It is with a huge amount of pride and happiness I'm able to
introduce Courier 2.5 today. This new version is a major step
forward and is a result of the experiences and feedback we got from
launching Courier 2.0 in May.
Courier is our take on a deployment tool for websites built on
Umbraco. It's focused around 2 things:
- Easy access to performing a deploy directly from the umbraco
backoffice, so even non-technical editors can do it
- Keeping track of the dependencies and resources needed for a
deployed item to function
Courier 2.5, will be a free upgrade to Courier 2.0, and Courier
1.3 as well!
Looking back
It's not a long time since Courier 2.0 was released. It was
received really positive, but as with everything, it was not a
perfect fit to everyone. And it soon became apparent that 3 issues
were widely reported:
- Timeouts due to too much data being transferred at a time
- Courier collecting tons of data, juts to transfer a single
document
- No default support for uComponents and other community data
types.
Major changes
Courier 2.5 solves those 3 common issues, along with another 80
bugfixes and smaller enhancements. Let's dive into the new big
changes.
A dedicated task-manager
Pushing a big site with all its files and data is something that
can take a while to do. First of all, it has to push all those
changes across a webservice connection, and collect and process all
the data on both ends. So with Courier 2.5, everything is handled
by a taskmanager, which handles long running tasks in the
background, queues tasks if something is currently being processed,
and gives live feedback on the process of each task. This makes
those long-running tasks rock-solid and at the same time provides
status on how far your deployment is.
Support for uComponents and DAMP 2.0 built-in
Massive respect to both of these community projects. They have
built up an amazing traction and is used on the majority of all
Umbraco sites being developed today. So from version 2.5, Courier
supports and understands these datatypes, and at the same time,
we've added a ton of helpers and sample code to help other projects
do the same, all available on the newly launched Courier Contrib
project page (which I will blog about very soon)
Tweaking dependency collection
When you transfer a document, you don't just transfer that
single document, Courier performs a analysis on the items you want
to deploy, and then collect all the files and data for those items
to function properly in their new environment. A good example
is that if you want to transfer a document, you would obviously
also need to have its document type, template, css, images, macros
and so on, transferred with it, or you would end up with a deployed
page, that might not work. We've done a lot of work to make
sure that items transferred still work, but require fewer
dependencies and are therefore faster to transfer. And we will
continue to do that, even for minor releases.
Finally, Courier 2.5 comes with a hugely refactored
architecture, and simpler and more clear API to use, so for those
who want to write extensions or run Courier from a console or WPF
application, it has become much simpler. I will blog about these
changes in the coming weeks as well.
Try it today
Courier 2.5 pre-release is available as a
package file and
manual install files, and samples and documentation is found here. We will
make sure to provide files and documentation on our.umbraco.org as
soon as 2.5 is launched.
Launch discount
To celebrate the launch, we're for a limited time offering
Courier 2, Full version at a discounted price of just
€99, that means you save €350
To get the discount, simply enter the discount code
"fgdtt2237asds" on the Cart page, during checkout.
Offer ends December 1st