Hey Umbraco community, from now on I (Sebastiaan) will blog
regularly about what we're currently doing during the development
of the core.
First off, as you will have noticed, v4.8.1 (featuring a dozen bug
fixes) has been released recently and that took a bit longer than
we had hoped partly because we wanted to make sure the release was
of high quality, partly because we were still getting better
organized.
Speaking of quality: unfortunately, even though we did try to test
for every install and upgrade scenario, a SQLCE problem still
slipped through. This seemed easy to fix at first, but it turns out
there is some SQL CE specific problems that indicate that we're
trying to connect to the database with two seperate connections
(which is not allowed). So while we're trying to fix this, here's a
workaround if you want to upgrade to 4.8.1: http://bit.ly/TEmMJN .
Please note that this is strictly an issue regarding SQL CE
installs, SQL Server is not effected, we'll fix the upgrade for
4.9.0.
On to better news: We have now completely moved the issue tracker
over from CodePlex to YouTrack (http://issues.umbraco.org ).
This is an exciting change because in YouTrack we have so much more
control over the way we manage issues, it suits our needs
perfectly. Have you seen the Agile board in which you can see
what is being worked on in real time?
To make this happen, we first went through all of the open issues
that had been active (created, voted on or commented on) for the
past 12 months (650+!) and evaluated which ones still had merit and
which ones had already been fixed or were duplicates. This left us
with about 350 existing bugs and another 150 or so feature requests
or tasks. We decided to close issues older than a year because they
had very little chance of still being valid. That said, if you're
really desperate to get an issue re-opened or look at it's
comments, we do have the raw
export available in both Report and BCP format (we were
unable to actually use these for importing so we scraped CodePlex
instead, the formats are therefore really very "raw").
The CodePlex Id's and owners of the issues were also imported (in
the description text), you can search for them and vote or star
your own issues.
We will soon be going through the issue list and making a
judgement call on the difficulty to fix. There are many little
issues that just need a change of about 15-60 minutes and we hope
that beginning contributors will find it less intimidating to get
started once they realize that there's something they can do,
easily. Another thing that will be looked at shortly is the
existing patches and pull request, we're going to start evaluating
them and hopefully can integrate a bunch of them soon.
Looking at the overview,
you can see that Matt has made great progress on overhauling the
media section to make it much easier to manage media files in
folders. He's also abstracted away the disk access part of the code
so that in the future we can start writing providers for, for
example DropBox or S3 (for which Matt has made a proof of concept
for that as well).
Meanwhile, Niels has been giving the document type editor a lot of
love, taking the best ideas from the community recently and
integrating them directly into the core. This includes an easier
way to group properties on a tab (fieldsets), allowing for document
type mixins (one doctype can inherits from multiple others) and
setting of root doctypes, which limits the number of document types
you can create at the root level (currently, you can just create
anything there).
And finally, the wonderful Lee Kelleher and Hendy Racher have put
some fixes in place to make management of
Relations much easier. This includes a way to edit your
relation types from within the backoffice (no more manually
constructed SQL statements!) and an actual relations picker.
#h5yr!
If you are itching to get some issues fixed, then don't hesitate,
Peter recently added a whole new Contribute section to Our
Umbraco and it describes exactly how you can get involved.
If you run into any problems, make sure to comment here, or leave a
message on Our or Twitter if you need some help, we're happy to
show you the way and excited to see your patches and pull
requests!