WARNING: Umbraco 6 Will die if you install Courier Via Repository.
I love Umbraco and when it works I love Courier.
But I just do not understand some of the decisions made by the umbraco team.
I have been having issues with Courier recently, part of a work around to get it working is to uninstall and re-install the Courier package.
Today I had to do this.
So after uninstalling Courier I went to the developer section of the back office and selected the umbraco repository found Courier and clicked install.
It turns out that the version of Courier it tries to install is the newest version, the version that is only compatible with version 7 I am running version 6!
Now by doing this, it has completely killed my umbraco 6 website, completely. As luck would have it...I have a back up of the website and the DB..
But this is completely.... sorry to say stupid.
Courier is a commercial product, and I do not understand how something so simple can be missed, all that needs to happen is when you click install, it should at least at a MINIMUM check what version of umbraco is running and if its not 7.. tell the user and abort the installation.
Any way rant over.... hopefully this will save someone else some time!
Yeah, that is not exactly clever that a V7 package is downloaded onto your V6 install, we'll have a look to see if we can do something to avoid that happening.
It does not have anything to do with Courier tho, its a general issue with our package repository.
The reason your site goes down is that it expects it to be a V7 site and depends on V7 Apis, so things can be brought back to normal by uninstalling the package or removing the courier dlls from the /bin
Again, it shouldn't happen, and we will look into it.
The ONLY reason why we are using 6.2 is because we have been having major problems with courier so we tried to use the latest 6 version thinking that might fix our issues. (before we were using 6.1)
Problem (very short version)
When we install courier set up the locations etc etc it all works I can even use it to transfer a content change.
But then, if we make a change to the web config file, even if we don't actually change the file just touch it save it. Start the website up.
The website works but courier dies, when I look at the log files you get errors like:
Error 1 - Shown inside the umbraco UI:
"Location could not be loaded, this could be a configuration error, or because Courier is running in trial mode, and cannot not load locations not on the local machine"
error 2 - umbraco.licensing.log.txt
Starts complaining about the licence even though it just worked, and we have got a licence with the domains set up.
The only way to solve this seems to be uninstall Courier and then Install it again.
This is why we rebuilt the whole site again from scratch using 6.2 (Which in it self caused problems because it took me a while to work out if you use 6.2 you have to download a specific version of Courier 2)
Now we have it all working on 6.2 With Courier installed... its doing exactly the same thing.
We've made a change to the package repository category view so now packages not marked as v7 compatible will not show up in v7. We had this before for the "popular packages" view but not for "categories." It was just an oversight.
I think that'll head off the case where the v7 package is installed in v6 unintentionally. Not only for Courier but for all packages. Thanks for the heads up.
If you do upgrade to v7, let us know how Courier for v7 works for you.
I'm sure i read somewhere that the team have learned a lot about the problems with Courier since its use in Umbraco as a Service. This has lead to what i've seen as the "most useable" edition of Courier since it's inception post v1.3.
But, will any of this lovely code be back-ported into Courier for Umbraco 6? Or are we in a situation where we will only see these benefits if we upgrade?
You probably saved a few developers a bit of pain by changing how the repository works.
We are still having problems with Courier, and are contemplating a move to umbraco V7, and from what I can see online it seems like everyone is giving it a good reception.
What I want to know is do I need to get a new licence for the new version of Courier or will the current one we have work out of the box?
The changes will not be back ported to v6 as much of the core work around session/thread management is directly related to updates in Umbraco 7 itself. Same goes for the related links and partial view macro support. In the future, focus will be on the v7 version and only critical and security fixes will be applied to the v6 version.
And now with Courier for v7 available it makes sense to use Umbraco 7 wherever possible too.
Disappointing, there's still a lot of Umbraco 4-6 installations out there and a lot of people who would find Courier beneficial (and have paid licences) if only it was a reliable. We're not ready to move to Umbraco 7 yet with our v6 builds and i'd kill for Courier, well to be honest i've tried so many builds over the last 18 months, i've long given up on Courier.
If you're saying part of the problem is in the core, then maybe you should no longer market Courier as a product which works with all currently supported versions and just stick with U7 as it is somewhat misleading.
On the positive side, I have just upgraded my 6 build to 7. It was a bit painful, but in the end I got there.
Installed Courier, and straight away a lot of the old issues I had have gone!
Just about to start really testing... but its looking/feeling a lot smoother, I think your right about umbraco 4-6 though, if your trying to use Courier for these builds it really is a pain.
Well hopefully the move to 7 will show Courier in a better light. It is a very powerful tool............. when it works.
WARNING: Umbraco 6 Will die if you install Courier Via Repository.
I love Umbraco and when it works I love Courier.
But I just do not understand some of the decisions made by the umbraco team.
