Kentico 8 is nearly here.. Want a sneak peek?

All development has ended, all new features are complete and the new Kentico 8 is very close to launch. Do you want to have a sneak peek now? 

Key features

• Updated visuals. Kentico now looks like the sophisticated modern system it is
• New architecture. The CMS Desk and Site Manager have been merged into a single administration environment
• New navigation. The Application Dashboard and Application List are designed to make the system easier to learn and navigate through
• New system contextual help. This always shows information relevant to where the user is
• Form Builder. The easy-to-use editor for creating forms
• Persona-based recommendations. These allow you to create marketing personas and use them in content personalization
• New features web developers. Including web part and widget improvements, CSS pre-processors, etc.

And much, much more…
 

Upgrading Information

As always, Kentico will prepare an upgrade package for those of you who want to update your existing V7 projects to the latest version. This article contains more detailed information, such as the date when the upgrade will become available to you and other important material.
 

Upgrade date

The most important information is that the upgrade package to V8 will be ready for download one month after the release date on the 30th of April, 2014. There are several reasons why we do not provide the upgrade at the exact time of the release:

• V8 is enormous and Kentico want to give it to you in the highest possible quality. At the moment they are completely focusing on the testing and fixing of all of the defects.
• The Upgrade is built on top of the finalized version of V8, so it’s not possible to release it on the same day unless Kentico keep it unreleased for a certain amount of time after it’s ready.
• Kentico decided that they prefer quality over speed, so they spent more time on the actual testing of the upgrade package. 

API changes

As stated above, Kentico V8 is a huge version. They did a lot of work in order to improve its architecture - I hope you will appreciate these changes. This, however, means that there will be quite a large number of changes in our API as well. In the context of upgrade, it means that you will have to replace the changed API in your existing projects, but, they are currently working on two things that will make it easier:

• Search on the Devnet portal. In the past, we have provided you with an excel sheet, which  contained the changes that had been made. This time, the API changes will be placed on our Devnet portal. You will be able to search for V7 API; call and search result will tell you what you should use in V8.
• Detection of the API changes in your existing project. After you upgrade and compile the solution, VS will throw a list of errors at you. But, this list of errors is never correct and for some reason you must fix the first error, compile it, and fix the next one and so on. So, Kentico is building a tool that detects which API calls are used in your project and correct the replacement for it in V8. But this tool is not ready yet, so I cannot promise that it will be ready together with the V8 upgrade package. 

Upgrade of live sites

Due to a redesign process in version 8, most of our components have changed their HTML mark-up. This change also affects some of our components used by default web parts. In addition, some CSS classes have been removed or modified. Therefore, Kentico will provide you with a guide containing upgrade styling best practices, modified, removed, and new CSS classes.

Kentico will cover base styling for UI components used on a live site (e.g. Document library) in Skin.CSS file. This one will be shared by all sites and, of course, it can be removed if it’s not needed. Actually, it is created using LESS pre-processor (similar to a style sheet used for UI styling), which gives you the ability to easily customize it according to your needs - for instance, picking just a few styles for the components you will actually use on your web site. This guide will be released at the same time as the Kentico upgrade release.

Future

We fully understand that in some projects the upgrade can be a little bit painful, so, Kentico are preparing certain things for the future. The first one is definitely the set of good practices, and how you should build your projects in order to upgrade them easily. Kentico will also work on the upgrade procedure itself. Kentico are constantly trying to improve it in order to make it as automatic and painless as possible.

Hold tight and we will start sending out new information or start by calling us now on 1300 308 210. We’ll even provide a FREE consultation to help get you started.