We just saw the keynote here at Codegarden 10, and there's been a lot of exciting announcements.
First off are the big changes over at our.umbraco.org, putting even more of a focus on the community. The projects section has been cleaned up and made more accessible and the forum has had huge improvements. An Umbraco marketplace for commercial packages is in the works and should be released in Q4 of this year. For developers of free packages, a "Karma Fund" has been set up so that the top 5 rated projects over the next year will recieve cash prizes at next years Codegarden.
Also announced today is the release of umbraco 4.5 (previously named 4.1) including some great new features:
- Backend search has been improved and updated, now fully working!
- Speed improvements of up to 66% in the backend
- Backend preview feature completely overhauled
- Help button now features context-sensitive links to the umbraco wiki, and custom help files can be created and inserted
- The package repository now features all packages with 15 karma points or more, no more gatekeeping by umbraco corp
- Datatypes can now be exported to .net for use with linq2umbraco
- A great new datatype called a "macro container", which will allow the creation of macros as widgets and allowing end-users much more control over elements on their pages
- An end has been announced to the dual licensing of the umbraco core and backend UI. Umbraco is now 100% MIT licensed throughout
All in all, lots of great announcements and 4.5 released today is great news for us and our clients. We're looking forward to the sessions during the rest of the day.
