How to solve your issue more quickly and upgrade vs. hotfix package

How to solve your issues more quickly
I mentioned some of the important things in my first blog post. This one will add something more to it.

You can send us your issues from your e-mail client or you can also submit the issue or bug on our web sites (Submit support issue form and Submit bug form).



In the images above is highlighted how to navigate to particular form and also very important fields for us - version number, hotfix number and development model. What makes the answer to be fast is that we are provided with faithful and detailed information.
It happened several times that we received message submitted using one of these forms, the version number which was selected was for example 4.1, hotfix 4.1.19 and the description of the problem. We knew that this issue was already fixed in previous version/hotfix, so we were looking for the problems elsewhere. This led to number of messages and investigation and at the end we realized that the user was using 4.0 version and the fix was very easy and known. Actually, this applies also for whole description of the issue. In some cases it can be complicated to explain or describe. In this case screen shots or access to the CMS can help us to understand it correctly. If you will provide us with access, please mention if the site is live or not and if we can try to do some changes or not. Another important thing is that if you have made any customization or you are using custom code. It is good to have this code so we can try to reproduce your issue with it.

Of course, sometimes it happens that you do not know the version number or you do not remember the number of the hotfix. In both cases you can send us the version number which can be found on various places in CMS, as shown in screen shots below (screen shots from CMS Desk are slightly different for 4.x and older version and for 5.x version, logon page is the same).





In some very critical issues you are not able to run the web site or login to the administration interface to check the version. There is one other way how to find out the version. You need to navigate to the BIN folder of your web project, right click on any of the DLL files with “CMS” prefix, select Properties and then Version tab (see screen shot below).



Upgrade vs. Hotfix package
In addition to one of my previous posts on this topic, because it is still bit confusing, I will explain what upgrade package is and what hotfix package is.

In fact, the process of applying either of them is the same, the difference is that upgrade package was fully tested and is released only after a new version is available. Whereas, the hotfix package is released weekly (7 days bug fixing policy), was not fully tested and in this package are fixed only bugs found in that particular version. Moreover, hotfixes are delivered only for currently released version (except the situation if there is no upgrade procedure available to upgrade to newer version, the hotfixes are released for previous version until the upgrade procedure is not published). Also, it is not possible to apply hotfix packages between versions – for example it is not possible to apply 4.1.15 hotfix to 4.0.x version. You need to upgrade the 4.0 version to 4.1 and then apply the hotfix. Hotfixes within the version are cumulative so it is recommended to apply always the latest one.