Planned breaking changes 2016

An update to let you know what breaking changes are coming in CMS this year.

The main breaking changes are:

1. A new state AwaitingApproval for content. We are also adding new events to IContentEvents and new save actions. Supports features around content approval.
2. IContentRepository.Save and the events around that (IContentEvents) have a few quirks and odd behaviours that we have fixed to make the API more consistent and work better with approvals.
3. Migration to UTC dates in the database will be a required step when upgrading, be ready by doing the migration today.
4. Reviewed all APIs to make sure we do not expose implementation classes as part of our public versioned API. We will make a separate post about this with more details.

Some of the smaller breaking changes:

• Links to unpublished content will return 404 (instead of login screen).
• Localized texts will fallback to a fallback culture in the language files before falling back to values specified in code.
• LanguageBranch class now implements IReadOnly to support read-only caching.
• No longer possible to create sites without at least one host defined.
• Properties PageData.StartPublish/StopPublish are changed to Nullable.
• StartPublish will be null until published or set explicitly (today it defaults to the created date which is misleading).
• Fixed confusing handling of empty properties (for example assigning an empty link item collection to a typed model resulted in a null value)
• IContentVersionRepository List methods have been consolidated into one
• The UI Framework EPiServer.Shell.dll will be moved from NuGet package EPiServer.Framework to EPiServer.CMS.UI.Core.

A lot more details will be provided as part of the release, including a list of all breaking changes and which APIs are being changed. Pre-release packages of the breaking change release will be made available as part of the continous release process in the coming weeks.