Sitecore 7.2 is a massive release!

Hello my Dear Sitecorians,

Its been ages since I have written an article on Sitecore. And I thought Sitecore 7.2 can be the best way to start it!

Well, there are so many reasons that suggest that Sitecore 7.2 is the best release by par, as compared to the previous versions.

Lets go in a little more details about them.

Main Highlights of the version:

• IE11 Full Support
• Sitecore MVC now supports ASP.NET MVC 5.1
• Publishing Performance Improvements and bug fixes. — we will see later in this post
• Sitecore Parallel Publishing
• Improved performance in building Link DB while publishing – LinkDatabase.UpdateDuringPublish
• Sitecore gives us an option of creating new threads for each new Job
  • Jobs.ExecuteInManagedThreadPool (current value would be true)
  • This setting in config, specifies whether jobs should be executed in Sitecore’s managed thread pool.
  • If true, jobs are queued to the managed thread pool.
  • If false, Sitecore creates a new thread for each job that is started.
• FilteredItemCache is not cleared on every time an item saved, but will be cleared only when required.
• When your Sitecore instance is busy, it will automatically block the EventQueue to be executed.
• Sitecore 7.2 includes many performance and bug fixes. How? Check this!
  • Sitecore 7.2 includes all the fixes of Sitecore 7.1 Update-1.
  • Sitecore 7.1 Update-1 includes all the fixes of Sitecore 7.0 Udpate-3 and Sitecore 7.0 Update-4.
  • Sitecore 7.0 Update-4 includes all the fixes from Sitecore 6.6
  • So ideally, 7.2 would covers all the required performance and bug fixes till any previous version of Sitecore so far!

As Sitecore 7.0 was all about Search, we can say, that Sitecore 7.2 is all about Publishing!

1. With Sitecore 7.2, we can now check how our content would be displayed on our Production Servers (CD Servers), even when the item is in Workflow State.

   • The Workflow definition item, now has a field — Preview Publishing Targets — wherein we can specify our QA or pre-production environments.
   • So even when the item is in some intermediate state, we can publish and check it.

2. Sitecore now provides an option of publishing all the items that are related to the current item that we are publishing.

   • A new pipeline is added — getItemReferences — and a new option is added to the Publish Dialog using which all the items related to one particular item can be published in one go.
   • By default, the related items include clones, aliases, related media items and items that the current item refers to in the link database.
   • For more details, click here.

3. Sitecore now considers publishing a special job, and would create a new thread for each Publishing Job

   • Publishing.ExecuteInManagedTheadPool (current value is false)
   • If true, publishing jobs are queued to the managed thread pool.
   • If false, Sitecore creates a new thread for each publishing job.

4. A new publishing Appender is added – so from now on, we don’t need to search for publishing related log entries in Sitecore log files, we have individual Publishing Log files available.

5. If you have configured a dedicated publishing instance then with Sitecore 7.2, you can take advantage of a few things:

• Database Caching not required on Publishing Instance(s) – Publishing.DisableDatabaseCaches
• Enabling Parallel Publishing – There are some config files added to App_Config/Include folder, using which, we can enable Parallel Publishing in our Sitecore environment. For more details, click here

Want to know more about Sitecore 7.2? Sitecore 7.2 development team have written a number of articles on this. click here to check them.

Hope you enjoyed the post?

Happy Sitecoring!