After 8 months of effort the finish line is in sight. With almost 3000 code checkins touching more than 2000 individual files, this release has been monumental in it’s scope compared to most DotNetNuke releases. Not since the days of DotNetNuke 2.0 and 3.0 have we accomplished so much in a single release. In spite of the sheer number of changes we have made, DotNetNuke 6 is one of the most stable platform versions in quite a while. That is not just my opinion but the opinion of the vast majority of people participating in our beta testing.
The response from the community throughout the CTP and Beta releases has been overwhelmingly positive. Even where there were disagreements over implementation details, the community has mostly provided constructive criticism that allowed us to improve the product. The quality of this release is not just a testament to the hard work of the engineers but also the testing efforts of our community and our own in-house QA team. Without the active participation of our community members this release would not have been anywhere near as impressive.
Not only did we have excellent participation on the testing side, we also had a lot of code that was provided by the community as well. The new skin and default template was built by Arrow Consulting and Design. The new DDR Menu was created and contributed by Mark Allan. The new Pages and Rad Editor Provider were contributed by Philipp Becker. The initial C# conversion of the entire release was performed by Ben Zhong. These are just the major contributions. There were many smaller code contributions from community members like Oliver Hine, Sebastian Leupold, Jeff Martin and Bill Severance. I’m sure I have missed some as there were quite a few people besides myself who were triaging bugs during this release. The bottom line is that this release has been a true collaboration between DotNetNuke Corp. and the community.
While everyone would love to spend another couple of months polishing and tweaking the release to make it just right, there comes a point where you have to make a choice to ship the code. As with all releases, shipping code always requires some tough choices: which bugs make the release and which will get pushed to the follow on release. What feature is in, and what feature needs a little more time in the oven. If there is a bug or a feature that you were hoping would make it in 6.0 don’t worry, we plan to have a maintenance release out around the end of Summer.
With all that said I am pleased to announce the release of DotNetNuke 6 Release Candidate. You can download the release from the beta release page on DotNetNuke.com. Please take some time to give this package a good once over.Barring any unforeseen show-stopping issues, we’ll be releasing this package as DotNetNuke 6.0 on July 20th. If you find a bug log it in Gemini. If you think it rises to the level of a show stopping bug then log the bug and make sure to leave a comment in the beta forums. For us a show stopping bug is one which prevents a mainline use case from functioning and for which there is no work-around. It has to be really significant at this point to change the release date so keep that in mind as you are logging your issues.
As usual, this package is not a formal release and is not recommended for production use. There is no guarantee that there will be an upgrade path to the final release package should we need to do another build.