We’ve been patiently waiting for the next major release of DNN, and it is finally here (DNN 10.0.0 was published on April 9)! This update will be more disruptive than others in the past, as the maintainers have taken this opportunity to remove features that have been deprecated since DNN 8, going back to January 2016. In addition to clearing some accumulated clutter from years past, DNN 10 offers a number of improvements for both administrators and developers.
What’s New
DNN 10 has a few major focuses, as well as including a collection of miscellaneous fixes and improvements that couldn’t fit into a 9.x release.
Visuals and Styles
The first change you will likely notice is the new theme, named Aperture. Aperture is a very lightweight theme designed to provide a pleasing initial experience when creating a DNN site, and to give an example of using modern techniques within a DNN theme. In addition, Aperture is the first theme to make use of another new feature, the Styles editor. When a theme or module opts into it, this allows an administrator to control colors and other visual preferences.
Content Approval
Tonci from Sistemi and Daniel from 2sic worked to enable content workflow features within DNN Platform. This includes page workflows, integration with the HTML module, and the addition of granular permissions and default Content Editors and Content Managers roles.
Developer Features
Finally, there were a number of features which will affect those building extensions on the platform. API Tokens were added as a new authentication mechanism for web APIs, which administrators can create and manage for specific APIs that developers expose. The other big improvement is in dependency injection, where all components created by DNN are able to pull dependencies from the DI container, and more components are available to be requested from the DI container. One notable component here is the integration of dependency injection with WebForms, enabling constructor injection for ascx controls.
What to Look Out For
The move to a new major version also provides an opportunity to remove components which are old or problematic, meaning that some effort may need to be made to get your site ready to upgrade and get access to the feature discussed above.
Deprecated API Removal
The maintainer team solidified the versioning and deprecation policy after taking over primary ownership of the project from DNN Corp. This includes a strict policy of removing APIs two major versions after those APIs are deprecated (e.g. an API deprecated in DNN 9.13.8 will be removed in DNN 11.0.0). This means that the DNN 10 release removes every API deprecated before DNN 9.0.0. For developers, building your extensions against 9.13.9 will display warnings for any API that is planned to be removed, along with a recommended alternative. For administrators, check with your module vendors to see if they’ve released updated versions before moving to DNN 10.
Dependencies and Telerik
Additionally, many dependencies were upgraded as part of DNN 10, as well as requiring .NET 4.8, SQL Server 2017, and Windows Server 2016. The Telerik dependency which had previously shipped with older versions of DNN but was found to have security vulnerabilities will now be removed upon upgrade to DNN 10 (previously that removal was optional).
HTML Workflow Migration
Finally, the content workflow changes require migrating the HTML module’s content from its homegrown workflow system to the centralized Content Workflow system. If either of those systems have been heavily modified on your site, the migration may not be able to automatically setup the content as it was before, and manual steps will need to be taken to preserve the site’s HTML content workflows.
Thank You DNN Maintainers
DNN has been maintained by a passionate community for many years with countless individuals investing time and effort into improving the platform. The DNN 10 release includes contributions from the following community members (in order of number of commits):
- Brian Dukes - Engage Software
- Daniel Valadas - Concepteur Web
- David Poindexter - nvisionative
- Peter Donker - Bring2Mind
- Tonći Vatavuk - sistemi.hr
- Mitchel Sellers - Iowa Computer Gurus
- and others
Stay Tuned…
Many of the major third party extensions have been updated to support DNN 10 already, though it will take some time for long tail of extensions to be updated for full support. Do a test upgrade of your extensions and site today to learn if you’re ready for DNN 10.
And That's Not All
Now that DNN 10 is on its way, the maintainer team is able to focus on integrating PolyDeploy into DNN itself as the Bulk Install extension. We have published a pre-release version of the new Deploy Client, which can be used against PolyDeploy as well as the new Bulk Install.