was implemented prior to our policy change.  You can see the highlights from this release below.  As usual, you can review the ChangeLog for complete details.

At OpenForce ‘09 we made a lot of announcements about changes to the DotNetNuke project.  One change that we announced was a commitment to provide more regular releases.  Over the past several years we have always focused on making releases when the software was “ready”.  This policy worked well when the project was staffed by volunteers as planning for fixed release dates is extremely difficult when you don’t know from week to week who would be able to work on the project, or how much time they would have available.

In software development, there are 3 major levers that you have available to manage a release given a fixed set of resources:  Time, Scope and Quality.  In general, we don’t feel that quality is a factor where you can cut corners.  This only leaves time and scope as levers you can use when preparing a release.  In the past we have worked on a somewhat fixed scope and fixed quality philosophy.  We tried to determine the features and bug fixes that would go into a release and keep testing until we felt that the software met the desired quality.  In 2010, we have shifted this approach and are now working to fixed release dates with a desired quality level and will adjust the scope as needed to ensure that we can meet our time and quality commitments.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 5.2.2 has been released.  DotNetNuke 5.2.2 is a monthly stabilization release and includes a number of fixes aimed at improving the overall stability and performance of the platform.  Over the last year we have been undergoing a lot of changes behind the scenes in how we manage the DotNetNuke release process which I’ll be discussing in a separate post.  The result of all that effort is that our releases are becoming more predictable and with greater emphasis on testing.  This particular release reflects those process improvements.  As usual, the complete details for all of the changes can be found in the ChangeLog.

Major Highlights Fixed issue where tabname lookup's were case-sensitive and caused problems when loading controls. Fixed issue where Captcha control did not include a value for the Alt attribute. Fixed issue where...

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 5.2.1 has been released.  DotNetNuke 5.2.1 is a monthly stabilization release and includes a number of fixes aimed at improving the overall stability and performance of the platform.  We continue to significantly enhance our testing effort with each release.  The 5.2.1 release benefited from an improved testing procedure that included several iterations of Load and Performance testing.  While we recognize that there is always room for improvement, we hope you’ll find that this release represents another significant step forward and further improves an already great product.   This release includes a number of fixes related to upgrade and installation scenarios.  Over the next couple of stabilization releases we will continue to focus on improving this critical part of the product.  As usual, the complete details for all of the changes can be found in the ChangeLog....

I am happy to announce that DotNetNuke 5.2.0 has been released.  This release comes after an extensive beta testing period and a corresponding effort by our internal testing team.  As one of our quarterly feature releases, 5.2.0 includes a number of new capabilities.  We have improved some of the module creation and packaging tools, improved our module caching support and added Page Output caching for our Professional customers.  These are just a few of the many changes and fixes in this release as indicated below. As usual, the complete details for all of the changes can be found in the ChangeLog.

One of the benefits of Open Source development is that you have a lot of community members to kick the tires and make sure everything is working correctly before you finalize a release.  In the past DotNetNuke has limited our beta releases.  Usually it would start with a small internal team and move from there to a selected group of public beta testers.  We generally did not hold wide...

After we released DotNetNuke 5.1.3 last night, a community member discovered a packaging error in the release.  Specifically the DotNetNuke WebControls 02.02.00 package was not properly integrated.  This package was added in 5.1.2 and included some additional defensive coding to help harden the DotNetNuke Web Controls against potential security issues.  The latest web controls package does not fix any specific security vulnerabilities, but rather improves the baseline security posture of the platform and makes it more difficult for a hacker to find and exploit vulnerabilities.  As a result of the mispackaging we felt it was prudent to release a new version to address this issue and ensure that the community and our Professional customers had a version which included these enhancements.

Upgrading to 5.1.4 is not necessary, but it is recommended.  The changes included in 5.1.4 help keep you safe from future attacks and as such is the recommended...

With the month of September coming to a close it is time once again for another DotNetNuke Stabilization release. 

 

DotNetNuke 5.1.3 resolves almost 40 issues with the previous release and further stabilizes the 5.x codebase.  Given the stability of the recent 5.x releases it should not come as any surprise that the fixes in this release tend to be narrow edge cases or resolved problems where well known workarounds were available.  We also added a minor modification that improves the ability of administrators to email event logs to their support providers.  This will allow system integrators, hosters and consultants providing DotNetNuke customer support to get a better snapshot of errors that the user is experiencing without relying on the user to accurately cut and paste error messages. The changes outlined below were incorporated in these releases.  As usual, the complete details for all of the changes can be found in the ChangeLog.

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DotNetNuke 5.1.1 is now available for download.  This version of DotNetNuke is a stabilization release and focused exclusively on fixing outstanding bugs which did not make the cutoff for DotNetNuke 5.1 or which were discovered after 5.1 was released.  As many people in the community are aware, DotNetNuke.com had some difficulty running DotNetNuke 5.1 under extremely heavy loads.  As a result of that experience the DotNetNuke engineering team was able to isolate several performance issues which did not show up in any of the prior testing.  Fixes for those issues were incorporated in this release along with the changes outlined below.  As usual, the complete...

Now that the holidays are through and we have had a chance to assess and fix a number of issues reported in DotNetNuke 4.9.1 and 5.0.0, we are just about ready to release DNN 4.9.2 and 5.0.1.  To avoid some of the confusion with a dual release we are going to stagger the two releases.

DotNetNuke 4.9.2 will be released on Monday, February 16th.  DotNetNuke 5.0.1 will be released the following Monday, February 23rd.  Barring any major hidden show-stopping issues, DotNetNuke 4.9.2 will be the final 4.x release and all future development will focus on the 5.0 platform.

As usual we will post release...