Just in time to squeeze into November this kicks off what will
be a recurring Q&A session. First off I've picked a few easy
ones to get us started. To get involved, feel free to go to the Umbraco 5 discussion forum. That's the place
to be for general discussion, and we'll be cherry picking some of
the most pertinent points and collating answers in this series for
ease of reference.
Q: When can I see the code?
We're going to be moving into public development mode in
December when we announce the update of the existing CodePlex repo
with a full 5.0 branch. The 5.0 code in there at the moment is a
dud.
Q: Why the secrecy?
It's not a secret if the plan is to reveal all! Well, I can
understand the question - but really it's nothing sinister, and
we're not interested in coding behind closed doors. Really it was
an unprecedented situation for the project - and we needed to take
a lead on some areas to build the skeleton before opening up for
inspection. From the point we move the code into CodePlex, we'll be
actively pushing changesets directly there so you'll be able to
follow or contribute to the development in full.
Q: Will it be upgradable from Umbraco 4.x?
We won't be providing an automatic upgrade path. In recasting
some of the foundations of Umbraco, some fundamental pieces rely on
incompatible technology - for example, it wouldn't be practical for
us to attempt an automatic port of complex Viewstate-based
usercontrols to the preferred partial views in 5. However, as I've mentioned before there's a fundamental
reason why we haven't changed the core concepts: the theory behind
Umbraco has not been rewritten, so the process of manual migration
will not require leaps of faith. Regarding content data migration,
it is of course plausible to write a persistence provider for
Umbraco Hive which can read/write an Umbraco 4 store. This is an
area which is under development as it's largely dependent upon time
and resources - I'll update this answer if we have any
developments. Last updated 25th November
2010.
Q: When will Umbraco 5 be released?
As Niels said in this post we're aiming for CTPs
and Alphas in Spring 2011, and a stable Beta by CodeGarden 2011.
Yet another reason to come along to this great annual event!