Early preview of version 5.0

   —   
Behold! The version 5.0 is almost on its way to your homes and offices, so if you want to know what will be new, check it out here.
Hi there,

The new version is almost finished and currently in the QA, we are just finishing it's design and fixing some minor issues. So here is some teaser for you so you can already see what is coming and what you can look forward to.

What is new?

There is a lot of minor changes as always, so we will go through just the top items that you should definitely know about.

New design

First thing you will definitely notice is not so much functional, but it definitely brings better look and fell of the entire application. We completely redesigned the admin UI to the new colors so it feels more modern and is better to demo to all your clients. It includes more friendly ribbon-like toolbar in the Content section:



More scalable

During the development, we have spent significant amount of time on the scalability of the entire solution, so you may see several new things which might caused trouble with larger projects if you didn't develop and configure your project carefully:
  • New selectors
  • More efficient and faster UI
  • More efficient controls and ability to configure them even deeper (e.g. set the list of columns that the control should get from the database)
  • Replication of the database (with 5.0 you can use merge replication and have several databases for your web farm servers)
  • More efficient web farm support
  • Scheduled task to clean unused memory to keep the memory profile low.
 

Widgets

This is a great way how to allow the editors work similar way like the designers and also allow site visitors to personalize the pages. It works similar way like the web parts and design mode, but it works outside of the Design tab and has great granular configuration where you select if specific zones can be customized by editor / group admin / visitor and define a set of widgets in Site manager for these specific types of zones. Then the editor just comes to the Page mode and has the availability to work with the widgets allowed for him. Same for the site visitor or group admin on the live site. The best thing about this is that you can even set up a site that can be completely managed and designed by the editors, without any security risks.

 
 

UI personalization

Another great new feature. Now you have the option to enable or disable specific parts of the CMS Desk for the users so they see only the parts of UI they really need and are not confused with other settings they don't even know what they are for. Also, customization of the UI interface tabs and menus have never been easier since you can define your own custom UI elements there which automatically populate in the corresponding menus of the CMSDesk UI. Just like the standard permissions, this is also role-based.

 

Improved Media library interface

With new dialogs in 4.1 there is a more friendly way how to manage the media files, in 5.0 we have unified this with the main Media library UI in Tools to make it also more friendly and included some new functionality in there, too.



Staging

The staging in 5.0 can synchronize Custom tables data, has better support for staging of Media libraries and also synchronize the site assigment of objects including removal of the objects from sites.

New SEO settings

We have done a great job in making the solution more SEO friendly and we are introducing several settings that may help you to make your pages have real single URL for SEO purposes. Other URLs are then 301 redirected to the main one.

Bulk operations with content

The listing mode and media library now supports bulk operations such as Move / Copy / Publish etc. which gives you much more flexibility if you are redesigning your web site structure.



Drag and drop in content tree

Finally, we also offer drag and drop directly in content tree. You can Move / Copy / Link or change the order of the documents and entire sections just by dragging them over to the new location. This will make your end clients crazy during your demos to them.



Support of times zones in the CMSDesk UI

The time zones in 5.0 are now supported in the entire content section and Booking module, including the Publish from / to fields and time information in the grids.



Version comparison in version history

Great feature for your workflow, in 5.0 you can side-by-side compare the versions of the documents with the changes highlighted.



Searching in forums

The Smart search now supports forum indexes so you may include the results from forums to your search results or set up the search specifically for the Forums.



AD import utility

The final version of 5.0 will come also with a new AD import utility, so you don't need to create the AD (Windows) accounts manually or wait until that specific person logs in and gets imported, but you can import and set them up them in advance.

What's next?

There is a lot of minor changes and of course also all bug fixes from previous version included, some of them even with better functionality than in hotfixes (due to limitation of hotfixes to minor changes in code).

As you can see, there is a lot of new things and the entire solution gets much better (as always). I think it will be definitely worth it, do you? So now it is up to you to decide if want to get all this for the 4.1 version price or for the new price after release. Looking forward to your comments.

BTW: We expect this new version to come out before the end of this year, I cannot promise you an exact date since there are still some open issues we are fixing but we hope to have it around christmas so if I were you I wouldn't wait too long to make your purchase in time under older licensing ;-).
Share this article on   LinkedIn

Martin Hejtmanek

Hi, I am the CTO of Kentico and I will be constantly providing you the information about current development process and other interesting technical things you might want to know about Kentico.

Comments

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Marcello,

Yes, as always there will be an upgrade package from current version 4.1, which will also set up your default user profiles and other necessary things as usually. Import of packages from older version (except for Beta) will also work as usual. Since we cannot make it complete before the end of the year due to limited time resources (there was a lot of time spent on this version itself), we will release it sometimes around half of January (maybe few days sooner), that is current plan. So if your site is not too heavily customized, it can migrate right away through export / import when final is ready, if it is too heavily customize, you will need to wait just for few more weeks.

m.rutter commented on

Hi Martin,
this is one of the best and eagerly awaited post I read in the last months.

