Hi everyone! Have you booked up your Seasonal Religious-or-not
Coding Fun calendar yet? No? Well, allow me to proffer a toy for
the holidays. We've put up a couple of new Umbraco 5 builds for you
to try out. We're calling it Release Candidate 1 - we're almost
there in terms of features, and the remaining work for us to get to
a 5.0 release is around performance, bugfixes from community
testing, and any quick wins around handy methods that help with
building a site.
As usual, 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
- Umbraco 5 Beta 1 is out today
You can download the RC 1 web application zip from
CodePlex, and within minutes of this blogpost going up our status page will reflect the latest
updates too.
Before we crack on, a quick word about timings: while we haven't
matched our recent hopes for a Christmas 5.0 completed release, we
do know that we will be able to put it out by the end of January.
We have now reached the point where we're going to be working on
performance and bugfixes in time for 5.0, so that we can then
quickly add any popular missing features with future releases (5.1,
etc.) We're really grateful for your help testing this release, and
we'll be using your feedback to make a lightning-fast, stable 5.0
after Christmas.
What's in the release?
Today's release has two parts. The first has the same level of
User support as Beta 1 - i.e., no Members section. The second
download is the same fundamental codebase, but with the Members
section added. Work on this has not yet been completed, and we're
keeping it on a parallel build for the moment so that we can
evaluate community feedback and leave the option open for us to
release 5.0 either with or without Members support depending on how
the testing goes. We'd really appreciate if you could give that one
a try too and let us know how you get on.
Issue Tracker
Speaking of "letting us know", it's about time we helped you
help the project, by introducing the promised place to log v5
issues. We have used the CodePlex Issues tracker for some time, and
it's been very good to us, but there are some niggles - and so we've created a new issue tracker
at http://issues.umbraco.org for people to use
for v5 RC1. We'd love feedback on this too, as if all goes well, we
could see this as the new central tracker in the future.
We also have some exciting ideas about how to integrate this
with the Karma system on Our - if you have any ideas too, please let us know!
The tracker is based on the excellent YouTrack from JetBrains,
who have been kind enough to give us a free license for our
open-source project.
Registration is open to all. After logging in, you will see the
welcome page that gives you a few hints on querying the issues
log.
We've got some issues in there already that we'll be working on
in time for 5.0:
Logging an issue is really straightforward. You can select a
release that you're targeting, and easily include screenshots from
your clipboard or filesystem from the "Attach" menu:
Features added since Beta 1
Composite document types
A few people noticed a big feature lacking in Beta 1: inherited
document types. Support for this was in the architecture from the
beginning, but it didn't make the cut for that release. Today's
download has the feature ready and waiting to be tested.
Where it slightly differs from v4.7 is that you can now have
multiple parent document types! 
You can have two master document types, say
"SEO Fields" and "Article Fields", and have a "News Article"
document type that inherits the fields of both. We merge any tabs
that have the same alias too, so that your editors see fields in
common tabs grouped together.
You can change this inheritance structure at any time, but be
warned of course that you may end up removing existing properties
that you have filled out for content.
Here's an example: I've got a News Article document type which
inherits from both "Seo Fields" and "Article Fields". My News
Article type has a tab called "Article", and so does the "Article
Fields" document type. If I edit "Article Fields", I can see my
"Article" tab with its "Body Text" field:
If I edit the child "News Article" document type, I can see the
inherited properties greyed-out for reference, and also the "News
Title" field that only exists on this document type. I've also got
some greyed-out Seo fields there because I'm also inheriting from
my handy "Seo Fields" document type.
Editing some content that is a "News Article" shows the two
fields merged into one Article tab:
Dictionary
The dictionary is now in there too. You'll notice it in the
backoffice under the Settings tree, and you can use the
@Umbraco.GetDictionaryItem helper in your templates to insert a
value. As I mentioned in the previous release, the Dictionary in v5
uses our revised Language support that allows for fallbacks. So, if
you specify that the Belgian French language "falls back" to
regular French, any Dictionary items that are blank for Belgian
French will revert to the value in the regular French language.
