Are You Ready for DNN 10?
We’ve been patiently waiting for the next major release of DNN, and it is finally here (DNN 10.0.0 Release Candidate 2 was published on February 26)! This update will be more disruptive than others in the past, as the maintainers have taken this opportunity to remove features that have been deprecated since DNN 8, going back to January 2016. In addition to clearing some accumulated clutter from years past, DNN 10 offers a number of improvements for both administrators and developers.
What’s New
DNN 10 has a few major focuses, as well as including a collection of miscellaneous fixes and improvements that couldn’t fit into a 9.x release.
Visuals and Styles
The first change you will likely notice is the new theme, named Aperture. Aperture is a very lightweight theme designed to provide a pleasing initial experience when creating a DNN site, and to give an example of using modern techniques within a DNN theme. In addition, Aperture is the first theme to make use of another new feature, the Styles editor. When a theme or module opts into it, this allows an administrator to control colors and other visual preferences.
Content Approval
Tonci from Sistemi and Daniel from 2sic worked to enable content workflow features within DNN Platform. This includes page workflows, integration with the HTML module, and the addition of granular permissions and default Content Editors and Content Managers roles.
Developer Features
Finally, there were a number of features which will affect those building extensions on the platform. API Tokens were added as a new authentication mechanism for web APIs, which administrators can create and manage for specific APIs that developers expose. The other big improvement is in dependency injection, where all components created by DNN are able to pull dependencies from the DI container, and more components are available to be requested from the DI container. One notable component here is the integration of dependency injection with WebForms, enabling constructor injection for ascx controls.
What to Look Out For
The move to a new major version also provides an opportunity to remove components which are old or problematic, meaning that some effort may need to be made to get your site ready to upgrade and get access to the feature discussed above.
Deprecated API Removal
The maintainer team solidified the versioning and deprecation policy after taking over primary ownership of the project from DNN Corp. This includes a strict policy of removing APIs two major versions after those APIs are deprecated (e.g. an API deprecated in DNN 9.13.8 will be removed in DNN 11.0.0). This means that the DNN 10 release removes every API deprecated before DNN 9.0.0. For developers, building your extensions against 9.13.8 will display warnings for any API that is planned to be removed, along with a recommended alternative. For administrators, check with your module vendors to see if they’ve released updated versions before moving to DNN 10.
Dependencies and Telerik
Additionally, many dependencies were upgraded as part of DNN 10, as well as requiring .NET 4.8, SQL Server 2017, and Windows Server 2016. The Telerik dependency, which has been a pain point for many, has been completely removed. This means that any modules or themes relying on Telerik will need to be updated or replaced before upgrading to DNN 10.
Conclusion
DNN 10 brings a lot of exciting improvements and clean-up to the platform, but also requires some preparation to ensure a smooth upgrade. Be sure to review the release notes and test your sites and extensions thoroughly before making the move to DNN 10.