sensenet ECM 7 stable release is out
Welcome to the stable release of sensenet ECM 7.0!
Actually, this is not a big deal from a technical point of view: there were a few bug fixes, some interesting new features (like supporting Google Sign-in), but there is not much more in there than in previous releases.
But from the product’s point of view — well, this is a giant leap forward.
Ready to go
The ones who’ve been following our journey from sensenet 6 to sensenet 7 know that we did not actually change much in terms of source code. Of course we had to slice the whole thing into components, but we tried to keep everything intact. This is why we think that you can safely go into production with this release — because the majority of the code is already in production on many sites with sensenet 6!
Another reason to let this into production is that from now on we will publish patches. That means you will not have to start from scratch in your production environment (which is of course not an option), but execute the patches published by us (or maybe 3rd party vendors who publish sensenet ECM components).
It is still advisable to work with a clean database workflow in your development and test environment. The best practice is to create a CI build that is able to re-create your whole site and database from scratch, including installing sensenet ECM.
Upgrades in the future
Until this point we published pre-release versions of the product on nuget and on GitHub as well. We did not publish patches that would work as in-place upgrades on an existing sensenet ECM installation.
That changes now.
From now on we will assemble a proper SnAdmin package for every release we publish. Sometimes it will contain real content repository changes (e.g. a script that changes the db schema or added/modified content items), sometimes it will just bump the component version in the repo.
When developers get the new version from nuget, they will have to execute an SnAdmin command (in the command line) with the patch. In some cases (very rarely) there may be some additional manual steps, but we will explain those in detail and we plan to avoid that if possible.
Beta packages
Will we publish beta releases in the future? Of course! It helps our community a lot if we are able to show you what are we working on and try to collect feedback before publishing a stable release. Just do not push these into production, because that would involve manual patching in the future, which can be risky.
Components with different versions
As sensenet ECM is built from many components, these components are released in a different pace (in fact, we released a stable version of the two main components first, Services and WebPages — the others will follow soon). In some cases there will be version dependencies among components (e.g. one component’s latest version cannot work without upgrading a different one), but we will state these prerequisites when releasing a component — and of course nuget packages will force those dependencies too.
What’s next?
The journey does not stop here of course! We have many features to add and architectural improvements to make (take a look at the post about our frontend release for example).
The next major release is planned to include the Search infrastructure improvements we have been working on in the last several months.
We also plan to modernize our messaging backbone to make it suitable for cloud installations (meaning replace good old MSMQ with a more modern service).
Office Web Apps Server integration is also something we would very much like to add to our feature stack.
Stay tuned for releases in the near future and please contact us if we can help you with anything!
Originally published at community.sensenet.com on December 6, 2017.
