August 2008 - Summary

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Hi there, with the standard development posts, I will be providing you with the summary of our development progress to keep you updated with the information about how new version of Kentico CMS is developed. Here is the first one ...

At the end of the July we finished developing the version 3.1a of Kentico CMS and while the release candidate was tested, we started to developing the features of new version.

What market and you (our Customers) wanted were the Community features. Current internet is all about connecting people with each other and the community features are used more and more, even on corporate web sites. Some of you also want to implement some community webs and you are forced to implement some features by your own so we want to provide you a complete solution for this to save your time for more pleasant things than just development.

As you probably know, our roadmap contains the list of features which will be probably in the new version. We are very busy implementing it so we will probably need to move some of them into the next version.

Currently, we are working on following things:

  • New link management - In the previous versions, you were limited by using only one URL for the document (AliasPath) and one extra URL for each language version of the document (URLPath). In the new version we are introducing the document aliases which will allow you to use multiple aliases for the documents, including support for specific document extensions for better SEO. You will also be able to use wildcard URLs to place some of the query parameters to the path instead of the query string. This is already implemented.
  • Tags - The ability to mark documents with tags as the key words (or key phrases), including the tag clouds and grouping of the tags. This way you can connect documents by their key words. This feature is already developed and reviewed.
  • Categories (Taxonomy) - While tag is just a simple word, category is something predefined and you can use the categories to create taxonomy over you content. Each document can have multiple categories. Also already developed and in the phase of review.
  • Message boards - Similar to the blog comments as you know it, but available for all documents. This feature will allow you to create simple one-level forums (message boards) for your visitor's comments. We are about to finish it soon.
  • Alternative forms - You will be able to define multiple forms for the document / biz form / etc. and use different forms in different contexts. It is about to be finished.
  • New membership management - Current membership management is not built for large amount of users, for this reason we are rebuilding the administration interface so it can handle large amount of users. We are still developing it.
  • Groups - Groups will allow the web site visitors to create their own communities in a single web site and manage their content and members. This is by far the most important feature of social networking solution and we are still developing it.
  • E-mail engine - We are introducing new e-mail engine with e-mail queue and better Newsletter handling. We are currently developing it.
  • Custom tables - Some of you are probably using BizForms to create list of objects or store the data in a table which can be exported with our package. For this reason, we are implementing feature between Documents and BizForms, which will allow you to store your data in a lists, outside of the document tree. Again, we are currently implementing it.
  • Session management - Each social network platform needs the ability to display the online users, or at least their number, so we will provide you with simple session management. We are about to start developing it right after one of the subteams finishes their work on their current module.
  • Friends - To extend the possibilities of users, we will allow them to be friends with each other, just to connect them somehow. Also to be implemented in the nearest future.
Other things are either in the phase of analysis or ready for implementation. For the things above, you can be sure that they will be implemented in the new version, the other things will depend on the time we will have.

We have also successfully trained all our staff for all the modules and details of our Solution so now they all know all parts of the solution and we are developing much faster and better than before.

During the next month, we will be implementing and closing the features and if everything goes right, we will announce new version at the end of the October.

I don't like to go to the details, I better check our status to see if everything goes as it should and you get the solution as soon as possible. See you later.

P.S.: Please don't ask me about details or screenshots, just wait for the new version to see how the features look like and what they offer. It will give me more time to keep an eye on everything ;-)

M.H.
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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 Harsh, There has been beta version of 4.0 released (we decided to mark it major version since there are some changes in licensing and some others), you can find the details on our CEO's blog: http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Petr-Palas/November-2008/Kentico-CMS-4-0-BETA-and-Changes-in-Licensing.aspx We hope to release the final version of 4.0 before Christmas so we can enjoy them instead of finishing the new version. I am so busy making it finished that I even haven't got the time to write blog posts, I will get the time during this week to inform you all about current status.

Harsh Mathur commented on

Hi martin. First of all i would like to say that Kentico is one of the best CMS tool i have ever used. Some of the features which you have mentioned above are very important for our ongoing project specially categories and Tags and like Linus Boström we even had to create our custom solution for the project. I would like to know will these features be available in v3.2 or are they available in 3.1a already. If they will be available in 3.2 then by when we can expect the version.

de-Hao! commented on

Martin!

I'm impressed with the depth of the CMS product. I just recently created a User Group on LinkedIn.com to encourage dialogue on some of the pros and cons of the Kentico CMS product. Feel free to join the user group on LinkedIn.com and let’s share some thoughts and ideas.

