Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Sitefinity 3.1 SP2 released, Road Map reviewed

In what is a relatively small update for Sitefinity developers, the second service pack for 3.1 was quietly released this week on Sitefinity.com. This update mainly targets problems involving generic content in sites running multiple languages, but a few additional problems have been fixed along the way. If you're interested in reviewing the paper thin release notes, jump over to the Sitefinity forums and have a look.

More exciting is that work continues to move steadily forward on Sitefinity 3.2. Still on track for a January release, 3.2 is going introduce many new features to the CMS platform, including:

  • Integration with Windows Workflow
  • Ajaxification of most Sitefinity tools (finally!)
  • New! Document module for creating document galleries (photos, media, PDFs, etc.)
  • New! Newsletter module for creating/sending HTML email campaigns
  • New! Notification Service with API for sending automatic emails
  • Export tool for exporting projects to reusable templates
So that's 3.2 and January- just a few short weeks away. The Road Map for the next next major version, 4.0, has also been published online, giving you a unique long term look at what's coming in Sitefinity. So far (and these things could change, obviously), 4.0 is promising to deliver:
  • Automation service for tasks like background indexing and auto page publishing
  • Sync service for auto dev-to-prod migrations and mirrored servers
  • Integration with Silverlight
  • Browse-and-edit mode for editing sites without entering admin area
And that's just some of what's planned! Clearly some exciting progress being made on Sitefinity, the first bit of which we'll get to taste in January. If you're still not developing with Sitefinity, what are you waiting for? Really. Let me know in the comments.

3 comments:

Pete said...

no mention of dynamic properties, so its not looking to great for me. who do i raise this with?

cheers,

pete

Todd Anglin said...

Pete-

I think the correct people have seen that feature request, so I'm pretty sure it's logged. The Road Map tends to focus on big features, so it is possible that more improvements could be added to the 3.2 or 4.0 versions than are listed.

Have you tried taking a look at Sitefinity without dynamic properties as you've described them? Perhaps you can still achieve what you need to in different ways with the flexible Sitefinity architecture. Just a thought...

-Todd

Pete said...

I must admit, I haven't since versin 3.0 was releases. I will take another look once 3.2 gets its final release. Fingers crossed. :)