After a final round of checks and small bug fixes, we feel the
2.5 release is ready to get out to the masses. It is now available
on
our.umbraco.org for download, along with documentation and
installation instructions.
To get a taste of what Courier can do, watch
the videos here, or read this
blog post, which outlines the latest version.
Courier 2.5 improvements
Robust task manager
Handles all your tasks, even very long running ones, so
transfers, deployments and packaging tasks all run safely in their
own threads, ensuring that nothing stops in the middle of an
operation.
Support for community projects
Out of the box, uComponents and DAMP 2.0 datatypes are supported.
At the same time, we've launched CourierContrib on
codeplex, to ensure that we keep sharing code for adding
compatibility for 3rd party datatypes. If you want to be
part of this, or simply want to add courier support to your
datatype, give us a shout on the forum or read the docs on
dataresolvers for courier
Refined architecture
After feedback on 2.0 we decided to undertake the larger task of
changing the core APIs to handle the common issues of timeouts, too
many dependencies collected and the way responsibility was shared
between core and the individual providers. It has been a big push
to get done, but future development will be faster and more solid
than before.
Improved UI
2.5 has been about improving the lives of non-technical users, who
just want to right-click and deploy, so the UI in that area has
been massively upgraded to give better feedback and handle users
with limited permissions better - for instance, if a user is not
allowed to transfer document types, courier will simply check if
this is needed at all, so the deployment can continue.
Future development
This was the big push to get past the big issues, for the next
releases planned, we will be doing small and focused releases,
aimed at fixing immediate issues, reported by our users, and keep
major feature development on hold, until we have had a good amount
of maintance releases - stability is the main goal for the next
releases.
Courier and version 5?
Future development of course also includes Version 5 support,
and building a free Courier Provider for moving content from
Version 4 to Version 5. It will support moving all the items that
makes sense to move, namely content and media data, as well as much
as possible of their respective media and document type
information, we will keep you posted on the progess as we know
more.
Courier for moving content and media from Version 4 to Version
5, will be free for everyone to use.
We hope you will enjoy this release, and give us feedback, good
or bad so we can improve it even more.