It's a couple of weeks since
we put out Alpha 1 and the response from the community has been
incredibly helpful. So, today it's time to get a couple more
features into folks' hands with another drop - Alpha 2 is now up on CodePlex for your
bug-hunting pleasure! We've also updated the status page (our
codename for v5 is "Jupiter"). We keep this updated once or
twice per week, so it's worth a bookmark if you're keen to track
progress.
You can
download Alpha 2 from this CodePlex release page.
Umbraco & Version 5
The Alpha releases (and the CTP earlier in the year) are all
about getting a build into the hands of developers ASAP to help
with feedback. If you're coming to this page new to Umbraco or the
v5 project, we have a host of videos of some of the talks we gave
earlier this year over on the CodeGarden 2011 website. Each session contains
a ton of information about Umbraco v5: what its all about, why its
is being built from the ground up, how its being built and the
architecture behind it.
Check out the previous post for some background and those
links.
Alpha 2 headlines
First of all a quick reminder - Alphas are buggy and incomplete!
It's way beyond the sketch phase, but it's no oil painting - yet;
with your help we can get it there and we are incredibly grateful
for all who have taken Alpha 1 for a spin so far and given feedback
on the forums or issue
logger. With that said, we're really excited about the major
additions in Alpha 2:
Hostname support
Over the past few weeks we've worked to enable multi-tenancy
support in the Alpha 2, commonly known as adding "hostnames" to
content nodes. Hostnames now support port numbers too!
Adding a hostname to a piece of content effectively makes that
node the "root" of a website for routing, so when you add hostnames
and then navigate to the properties panel of some content, you can
see the host is now part of the Url generation for that node.
Adding macros to content
We've also worked on adding a new dialog box to TinyMCE for
inserting a Macro into content just as you can with v4, and
rendering it out in the front end. Macros are also now rendered in
the editor (which is optional; you can turn it on in the Macro's
properties). You can add parameters to a macro - which is either a
Partial View, or a Child Action in MVC3 parlance - in the Macro
editor under the Developer section:
Choosing this Macro in the rich text editor "Insert Macro"
dialog box will then present those parameters together with the
correct Parameter Editor for the type you selected. Parameter
Editors are a new addition to the v5 codebase which are an
extension of the same Property Editor architecture used to power
the Content & Media Editor system
Here I've set the Age parameter to 82, shown in the richtext
editor because I've enabled rendering in the Macro properties:
And after publishing my Homepage it's rendered in the front-end.
The below is an example of rendering the content containing the
embedded macro using the Homepage.cshtml template, which is
included in the "Dev Dataset" package that I chose during
installation:
What else is in Alpha 2
There are plenty of other improvements and changes in the Alpha
2, although a lot don't have a demonstrable "UI". Alpha 2 is
intended to be tested for the following:
- Create, Edit, Delete: Data Types, Documents Types (both Content
& Media), Content, Media, Users, User Types, Macros,
Stylesheets, Scripts, & Templates
- Create & configure Dashboards
- Create media & upload images
- Lots property editors
- APIs to create plugins: Trees, Editors, Menu items, Editors,
Surface controllers, Property Editors, Dashboard match rules,
Dashboard filters, Tasks, Macro parameter editors
- Partial View & Child Action macros including caching and
TinyMCE support
- Chrome and IE 9 support
- Hostname assignment and routing
- Keyboard shortcuts: We've got some nice base code in there, an
example of which is that Ctrl-S saves in almost all places
Getting started
Whilst we refine the alphas, it's pretty tricky to give a good
& reliable "upgrade" experience, so for best results if you've
tried Alpha 1 already, please try Alpha 2 with a blank database and
IIS root.
Getting started with Umbraco v5 is the same as v4: you'll need
to download the zip file from CodePlex, unzip the contents to your
desired location, then point an IIS/IIS Express instance at that
location. Don't forget to set your app pool to .NET 4 Integrated
Mode! Note: Before unzipping, you may also need to
right-click the zip, go to Properties, and click "Unblock"
depending on your Windows security settings and chosen unzip
tool.
Once you have IIS running, just visit the install page to begin
the installation: http://localhost/install (where
localhost is the host name of your instance). Be sure
that you have the correct IIS file permissions setup just like in
v4. When the installer begins you can then choose to use
SqlCe embedded database or enter details to
connect to a Sql Server 2008 instance. (MySql
support is not tested in the Alpha 1 but is coming!)
After the database has been installed you can optionally install
the 'DevDataset' package which will just pre-populate the Umbraco
instance with some sample data that we've been using during
development.
One installed, the default username and password for the
backoffice is "admin" and "test" but you can change and edit this
in the User section once you're in.
We've included the templates from the 'DevDataset' package in
the default install even if you don't choose to install that
package, for easy reference to some of the Razor syntax available
in the Alpha 1. As this syntax improves in later releases and gets
closer to 4.7.1 we'll be doing some more blog posts to give
examples!
Getting involved
Umbraco is what it is because of its amazing community, and
we're always in awe of the help and feedback we get. If you'd like
to help find or fix bugs, or contribute to the codebase, please do
get in touch. The best way is to grab the sourcecode from CodePlex, take a look
at our developer Wiki (which is a
work-in-progress), and once you feel acclimatised to the codebase
or want to ask questions, we'll meet you on the Our forums to help
you with your first pull request!
Known issues - what not to worry about
The CodePlex release page is the best place for
this so that we can update it in one place.
We've got more good stuff to come - in the meantime, happy
bug-hunting and thanks for helping!
Team 5