• Home
  • Release notes - Kentico 8.1

Release notes - Kentico 8.1

✖
Copy to clipboard

Kentico 8.1 (August 22, 2014)

System requirement changes

  • Removed support for hosting in Medium trust environments.
  • Microsoft Azure SDK 2.3 required for Microsoft Azure projects.
  • Added Microsoft SQL Server 2014 support for the database.
  • Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 systems now require Service Pack 1 to be applied.

New features

Content management

  • Documents were renamed to Pages in the administration interface. Keywords in the API and code names remain the same for backward compatibility.

  • Performance - Improved performance for websites with a very large number of pages.

  • Editor:

    • The editor toolbar is hidden until focus enters an editable region. After that the editor toolbar is displayed next to the region.
    • The default editor toolbar contains a reduced set of options and is less confusing.

  • Code generators - Provide an easy way to generate classes for accessing content data through the API (page types, custom tables, forms).

  • 51Degrees library - Upgraded to version 3.1.2.3.

E-commerce

  • Buy X, Get Y discounts - Allow store managers to define a new type of cross-selling promotions. For example, Buy any 3 clothing articles, get the cheapest for free.
  • User experience - Orders and Discounts are now marked with colored tags based on their statuses.

On-line marketing

  • Performance - Significantly improved recalculation speed and live site traffic of contact groups, scoring, and personas.
  • Geolocation - Updated the Maxmind GeoIP database used for contact geolocation.
  • Activity events - Changed the recommended way of handling “activity logged” events in the API. If you have custom handlers for the ActivityEvents.ProcessActivity or ActivityEvents.ProcessActivities events, use the ContactManagementEvents.ProcessContactActionsBatch event instead.

Platform

  • Dashboard:

    • Individual users can now customize their system dashboard (add, remove, relocate application tiles).
    • Application tiles on the dashboard now support displaying of live data.

  • New HTML5 multifile uploader instead of the Silverlight uploader.

  • Macro rules - Added support for escaping special string characters inside the values of text macro rule parameters.

  • DataQuery:

    • Automatically generated queries now use column names enclosed in square brackets.
    • Added new where condition methods (WhereGreaterThan, WhereGreaterOrEquals, WhereLessThan, WhereLessOrEquals, WhereEndsWith, WhereNotEndsWith, WhereNotEquals).
    • Added support for strongly typed columns (column, expression, value).

  • API - New method for safe HTML attribute encoding (HTMLHelper.EncodeForHtmlAttribute).

Social & Community

  • LinkedIn - New application for managing LinkedIn company profiles from Kentico. Includes analytics.
  • SharePoint - New connector for SharePoint 2010, 2013 and SharePoint online.

Fixed issues (major)

  • Debug - Optimized memory consumption.
  • Design - Fixed several minor design issues in the administration interface.
  • Design - Unified the position of site selectors in the administration interface — they are now on the right side of the header action buttons (with the exception of selectors in left menus).
  • Design - Header action filters were moved into the content of pages in the administration interface.
  • Design - The asp:GridView control was removed from skin files.
  • Design - Fixed the design and positioning of tooltips in the macro autocomplete help.
  • Design - Images in the database web installer were replaced by font icons.
  • Design - Unused E-commerce related styles were removed from CMSDesk.css.
  • DocumentQuery - The Immutable method was fixed for the DocumentQuery and MultiDocumentQuery classes.
  • E-commerce - The Shopping cart contains product order discount rule was disabled. A new, more flexible rule Shopping cart contains products (any/all) was introduced.
  • E-commerce - Added a foreign key constraint for the CouponCodeDiscountID column in the COM_CouponCode table.
  • E-commerce - Removed a redundant WHERE condition generated by the Top N products by sales web part.
  • E-mail engine - Improved stability for e-mail sending.
  • jQuery - Unified the usage of jQuery in the system (web parts, administration interface). Solves most of the issues when combining two versions of jQuery in the site content.
  • Macro data source web part - Added properties for configuring caching.
  • ObjectQuery - The ‘Count’ property now returns the correct number of items for paged queries.
  • ObjectQuery - The ‘Distinct()’ method now works correctly for paged queries.
  • On-site editing - The Edit page button now uses the content culture instead of the preferred UI culture of the current user.
  • Page paths - Page path selectors no longer save special characters in SQL encoded format (for example _ instead of [_]).
  • Pages - Changing the initial workflow step for page creation is now supported in the DocumentEvents.Insert event.
  • Performance - Optimized performance for object deletion.
  • Performance - Added a database index to increase the speed of contact group recalculation.
  • Smart search - Improved reliability and stability when running on Microsoft Azure.
  • Strands Recommender - Fixed the format of the product catalog feed generated by Kentico (including multilingual support).
  • UI elements - Fixed unwanted element reordering after the renaming of a UI element.
  • WebDAV - Removing the WebDAV module from the installation resulted in errors during the compilation of the solution.

