We hope you're enjoying Umbraco 6 as much as the other 1200+(!) people who have already installed it in less than a week's time!
So, what are we up to next? If you've been paying attention to our release page then you might have noticed some updates recently.
First a reminder of the fact that we're using SemVer for our version numbers, and will be able to adhere to the guidelines of that specification much better now that v6 is out. A short reminder of what Major, Minor and Patch means:
A version number is built out of 3 digits, x.y.z, where x is the Major, y is the Minor and y is the Patch version number.
Let me list them for you:
- Patch releases are now listed seperately.
- A patch release ONLY contains bug fixes, no significant new features and certainly no breaking changes.
- After listening to all you had to say on the subject it was pretty clear that a monthly release cycle for patches was preferred, which is what I have put in the calendar.
- Patch versions will not automatically be released when all of the issues are fixed, we will keep pulling in issues when they make sense and release according to the schedule.
- However, if a serious bug arises, we will do a release of the patch version as soon as possible and reset the calendar to do another release 4 weeks after that.
- We're still doing patch releases for v4, so if you're not ready to upgrade to 6 yet, we've still got your back.
- The release cycle of Minor versions has slowed down to doing one every 8 weeks, instead of 4 weeks.
- In true SemVer fashion, we'll not be allowing breaking changes in Patch and Minor releases (so no breaking changes until 7.0.0) - this is rather easy to detect when we're changing public method names and signatures, but sometimes can be really hard to see when there are behavioral changes. While we do test our changes, we really appreciate feedback from the community in finding things we might have overlooked.
- The main new features in 6.1.0 for now are a new Member API, Child Action Macros and better control over your routing but we're still coordinating about the other things that will fit into that version, so keep an eye on the release page for updates.
- v7.0.0 will be virtually identical to v6.0.0 but it will feature the brand new interface dubbed "Belle". It's our intention to have v6 and v7 share as identical codebases as possible and over the next months we'll know how well that will turn out in practice.
- Releases are now planned for Thursdays and not Fridays.
So that's where we stand right now. The last thing I would like to mention is that with 1200+ installs of 6.0.0 we've seen very few big bugs, which is something that makes us proud and shows that taking a few weeks of extra time to perfect the release was absolutely the right decision!
Thanks for all of you who have already tried v6 out and for the people who haven't: what are you waiting for?! ;-)