Hi everyone! It's Friday, so it must be time for an updated
release of Umbraco 5. We're calling this one Beta 1 - there's still
work to do, but it's getting more and more stable, the APIs are
becoming more and more final, and your feedback will be as valuable
as ever.
If you're new to Umbraco 5 or you've come here from a web
search, there is some background to the other releases we've done
in the previous few months:
-
Umbraco 5 Alpha 1 Release
-
Umbraco 5 Alpha 2 is out today
-
Umbraco 5 Alpha 3 is out today
You can download the Beta 1 web application zip
from CodePlex, and within minutes of this blogpost
going up our status page will reflect
the latest updates too.
Trialling Umbraco 5
If you haven't had a play with the Alphas, or don't know what to
expect, I recorded a quick screencast to show you how quickly you
can get up and running. I'm not so hot with the new fandangled
Screenr kids so I'd love some feedback in the comments on what
you'd like or not like to see in the future!
What's in the Beta 1?
Our focus since Alpha 3 has been on a couple of core areas:
Editing templates
Matt has made some further improvements to the template editor
and recorded a nifty Screenr here:
Along with those tweaks, we've also got a new "Books" node in
there which gives an example of how you can do parent-child
templates just like Umbraco 4.
Getting your content into your templates & pages
The new Homepage template in the Dev-Dataset also has a lot of
content by default as a mini-tutorial that can take you through
some example queries. Querying for content is something that we
have started since Alpha 3, and some of the early methods are
already in there to play with. Our aim is to have this pretty much
complete in time for Beta 2.
Bug fixing
We've been getting a lot of great feedback from the various
hackdays and meetups, and we've closed as many issues as we could
find. For example:
- Deleting a property in a document type should no longer
error
- Deleting a whole document type should be fixed
- Publishing all content from the context menu should have fewer
niggles
- Registering your own Dashboards in the backoffice should be
easier (Darren Ferguson has put up a great example
blogpost here)
- .. and so on! Of course, if you do find any problems, we'd love
to know. There's an Umbraco 5 forum on Our Community site which we keep an eye on as
often as possible. With the next beta, it'll also be time to start
having an issue tracker which we'll help you out with when the time
comes.
Performance
The Alpha 3 was slow, we know - especially if you're using
SqlCe. It's better in the Beta 1 - not yet perfect, but you'll
notice the difference. Why are things slow in these pre-releases?
Primarily because we're getting the foundations right first, and
coming back in later to profile the code and understand where to
make efficiency savings. Premature optimisation can really hurt a
project - for example, if we added workarounds or caching before
the full extent of the system was fleshed-out, we could hit a
roadblock or find that the caching was lying to us.
So, now we've started our round of betas, we're in the phase
where we start to profile the code and put effort into
optimisation. This doesn't just mean adding caching - it's taking a
look at the actual code as it runs and ensuring we're doing things
efficiently.
This phase has started - the tree should be more performant in
the backoffice, for example, but we know of plenty of other places
where we can make it lightning fast as we move closer to the main
release.
Performance part 2
As you may know, Lucene is extraordinarily fast at reading data
from the local filesystem. If you don't know it - that's OK, just
trust me when I say it's very often used to index data to a set of
small files that make it much quicker to read or query, taking some
of the burden off your database. In my past life I ran a team that
moved Vogue.co.uk entirely onto Lucene in fact, and our database
server only ever got contacted by our Lucene indexer once in a
while and started to feel quite lonely.
Our goal is to let everyone have Examine / Lucene indexing in
Umbraco 5 with very little setup or even to know it's happening. In
addition to our core coding practises and database design, this is
one of the ways in which we'll ensure Umbraco 5 is scalable and
performant, long-term. Because of the way our data layer ("Hive")
works, we can combine providers together in a configuration file,
so that whoever responds first with a piece of content wins.
So Shannon has put a lot of work over the past few weeks into
writing a Hive provider for Examine. It's included in the Beta 1,
but it's disabled by default as we've got a bit more work to do. If
you enable the provider, you can install just as normal - with your
SQL Server totally switched off, if you like - and edit / display
content just fine. Here's another Screenr if you'd like to have a
play:
Known issues / limitations
We're still in pre-release mode even though this is a Beta 1, so
there will be bugs and performance issues, but we really are
grateful for you giving it a go so that you can be a part of a
stable Umbraco 5 release! We've put the issues list on the CodePlex release
page to keep it in one place.
Collaboration - Umbraco 5 Contrib!
In my last post I asked for input on what you think we should do
to make it a more welcoming place to contribute to the codebase. As
a result of some of the great feedback, at one of the recent UK
hackdays we started a new CodePlex project called Umbraco 5
Contrib. We'd love for this to be a great playground for anyone
who wants to have fun making property editors, custom trees, custom
Hive providers, dashboards, anything really. Of course, Umbraco
remains open source and that will never change - you can still fork
the main codebase and we're always grateful for pull requests! But
if you'd rather work on plugins in parallel, now there's a place to
do it in collaboration with us and your fellow community members.
Check out the code, there's already a Wordpress Hive provider, an
example Products Hive provider, and an example Dashboard on there
thanks to Darren and David! And I know more are coming - Morten is
looking at a Flickr Hive provider, and Lee on a Google Maps
property editor.
That's all for now, I hope you enjoy the Beta 1 and as always
let us know what feedback you have!
Happy bug-hunting and thanks again for helping!
Team 5