Finally. 18 months of hard work is coming to an end as we - the
Umbraco Core Team - proudly can announce the release
candidate of Umbraco 4.1 - the biggest update to Umbraco.
Ever.
With the Release Candidate stamp this means that we're
now recommending Umbraco 4.1 for all new projects. So get
yourself indulged in all there is to love (and this is just the
summary!):
Performance - it's a screamer!
- Updated XML Schema ensuring higher performance
- Build in caching of Members and Media when referenced via the
umbraco.library methods
- Completely new Back Office tree with caching and much clever
loading of data
- Heavily reduced http requests when working in the Back
Office
- Heavily reduced SQL queries in Back Office
- A .NET 4.0 product that works perfectly with Visual Studio
2010
Stability
- Updated DB schema with more constraints and indexes
- More than a 100 unit tests written to verify API methods and
datalayer
Feature packed
- Enhanced preview. Browse your entire site as it looks in the
future, including out-of-the-box support for all XSLT and
NodeFactory based macros
- SpellChecker. With support for more than ten languages out of
the box!
- LINQ 2 Umbraco. More a .NET Developer than an XSLT guru? You'll
love accessing data via the all brand new .NET LINQ API
- Examine. Ultra performant and stable index-based search engine.
With a fluent API that developers will love
- New XML Schema. Not only more performant, but makes it easier
to understand your data and adds future support for Intellisense in
Visual Studio!
- Improved DLR support. Faster than ever and with support for
Ruby too!
- New Datatypes: Image Cropper for editor friendly image
manipulation and Macro Container for easily handling of feature
areas. (Needs to be manually created in the data type section in
the RC)
- Improved Mediapicker: Preview and advanced dialog with upload
is now a part of the default MediaPicker (needs to be activated on
the datatype in the RC)
- A ton of other improvements and updates!
Upgrades
Umbraco 4.1RC is a HUGE update to previous versions and while
we've done our best for backwards compatibility we do not recommend
that you upgrade any production environments until the final
release. Especially if you use 3rd party packages.
However, we'd love feedback on experimental upgrades and we've
made a
WIKI page on Our Umbraco to sum up what's needed to
upgrade.
Gotchas and logging bugs
Remember that this is a release candidate and not a release.
There will be bugs, however we haven't encountered any showstoppers
for long and we're using it for a good range of our own sites! The
final release however, is not far away and we're constantly ironing
out bugs as they're
logged. When logging bugs please take the time to search the
issue tracker if the issue have already been logged, that helps the
core team big time! Also, before logging a bug you should also
consider discussing it in our dedicated 4.1
forum, especially if you're in doubt if it's a core bug.
Final word
Enjoy! And keep an eye on our nightly builds and our @umbracoproject
twitter account for latest updates. Be nice to the Core Team -
they've worked insanely hard.