Additionally, all bugs fixed within the Kentico 8 hotfixes are included in version 8.1. See the Bugtracker on DevNet for a full list (select Fixed Bugs).

Breaking changes (API and HTML output code)

  • The CMS.DataEngine.ClassMappingInfo and CMS.DataEngine.ClassMappingInfo classes were removed from the public API (not intended for external use).

  • Certain overloads of the MacroCompatibility.TransformToDataMacros() method were removed from the public API (not intended for external use).

  • The return value of the DocumentEngine.TreeProvider.SetNodeOrder method was changed from int to void. Use the NoderOrder property of the given TreeNode object to get the node order value.

  • The DocumentEngine.DocumentNodeDataInfo and DocumentEngine.DocumentNodeDataInfoProvider public classes were made internal (not intended for external use).

  • The DocumentEngine.DocumentURLProvider.UseLiveURLForEditing property was removed. Pages with MVC templates always automatically use the live URL in Kentico 8.1.

  • The first parameter of the CMS.Ecommerce.DiscountInfoProvider.IsUserAuthorizedToReadDiscount method was renamed from siteName to site and now accepts both site ID and site name values.

  • The CMS.Base.AzureHelper.TempPath and CMS.Base.AzureHelper.CachePath properties were moved to CMS.AzureStorage.PathHelper:

  • The following members were removed from the public DataQuery API (not intended for external use):

    • CMS.DataEngine.IQueryObject.IsNested
    • CMS.DataEngine.AbstractQueryObject.Name.set
    • CMS.DataEngine.IQueryColumn.NestedQuery
    • CMS.DataEngine.QueryColumnBase<ParentType>.NestedQuery
    • CMS.DataEngine.IQueryObject.Name.set
    • CMS.DataEngine.QueryMacros CMS.DataEngine.DataQuerySettingsBase<TQuery>.GetExpressions()

  • The NodeChildNodesCount column was removed from the CMS_Tree database table, replaced by NodeHasChildren (bit data type). To get the number of child nodes in the API, use TreeNode.Children.Count.

  • The ContactGroupScheduledTaskID column was removed from the OM_ContactGroup table. You can use the ContactGroupRebuildTaskManager class in the API to manage planned contact group recalculations.

  • The CMSLogActivityImmediatelyToDB web.config key was removed and no longer affects on-line marketing functionality. This key was only intended for showcase purposes.

  • The LinkedIn apply with web part was removed (LinkedIn no longer supports this functionality).

  • Inline styles in the output of the UniGrid control were replaced by CSS classes. May influence live site pages that rely on the inline styles.

  • The system generates information messages on the live site with simpler HTML markup (now the same as in Kentico 7).

  • The file uploader control has different output HTML, because the Silverlight uploader was replaced by an HTML 5 uploader.

  • The markup of the Tasks.ascx live site control used for displaying project management tasks has slightly changed. The FloatLeft CSS class has been removed from the div element containing the task listing.