The release of DotNetNuke is a major step on the way to having what we as Europeans have always wanted: our favourite CMS with content localization abilities. With such a significant release (there were many architectural changes necessary) it is no surprise that some changes will break 3rd party modules. Even though we worked very hard behind the scenes to minimize this, DMX has also been impacted by a change.
That is why DMX 05.02.10 has just been released. It has been tested on both 04.09.05 and 05.05.00 to make sure none of the repairs impact the older installations. For more info about the latest DMX and a list of changes read this post.
In the remainder of this post I'd just like to comment a bit more on the DNN 5.5 release. As many of you are aware but many more are not, content localization has been one of the most contentious architectural change requests of the past few years. With the Europeans clammering for ML (multilingual) support and North Americans wary of any changes that might impact performance for a reason that doesn't concern them. Over time it became less black/white with more Americans demanding for ML support as well. To date several popular solutions have been marketed to make DNN do ML, but although you could make a ML site with these, there were boundaries that just could not be crossed without core changes. The DNN architects have spent quite some time listening to us. But the sheer compexity of the task plus the fact that within the international community there were differences of opinion on how it should work, meant that this got shelved time and again.
That is why I took the initiative for a "European summit" on this issue. In early 2009 about 25 DNN'ers from all across the continent gathered in Switzerland to discuss the issue and debate the various approaches. This was followed up with the creation of an "Internationalization" team within the DotNetNuke core team to carry on this discussion and embed it in the project. The final push came with the Day of DotNetNuke event in Paris in May 2010 where Shaun Walker was invited to speak (and urged to present a DNN that would do content localization). That meant there was a deadline for the DNN engineers to get this done. Despite the fact that some have been frustrated at the pace and direction of the final solution, we are happy it is finally here. As someone who has been closely involved with this I can only admire the result given the complexities and all the "noise" around content localization. Although much leaves to be desired at the UI end of things (there has been some strong internal criticism of the way it is managed by the user) I believe we all can move forward with the way it works.
So DNN 5.5.0 is a great release and accomplishment of the engineering and internationalization teams. For sure. But as always I advise my clients to use this for (a) test sites, (b) new sites, and to run tests with existing sites. But I'm not using it myself to upgrade my own production site just yet. Why? Well, as I pointed out earlier this release in particular has a lot of architectural changes (read: potential to break other stuff). So I'm holding off a little while to see what happens. There is a risk of a chicken-and-egg kind of cycle that would hurt the platform: if no one uses it in earnest, we don't find any issues. So that is why I urge everyone to keep testing this release and report anything they may find. Either here on on DotNetNuke. Together we improve the quality of this platform.