Well, v5 is dead but not buried, thought i'd start a thread to discuss what gems you found in V5 that you'd like to see in v4.
Personnaly i'd like to see the inherit from multiple document types functionaility ported over, this really helps with maintainability of document types.
I was just about to do the same thing! I agree with your point as I thought that was great. Also the ability to change base document type(s) after they have been set was really useful.
I'd like to see full support for developing MVC style controllers and views. I don't think the implementation in v5 with surface controllers was perfect so it would be nice if it could be looked at as a whole rather than ported directly over. But for me, fully supported MVC integration is my number 1.
One thing that might help with this, and something that I am considering looking at, is maybe a user control where you can pass in the name of a controller and a child action to call, and possibly some parameters. (And something similar from a Razor macro).
I'd also like to be able to use it to customize the back office if possible. The way you could create property editors and dashboards in v5 was really nice.
In an ideal world, I'd like to scrap master templates and be able to use razor for everything but that might be asking a bit much.
In v5 you can easily and nicely customize the way permissions work. In v4 this is a horrible, ugly fudge.
The other thing I liked about v5 was that the code followed a consistent standard. Whereas in v4 you have code in a variety of places with different casing and it's quite hard to find anything, in v5 that was solved.
The other thing about v4 is that there are a large number of ways of doing the same thing. So for example we have Node, then there's another Node in another namespace, then there's the DynamicContext or whatever it's called in Razor. We've written a lot of extensions, but we've had to double up a lot of them so that they are usable in Razor. (Tbh if DynamicContext just implemented INode that would make life easier.)
My worry with Niels' plan to refactor cms and businesslogic is that we will end up with yet another series of deprecated classes and yet another set of things to support. (Unless the whole assembly can be deprecated in which case that might make it easier.)
I also liked the UI changes in v5 - the lack of popups in particular. Also I use Opera and the tabs in the back office in v4 have always been really slow the first time you click one on a page - in v5 this wasn't an issue.
Oh and a version of Courier that actually works please !! (I know there wasn't one for v5 but the fact that the v4 one is so broken is now more important for us because we don't have the hope that the v5 version will fix things.)
Yer the MVC stuff would be nice, hopefully that will come, but i guess its no biggy if it doesn't. Just trying to see what quick wins there are out there that could be ported over from v5 and if any are simple we as the community could start to look at moving them, as well at the core.
There's probably good value in not getting tied down to what is going to be really hard/time-confusming or not, and just get a list that reflects what the community wants the most so that it can be reflected in the roadmap. Doesn't mean that if the more complex stuff is the most popular that it has to be done immediately, but that would mean that it is being considered for a future version at some point.
I'm not convinced that MVC support would be that massive a deal - but I've not really tried it yet so I mgiht be wrong. If it was simple, then it would be a big win because it might help some people migrate from 5.
I liked hasving Name and UrlName as separate properties out of the box in v5. I'd like to see that in v4. (I know I can work around it in v4 but think ti would be nice if it was an official bit of the code.)
@John Totally agree with the inconsistent casing and naming in u4, it's a small detail but it bugs the hell out of me. And the two Nodes in the different namespaces, if its deprecated it should be pretty quickly removed. I'd rather take small breaking changes than keeping that kind of stuff forever.
Myself, i want to see NiceUrl gone and some better way of getting the Url, and maybe some way to customize it. For example, I have a problem with two sites on same installation that has subdomains for languages, ie. en.blabla.com de.blabla.com en.blabla2.com de.blabla2.com, if i use usedomainprefix niceurl breaks, if i dont, you can go to pages from other sites with the same domain, and google indexes several versions of the same page. uhm, my explaination was pretty bad.
I also really liked the UI changes in u5, multiple document type inheritance. MVC was great, but I did not like the way it was used with surface controllers, it was way difficult to understand and implement.
I agree the ui changes were really nice in v5, though a little buggy in firefox, it seemed to crash firefox alot and i had to use IE, which was a really strange experience. lol
While you wait for multi-inheritance you might like DocTypeMixins which allows you to do something like it. Now v4 is alive and well again Matt and me are going to release the mothballed version 2 of it soon and hopefully work on getting something like it or better into v4 core with some luck :)
As stated in the panel chat I personally feel like a coiled spring and can't wait to get cracking on with v4 again!
+1 for the permissions handling in v5. Would also be nice to have a way to control tab-level access (e.g. only admins can see properties tab on documents) - this is possible with the use of packages right now but nice to see it in the core.
@Peter can/do you use DocType mixins with uSiteBuilder? Havent used DocTypeMixins much but this would be a powerful combo..
One other subtle thing that I liked about v5 is because it was an MVC project it was possible to update the csproj to force all Razor views to compile with the rest of the project. It's not practical all the time, but really useful when you awnt to make sure you haven't broken anything when you change a library DLL.
@Barry I've not yet used it with usitebuilder but you can do something similar with standard inheritance. We are playing with using Interfaces in usitebuilder to achieve something similar but its needs some more work. usitebuilder rocks by the way, gives a lot of the gains I think the v5 users are after (Models and Intellisense in VS for instance). We've got some blog posts to write it seems :)
@Dan - I don't have tihs option, but maybe because I'm using a Web Application rather than a Web Site ?? As far as I was aware it had to be an MVC project for this to work, but I could be wrong. (Unless I'm looking in completely the wrong place of course :) )
What I'd like to see from V5
Well, v5 is dead but not buried, thought i'd start a thread to discuss what gems you found in V5 that you'd like to see in v4.
