DNN 8 is a major release which includes many breaking changes. While the list below has been compiled from available resources, you may also wish to read about these changes directly from DNNCorp and the changelog located at CodePlex. Please see the following links for the original release materials:
Changes in Pre-Requisites
- .NET 4.5.1 or higher is now required
- newtownsoft.dll (json.net) is updated from 4.5.11 to 7.0.1
- Removed support for Internet Explorer 8
- Medium Trust is no longer supported
New Features
- New theme: Xcillion
- New HTML editor: CKEditor
- Page output caching (Caching of entire pages)
Breaking Changes
Third Party Modules (formerly core modules that shipped with DNN) known to break on this upgrade and require new versions to be installed:
The following Administration modules have been removed from new install and upgrade packages (these modules are no longer supported in the product, but can still be downloaded and installed separately):
The following features/modules have been removed completely:
- What’s New
- Feed Browser
- Widget Framework
- Getting Started
- Content List
Per DNNCorp - These features have long since been deprecated, but the code has remained in DNN. This cleanup is long overdue.
The following Navigation Providers have been removed:
- ASP2MenuNavigationProvider
- DNNDropDownNavigationProvider
- DNNMenuNavigationProvider
- DNNTreeNavigationProvider
- SolpartMenuNavigationProvider
Per DNNCorp - DNN has supported the concept of Navigation providers since DNN 3.2.0. Over time additional providers were added to deliver particular output or support new capabilities. In DNN 6.0, the DDR navigation provider was added and this has proven to be a great success - it's power and flexibility has meant that it has become the defacto provider to use and it supersedes the others.
URLRoutingModule Changes:
Per DNNCorp - In DNN's web.config file, there is a HttpModule definition for the UrlRoutingModule. Due to a bug that affected users on machines without a patch for extensionless url's, this HttpModule had a wide definition where it examined all requests. As url rewriting should only happen on .net mapped requests (e.g. aspx), this had an overhead on performance.
As the bug previously mentioned has had a patch available since 2010 (and does not apply to Windows 8/10/2012/2012r2/2016), we are going to set this definition to only apply to managed requests. If on upgrade to DNN 8, your site experiences problems (e.g. 404's on pages), please apply the linked patch (or edit your web.config to change the preCondition="managedHandler" to preCondition="" on UrlRoutingModule-4.0
Other Items:
- Removed legacy appSetting connection string (modules that have not updated for this in the past years will now break as a result)
- Moved Telerik controls to a new assembly, requiring third party extension to recompile to continue to work (this is to phase them out completely in the next series of releases)
In June 2014 it was announced that DNN and Telerik have ended their relationship. With the release of Platform 8, the Telerik controls were abstracted into a new assembly so we can eventually retire them completely. As a result of this, any third party extensions that make use of the Telerik controls (using the DNN wrappers for them); will be required to update their references to the new library and compile against Platform 8 (or later). All extensions that have NOT done this will be broken.