This brings the total number of bug fixes up to 88 since we released Umbraco 4.5 two months ago. There’s no way we could have achieved this without the many people who’ve helped testing, reporting and submitting patches to the issues. Thanks a million!

With Umbraco 4.5.2 we’ll finally have an ultra stable version of Umbraco 4.5!

In retrospect – did we release v4.5 too fast?

With almost a hundred bug fixes in just two months it’s tempting to question whether we should have released v4.5 at all. It’s hard to say as most of the issues was reported after Umbraco 4.5 was released and we’ve had a beta versions for quite some time. There’ll always be bugs in software and when you push the release button is always a question of when it’s good enough. If you never push the button, there’ll never be a release.

However, I personally think we made a couple of mistakes. That’s alright. If we turn the mistakes into lessons learned it means progress for the team and the project. And we’re doing our very best to learn. Here’s what we’ve found so far:

• First of all our test cases were too simple, too narrow and didn’t change at all. We had a checklist of various editing actions in combination with testing the Runway and Creative Website Starter packages. This was very helpful in order to find and fix bugs along the way, but this should have been combined with random install of community packages in the Repository.
• Unit testing won’t find everything. With Umbraco 4.5 we finally added a testing suite with more than 100 unit tests and loads of hidden bugs were found. However, a simple test suite will never be able to cover the many scenarios where Umbraco is used and as such should only be a foundation. This is a no-brainer, yet crucial to remember. With the many things covered by unit tests, there’s no longer a Core Team member not believing in Unit tests as heaven sent. But robots will always be the smartest of idiots.
• Enthusiasm is awesome but never overshadow the pursuit of attention to detail. One of the things that always have given me the biggest thrill is when tiny details in Umbraco gets improved. In the enthusiasm of the major UI and performance enhancements added to Umbraco 4.5 it was (too) easy to forget this craving for nano management. But it’s one of the things makes Umbraco special – even though it can seem silly to spend days on minor things. heck, I even wrote a blog post about this four years ago.
• Don’t live in a silo. While Umbraco might work perfect for the scenarios used by members of the Core Team, we’re only a fraction of the active users. This means that we should be much better to use 3rd party implementations, packages and un-official “tricks” when testing a release. In addition to this, we should involve 3rd party package developers as early as possible and help with a plan on how to ensure that their packages work when we release. Today an Umbraco implementation is often the sum of the Core combined with a number of packages. If they don’t work together it can leave a beautiful Core useless.
• Raise the community to take even more responsibility. As a community member who’s business depending on Umbraco, it’s only natural to become disillusioned when a new release doesn’t work, forces you to change habits or makes an upgrade impossible. Believe me, the Core Team have no intention on doing this on purpose and it hurts badly when seeing people frustrated. But we’re no better than the information given us. So be active. Tell us about what doesn’t work and log issues in the Codeplex issue tracker with thorough steps to reproduce. Good bug reports take a lot of effort but in return you get better software. And even better – participate in our beta programs. Many of the bugs reported and fixed the past two months could have been discovered weeks before the release if only we had gotten help with better and more extensive testing. So help us, helping you.

We’ll use this knowledge while we’re building Umbraco 5. You’ll see more blog postings, more videos and more documentation about the next version than ever before. We’ve learned a lesson.

Their website: http://umbraco.org

From their site:

“The ultra solid release of Umbraco is raising the bar in the Web CMS industry. The stability, the clean and user friendly UI, the beautiful and simple Canvas editing, the inclusion of community work, the integration to the .NET framework and the absolutely control over markup is second to none.”

Download at Umbraco.

According to the Umbraco website:

The final release candidate of Umbraco 4 is out and available for download at CodePlex.

The focus the past week have been on stability and fixing any serious issues. The last Release Candidate added error when deleting files and macros via the context menu and we’ve made sure that all that is working again.

We’ve also polished the Membership Provider, so that it’s 100% compatible with the umbraco content and members for security trimming. Word is also 100% compatible with Umbraco Content Channels including uploading images and  charts and speaking of Content Channels, it also supports the umbraco tagging control now.

The internal search index have been upgraded to Lucene 2.0 and it’s better at auto correcting any errors and you can  now also activate internal search dialog by pressing SPACE in the search box. Apart from this we’ve made a good bunch of UI polishing and upgraded jQuery to 1.3.1.

We’re confident that we’ll have a release of Umbraco 4 on Friday – YAY!

Be sure to help them test it out if you are a user so they can have their final release ready for the upcoming weekend!

“As usual, judging comes from a panel of experienced and respected figures from the Content Management and Open Source industry. They will be selecting their top three based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.”

“The final judge is made up of votes from customers and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. You have the chance to support your favourite Open Source CMS by submitting a vote when the final five are announced.”

Here are the finalists.

Overall Open Source CMS Award

• DotNetNuke CMS
• Drupal CMS
• Joomla! CMS
• Plone CMS
• TYPOlight CMS

Most Promising Open Source CMS

• CMS Made Simple
• Impress CMS
• Mia CMS
• MemHT CMS
• SilverStripe CMS

Best PHP Open Source CMS

• CMS Made Simple
• Drupal CMS
• eZ Publish CMS
• Joomla! CMS
• XOOPS CMS

Best Other Open Source CMS

• dotCMS
• DotNetNuke CMS
• mojoPortal CMS
• Plone CMS
• Umbraco CMS

You can vote here: Open Source CMS Awards