Personnaly i'd like to see the inherit from multiple document types functionaility ported over, this really helps with maintainability of document types.
I was just about to do the same thing! I agree with your point as I thought that was great. Also the ability to change base document type(s) after they have been set was really useful.
I'd like to see full support for developing MVC style controllers and views. I don't think the implementation in v5 with surface controllers was perfect so it would be nice if it could be looked at as a whole rather than ported directly over. But for me, fully supported MVC integration is my number 1.
One thing that might help with this, and something that I am considering looking at, is maybe a user control where you can pass in the name of a controller and a child action to call, and possibly some parameters. (And something similar from a Razor macro).
I'd also like to be able to use it to customize the back office if possible. The way you could create property editors and dashboards in v5 was really nice.
In an ideal world, I'd like to scrap master templates and be able to use razor for everything but that might be asking a bit much.
In v5 you can easily and nicely customize the way permissions work. In v4 this is a horrible, ugly fudge.
The other thing I liked about v5 was that the code followed a consistent standard. Whereas in v4 you have code in a variety of places with different casing and it's quite hard to find anything, in v5 that was solved.
The other thing about v4 is that there are a large number of ways of doing the same thing. So for example we have Node, then there's another Node in another namespace, then there's the DynamicContext or whatever it's called in Razor. We've written a lot of extensions, but we've had to double up a lot of them so that they are usable in Razor. (Tbh if DynamicContext just implemented INode that would make life easier.)
My worry with Niels' plan to refactor cms and businesslogic is that we will end up with yet another series of deprecated classes and yet another set of things to support. (Unless the whole assembly can be deprecated in which case that might make it easier.)
I also liked the UI changes in v5 - the lack of popups in particular. Also I use Opera and the tabs in the back office in v4 have always been really slow the first time you click one on a page - in v5 this wasn't an issue.
Oh and a version of Courier that actually works please !! (I know there wasn't one for v5 but the fact that the v4 one is so broken is now more important for us because we don't have the hope that the v5 version will fix things.)
Yer the MVC stuff would be nice, hopefully that will come, but i guess its no biggy if it doesn't. Just trying to see what quick wins there are out there that could be ported over from v5 and if any are simple we as the community could start to look at moving them, as well at the core.
There's probably good value in not getting tied down to what is going to be really hard/time-confusming or not, and just get a list that reflects what the community wants the most so that it can be reflected in the roadmap. Doesn't mean that if the more complex stuff is the most popular that it has to be done immediately, but that would mean that it is being considered for a future version at some point.
I'm not convinced that MVC support would be that massive a deal - but I've not really tried it yet so I mgiht be wrong. If it was simple, then it would be a big win because it might help some people migrate from 5.
I liked hasving Name and UrlName as separate properties out of the box in v5. I'd like to see that in v4. (I know I can work around it in v4 but think ti would be nice if it was an official bit of the code.)
@John Totally agree with the inconsistent casing and naming in u4, it's a small detail but it bugs the hell out of me. And the two Nodes in the different namespaces, if its deprecated it should be pretty quickly removed. I'd rather take small breaking changes than keeping that kind of stuff forever.
Myself, i want to see NiceUrl gone and some better way of getting the Url, and maybe some way to customize it. For example, I have a problem with two sites on same installation that has subdomains for languages, ie. en.blabla.com de.blabla.com en.blabla2.com de.blabla2.com, if i use usedomainprefix niceurl breaks, if i dont, you can go to pages from other sites with the same domain, and google indexes several versions of the same page. uhm, my explaination was pretty bad.
I also really liked the UI changes in u5, multiple document type inheritance. MVC was great, but I did not like the way it was used with surface controllers, it was way difficult to understand and implement.
I agree the ui changes were really nice in v5, though a little buggy in firefox, it seemed to crash firefox alot and i had to use IE, which was a really strange experience. lol
While you wait for multi-inheritance you might like DocTypeMixins which allows you to do something like it. Now v4 is alive and well again Matt and me are going to release the mothballed version 2 of it soon and hopefully work on getting something like it or better into v4 core with some luck :)
As stated in the panel chat I personally feel like a coiled spring and can't wait to get cracking on with v4 again!
The DocTypeMixins look cool, I hadn't seen this project before, willsuit my needs perfectly for now.
+1 for the permissions handling in v5. Would also be nice to have a way to control tab-level access (e.g. only admins can see properties tab on documents) - this is possible with the use of packages right now but nice to see it in the core.
@Peter can/do you use DocType mixins with uSiteBuilder? Havent used DocTypeMixins much but this would be a powerful combo..
One other subtle thing that I liked about v5 is because it was an MVC project it was possible to update the csproj to force all Razor views to compile with the rest of the project. It's not practical all the time, but really useful when you awnt to make sure you haven't broken anything when you change a library DLL.
@John Can't you just use Build Website in Visual Studio for v4? This will show any errors in your CSHMTL scripts.
@Barry I've not yet used it with usitebuilder but you can do something similar with standard inheritance. We are playing with using Interfaces in usitebuilder to achieve something similar but its needs some more work. usitebuilder rocks by the way, gives a lot of the gains I think the v5 users are after (Models and Intellisense in VS for instance). We've got some blog posts to write it seems :)
@Dan - I don't have tihs option, but maybe because I'm using a Web Application rather than a Web Site ?? As far as I was aware it had to be an MVC project for this to work, but I could be wrong. (Unless I'm looking in completely the wrong place of course :) )
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