Release Notes for EPiServer Community 3.2
Last updated:
Breaking Changes
Work has been done in the new version of EPiServer Community to rebrand and refactor the product from the database and up with breaking changes as an unfortunate consequence. We will provide a migration toolkit with database scripts and documentation on how to upgrade from EPiServer Community 3.1. This is highly recommended as all future releases within the EPiServer Community 3 version will be based on version 3.2.
EPiServer.Common
The StarSuite assemblies have been removed and are together with the Community Framework (Tagging, Ratings, Categories, Abuse reports, Visits, Dynamic Attributes, Cache etc.) merged into a new EPiServer.Common library for possible future use of other EPiServer products.
Configuration
All configuration for EPiServer Community and EPIServer Mail is consolidated into web.config to follow EPiServer standard and ease configuration management and deployment.
Minifeeds and Newsfeeds
The Minifeed consists of stories of who did what to whom. Stories are built up from an Action (for example: Adding a comment on someone’s blog entry), Actor (the user who committed the action), Attachments (for example: the blog entry itself) and Target (for example: the user that owned the blog entry). Stories are then added programmatically to the minified and give you full control over what should go in there. A typical Minifeed list item (Story) from the above example would be:
"userA commented on userB´s Blog Entry"
The Minifeed belongs to the user who committed the actions and the Newsfeed is an aggregated version of different Minifeeds, where you can extract stories from a user collection, for example a users friends list. The Newsfeed also aggregates on action level within a specified time interval so that Newsfeed list item could look like:
"userA, userC and user D have commented on userB´s Blog Entry"
Attachments are of course of the IFrameworkEntity type (previously called IStarCommunityEntity).
Visits
Previous versions of Blog and Forum have had a built-in view system to count views for blog entries or topics. In 3.2, we have created a general Visits system residing in EPiServer.Common.Visits which is available for all IFrameworkEntity object. It allows for adding visits to an entity and for getting number of visits, last visit and visits history sorted on total visits and unique visits.
Video Comments
Enables comments on videos similar to existing Image comments.
Sort on Most Popular
Sort on average rating is not really relevant in many cases where there are few ratings for some entities. In 3.2, we have introduced the Bayesian estimate to calculate the most popular based on rating, number of rates etc. The same algorithm is for example used on imdb.com. These new overloads are found in EPiServer.Common.rating.RatingHandler.
Rating by Friends
New overloads in the EPiServer.Common.rating.RatingHandler make it possible to extract users that have rated a specific entity. Typical use is to get a collection of friends that rated a certain item.
Online Users
The EPiServer.Community.Contact.ContactHandler has been equipped with new overloads for getting online friends.
Explicit Cache Time Expiration
Overloads for a number of methods with the possibility to set an explicit time for cache expiration. This is useful in cases where the cache otherwise would expire very often (like in the visits system) and where some latency is acceptable.
Installer
EPiServer Community is now installed via the EPiServer Deployment Center and the Relate+ Package has one single setup.exe covering all included products. A stand-alone installer for EPiServer Community and EPiServer Mail will come shortly after the release of the product package EPiServer Relate+.
Relate+ Template Package
We really believe that the Relate+ templates that are shipped together with the Relate+ Package will make a great impact on the way EPiServer Community is marketed, perceived, and implemented in the future. The first batch includes the so-called "public" templates and the idea is that more specialized templates for different community needs will follow. This package will hopefully give you a flying start when it comes to community development.
EPiServer Community SDK
The class summaries and code samples previously available in the Programmers Guide PDF document have been updated and migrated to HTML format. The new documentation will be available online at sdk.episerver.com and as a downloadable compiled html (chm) file.