Great job, guys! I guess you'll release the new version soon.

Just a question: will be available an update procedure form previous versions 4.x (and 3.x)?

Thank you and ... congratulations!
Marcello.

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Jin,

If you consider the release date of final version near future, then definitely YES. The documentation is together with the QA the last part of our development cycle so it is still yet forming.

Jin Manriquez commented on

Is there update for the version 5.0 documentation in the near future?

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi waleedk,

I guess you can compare Kentico CMS with SiteCore from functional perspective, but have you compared from the entire value / price perspective? Yes, they have some more advanced features, but that comes with 10 times higher pricing, so the real value you get for your money is questionable, isn't it? Just for instance, take 1/10 of SiteCore features and compare it to full feature set of Kentico, that would be the right thing to compare. Who wins now? ;-)

I cannot agree that SiteCore is better for customization. It has many handlers and connection points, but you cannot really change any functionality or UI, just add or remove entire modules. So it is either your code or their code, nothing in between just slightly modified. And moreover, we offer source code license (still for the 1/10 of the typical SiteCore license pricing), what is better than having the option to change just anything? I agree that some of that customization options are not clearly described, that's what we are working on.

We are definitely closely watching them because they have become our main competitor. If you can give us feedback on what you can do in SiteCore but cannot with Kentico CMS, that would be great. We are filling the blanks all the time to be able to offer the same or better value, but still for a decent price. Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

+ I definitely think the development process with Kentico CMS is much faster and friendly (in case you start from scratch or know both on the same level).

SAMEER commented on

thank you for your hard work.Nice job guys!
Congratulationes!!!, I'm sure that all the news features will help us.THANKS SO MUCH

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Tag,

Yes, your designers will be able to edit the stylesheets from within the CMSDesk UI.

The direct on-site editing is not available at the moment but it is definitely something that we plan for future.

waleedk commented on

Hi Martin Hejtmanek,
i used your product version 4.0 and compared it to sitecore.com and i found from a webmater side that sitecore is much better as a product and easier to customize than the kentico. i'm sure if you look into the sitecore offering u will be able to produce far better solution.
also u need to add more controls .... and make them easir and simple to integrate.

thanks

Tag commented on

Will we be able to give CMS Designers (and/or other roles) access to the stylesheet editor without having to give them access to CMS Sitemanager?

This is a major issue for us when working with outsourcers. Designers need access to stylesheets but only developers and admin need access to rest of cmssitemanager.

Also, is it possible to add a Save button to little bar that shows up at top of page when browsing site outside of the CMSdesk that tells you you're in edit mode?

Would be great if clients could just login, and edit content areas in a full browser window like this instead of using CMSdesk at all.

Elijah Taylor commented on

This looks awesome, thank you for your hard work. I can't wait to try it out!

Alvaro commented on

Congratulationes!!!, I'm sure that all the news features will help us.

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Mike,

I mean 5.x but as I said, no promises, the exact time plan and road map for it is still on the discussion

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Alex,

Alternative for your "Peremestit" is "Přemístit", but we prefer "Přesunout" in this context :-) I think lot of basic words are similar to all Slavic languages, because we can sort of understand each other on a basic level. With speaking, it is much worse and since you have azbuka, it is even harder to write.

Mike commented on

Hello Martin,

by next version, do you mean 5.x or 6?

Thanks!

Jeroen Fürst commented on

Nice job guys! I really like the new layout, widgets and the improved (more consistent throughout the CMS) media library! :)

Alex Rybin commented on

Ha-ha!
Seems it sounds likely... "Kopírovat" (Czech) and "Kopirovat" (Russian). Cool! :) What is translation for "Move"? "Peremestit'" in Russian. :)

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Alex,

I totally understand you. The Czech for "Copy" had very similar issues, because it is "Kopírovat" that is one of the reasons we made more space there

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Michiel,

Unfortunately not yet. We plan to somewhat unify the page modes and make the widgets (and also design mode) work in ASPX in the next version, there was not enough time to finish this in this time.

Just for others who might ask: There is a Beta version, which is available to partners only so do not look for it here.

Alex Rybin commented on

You leave more space for "Copy", "Move", "Up" and "Down" buttons above Content Tree. That is great! Now we can translate it to Russian normally. In Russian we have up to 10 symbols in translation of "Copy"... :)

Michiel commented on

Congratulations on what looks like a very good (beta) release!

It's really great that you are releasing a beta, I'm installing it right now, and I will make sure to provide some feedback the coming weeks.

One question I already have: can we use widgets in ASPX templates?