Kentico CMS User Group in LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=970177

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Halim. This should also be available in the next version where you will be able to select which data you want to delete

Halim Dahlan commented on

Hi Martin,

Great work on the current release of the CMS and also looking forward on the enhancements. One thing I would like to suggest. The current web analyst report does not allow you delete the current data. It's good to have this feature as users (especially developers) might want to start the statistics fresh (after undergoing tests on development) before going to production.

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Thank you, if we will have enough time (not sure right now), we will try to implement this during current version development. I am currently attending the Microsoft DevTools EcoSystem Summit in Redmond and we are very excited about the Visual Studio extensibility and also some of the presented ideas. So in future releases you will all get even better developer experience from our CMS solution with VS integrated editing of the code. I won't tell you any details at the moment, just be sure you will like it ;-) I may bring some details with one of my blog posts later.

Ralf Terner commented on

Hi Martin, Thank you for response.

I had submitted ticket "[Ticket:42714] Feature suggested by Ralf Terner". Hope that Kentico development team will add this feature to some of the next version. Now I will start to research of what can be done using UrlRewriter.RewriteUrl() method.

Thanks to Kentico development team for creating the best CMS on the market!

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Ralf,

This will be possible for single pages in the next version with wildcard URLs or document aliases. To apply this on the whole web site, you would need to set this for all pages. I will try to analyze how we could apply this in general without influencing existing web sites or functionality. Currently, you can do this by performing URL rewriting before ours, just analyze the URL and rewrite it to the other form before the method UrlRewriter.RewriteUrl(), our rewriting engine will take care about the rest. I am currently out of office so I cannot give you exact example, please contact our support team for details.

Ralf Terner commented on

Hi Martin,

Can you please look here:

SEO URL rewriting
http://devnet.kentico.com/Forums.aspx?ForumID=17&Thread=00004735

Is it possible to solve this task by changing some code in App_Code\Global.asax.cs? Or maybe you know some other simple hack?

Excuse me for spending you time. But it is very important question for me.

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Patrik.

Actually, from what I know, we have a customer who succesfully sent 85k Newsletter e-mails with the latest service release (3.1a). Unfortunately it requires lot of system resouces and the server configured to let the application consume it without being restarted. Current weakness if newsletter module is the fact that it generates the e-mail bodies to the queue which gets insanely large for such amount of users. We are improving the next version to generate the bodies of e-mails on-the-fly right before the e-mail is sent so the e-mails do not have to store all their data in the database and consume so much memory. Hopefully, it will extend the possibilites of newsletter engine to the higher levels.

Patrik Potocki commented on

When you developing the new email engine, I hope you making it work big scale also. Because the current email engine have alot of problem when the numbers start hitting 10k+. Would be very nice if it could handle atleast 100k+ subscribers or even better unlimited :)

Elijah Taylor commented on

Your response to the market's needs is exemplary. Several of these new features (new link/url features, tags, categories, custom tables) will greatly impact our development schedule for Q4. Some of them will address things we've already had planned to develop ourselves, and that's a welcome release indeed!

Thanks again for creating such a great CMS.

Dirk commented on

Martin: just great! you've got a very motivated and capable (support) team. They are really motivated to deliver solutions and just do so.

Darren Harding commented on

All sounds good even though they are probably not all features I would use personally. Like Dirk said the web designing side of things can be hard going sometimes so the VS / Intellisense thing sounds very interesting.

Dimitris Rakopoulos commented on

The Categories/Tags is something I have been looking for! Really useful and worth waiting!

Keep up the good work!

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Dirk: Thank you for your suggestion, it will be done in the next version. If you have any more suggestions, please let our support know, they are constantly gathering the requirements from our customers. I can tell you that we are planning improvements in web site designing, and as one of MS VSIP we are planning to integrate our editing interface to the Visual Studio so you can use Intellisense and other fancy features of VS while editing your layouts and other code.

Dirk commented on

Very promising!
There is one thing that i don't like in the ecommerce-module: already (website)registered users have to enter some details again such as their e-mail. That should be filled in automatically. (and in other parts)
It's a minor thing, but important to motivate potentials to click-through and buy.
For the rest: Kentico is the best CMS i worked with (as a programmer). The webdesigning takes a lot of effort, but overall Kentico is the best!

Linus Boström commented on

Sounds really good. We had to create a custom solution for adding tags and categories, looking forward to replace this with a native CMS solution.