I have been having issues with Courier recently, part of a work around to get it working is to uninstall and re-install the Courier package.
Today I had to do this.
So after uninstalling Courier I went to the developer section of the back office and selected the umbraco repository found Courier and clicked install.
It turns out that the version of Courier it tries to install is the newest version, the version that is only compatible with version 7 I am running version 6!
Now by doing this, it has completely killed my umbraco 6 website, completely. As luck would have it...I have a back up of the website and the DB..
But this is completely.... sorry to say stupid.
Courier is a commercial product, and I do not understand how something so simple can be missed, all that needs to happen is when you click install, it should at least at a MINIMUM check what version of umbraco is running and if its not 7.. tell the user and abort the installation.
Any way rant over.... hopefully this will save someone else some time!
This needs to be fixed!
Hey Ayo
Yeah, that is not exactly clever that a V7 package is downloaded onto your V6 install, we'll have a look to see if we can do something to avoid that happening. It does not have anything to do with Courier tho, its a general issue with our package repository.
The reason your site goes down is that it expects it to be a V7 site and depends on V7 Apis, so things can be brought back to normal by uninstalling the package or removing the courier dlls from the /bin
Again, it shouldn't happen, and we will look into it.
/per
Oh, and just to ask for a bit of info, what Version of V6 are you using?
6.2
The ONLY reason why we are using 6.2 is because we have been having major problems with courier so we tried to use the latest 6 version thinking that might fix our issues. (before we were using 6.1)
Problem (very short version) When we install courier set up the locations etc etc it all works I can even use it to transfer a content change.
But then, if we make a change to the web config file, even if we don't actually change the file just touch it save it. Start the website up.
The website works but courier dies, when I look at the log files you get errors like:
Error 1 - Shown inside the umbraco UI: "Location could not be loaded, this could be a configuration error, or because Courier is running in trial mode, and cannot not load locations not on the local machine"
error 2 - umbraco.licensing.log.txt Starts complaining about the licence even though it just worked, and we have got a licence with the domains set up.
The only way to solve this seems to be uninstall Courier and then Install it again.
This is why we rebuilt the whole site again from scratch using 6.2 (Which in it self caused problems because it took me a while to work out if you use 6.2 you have to download a specific version of Courier 2)
Now we have it all working on 6.2 With Courier installed... its doing exactly the same thing.
Its a NIGHTMARE!
@Avo
We've made a change to the package repository category view so now packages not marked as v7 compatible will not show up in v7. We had this before for the "popular packages" view but not for "categories." It was just an oversight.
I think that'll head off the case where the v7 package is installed in v6 unintentionally. Not only for Courier but for all packages. Thanks for the heads up.
If you do upgrade to v7, let us know how Courier for v7 works for you.
Hi Paul
I'm sure i read somewhere that the team have learned a lot about the problems with Courier since its use in Umbraco as a Service. This has lead to what i've seen as the "most useable" edition of Courier since it's inception post v1.3.
But, will any of this lovely code be back-ported into Courier for Umbraco 6? Or are we in a situation where we will only see these benefits if we upgrade?
Kind Regards
Martin
@paul Thanks.
You probably saved a few developers a bit of pain by changing how the repository works.
We are still having problems with Courier, and are contemplating a move to umbraco V7, and from what I can see online it seems like everyone is giving it a good reception.
What I want to know is do I need to get a new licence for the new version of Courier or will the current one we have work out of the box?
Thanks Ayo
Ayo
Your current licence will work fine.
Regards
Martin
@Martin
The changes will not be back ported to v6 as much of the core work around session/thread management is directly related to updates in Umbraco 7 itself. Same goes for the related links and partial view macro support. In the future, focus will be on the v7 version and only critical and security fixes will be applied to the v6 version.
And now with Courier for v7 available it makes sense to use Umbraco 7 wherever possible too.
-Paul
@Paul
Disappointing, there's still a lot of Umbraco 4-6 installations out there and a lot of people who would find Courier beneficial (and have paid licences) if only it was a reliable. We're not ready to move to Umbraco 7 yet with our v6 builds and i'd kill for Courier, well to be honest i've tried so many builds over the last 18 months, i've long given up on Courier.
If you're saying part of the problem is in the core, then maybe you should no longer market Courier as a product which works with all currently supported versions and just stick with U7 as it is somewhat misleading.
M.
@martin
I have to say I agree with you.
On the positive side, I have just upgraded my 6 build to 7. It was a bit painful, but in the end I got there.
Installed Courier, and straight away a lot of the old issues I had have gone!
Just about to start really testing... but its looking/feeling a lot smoother, I think your right about umbraco 4-6 though, if your trying to use Courier for these builds it really is a pain.
Well hopefully the move to 7 will show Courier in a better light. It is a very powerful tool............. when it works.
Ayo
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