This should be a timesaver for scenarios where your usage of the
language in your website only differs in a few key words.
A quick word about keys: many have seen that you can have a
"hierarchical" dictionary in v4, but you still have to find unque
names for your keys, because you refer to them by only their key
and not their path in your templates.
This changes in v5. Here's two dictionary items that I have:
Here's the code for using them:
<p>My
key:
@Umbraco.GetDictionaryItem("MyKey"
)</p>
<p>My key
2:
@Umbraco.GetDictionaryItem("MyKey/MyKey2"
)</p>
Also, since Dictionary items are "just regular content" in Hive,
we get Rollback, Move, Copy, and Permissions, all "for free":
Preview
You can now click the 'Save' button followed by the 'Preview'
button and see your page rendered with the latest revision rather
than the published copy.
Hierarchy navigators on DynamicModel
In your templates, you can now use the following navigators:
- DynamicModel.Ancestors
- DynamicModel.AncestorsOrSelf
- DynamicModel.Descendants
- DynamicModel.DescendantsOrSelf
- DynamicModel.Children
- DynamicModel.Parent
Each of these navigators also has more querying and sorting
support on there. The following methods are available:
- Single
- SingleOrDefault
- First
- FirstOrDefault
- Last
- LastOrDefault
- Any
- Count
- Where
- OrderBy
- OrderByDescending
All of these methods except the last two accept a string for
querying against the dynamic properties on a piece of content. You
can just supply the string, like v4:
DynamicModel.Children.FirstOrDefault("publisher
== \"APRESS\"")
or you can supply parameters in order if you prefer - the
numbers just correspond to the order of parameters that you supply
after the first part:
DynamicModel.Children.FirstOrDefault("publisher
== @0",
"APRESS")
Normally, if you're used to dealing with lists of objects in
.NET (IEnumerable<Something>) you may know that when you
access methods like myList.Count(), the Count() method is actually
what's called an "extension method" - it's a static method defined
in one place that can be used on anything that implements
IEnumerable<Something>. Why do we care? Because these static
methods don't work on dynamic objects - those where not even Visual
Studio knows the properties available, because .NET figures it out
when your page is being rendered. But it would be a great pain to
have to either not have those handy methods like Count(), Any(),
First() on DynamicModel or have to call them in the alternative
unintuitive way. So we've added them explicitly to the collection
that underpins Ancestors, Children etc.
Long story short, it means you can also do queries like this,
using Where() with Count() tacked on the end:
DynamicModel.Descendants.Where("NodeTypeAlias ==
@0",
"BookPage").Count()
The OrderBy and OrderByDescending methods take a property alias,
e.g. OrderBy("Name")
You can also use the same underscore prefix as in v4.7 in order
to put a "recursive" property into your template. This is a
throwback to the legacy of XSLT when it was straightforward to say
"my current page might not have this property, but please go up the
tree until you've found one". A bit like an "inherited" property.
Where you would normally write DynamicModel.SiteName to
put the Name property from the current page, you can put
DynamicModel._siteName with the underscore and lowercasing
indicating to the system that, if that property isn't found, it'll
go up the tree until it's found it.
Alternative Templates
If you have more than one template available for the document
type of your content, you can now include that in the Url similarly
to v4. For example, here's the homepage template that I've been
using to test querying, it has some cruft at the top:
And here's the cleaner one that I called AltHomepage.cshtml on
my filesystem, and added to my Homepage doctype, accessed by adding
?altTemplate=althomepage to my browser address bar:
Happy bug-hunting holidays!
As always, we really appreciate the time people take to test out
these releases - even putting up with it not having many
performance optimisations until the final stage - and both
reporting issues, and collaborating on the community
site and on the contrib project.
So, best wishes to you and yours, and see you in the forums!
Team 5