In less than 3 months after the release of the first beta, the Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2 is available for download.

Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2 comes with new features like:

• New Portal Explorer based on ExtJS 2.2
• WebDAV support for the Sense/Net content repository (PFS)
• Import & Export form content repository
• Document Library portlet added
• Improvement is other portlets
• Content Store REST service and CMIS service prototype
• A ton of bug fixes and optimizations

Please register at our website for beta test and/or download the latest release.

Happy holidays.

Content Types are the heart and soul of Sense/Net 6.0.

A content type is a reusable set of fields you want to apply to certain contents.  Everything (every content) you see in Portal Explorer and on Sense/Net 6.0 portal pages is defined by Content Types - all the files, users, groups, webcontents, page templates, pages and even folders.

If you will be building a site the first thing you will be bumping into are Content Types. For example if you want to run a news site the first thing you will have to do before being able to start off with any kind of designing or programming is define what an article will contain - define its Content Type. Lets say you decide that an Article needs to have an author, title, abstract,  text, and related articles. You will have to create this Content Type. From then on you will be able to start creating and managing these articles in the backend of your portal via the Portal Explorer. And only after that will you will be creating specific Content Views to display these articles on your website in the layout(s) you prefer.

If you want to dig deeper into this topic read the wiki page on Content Types and Tamás's article on Content Type Definitions. If you want to move on check how you can create a Content View to display a Content Type.

I am happy to announce that we will publish Sense/Net 6.0 source code on a regular basis, weekly or daily - we haven't decided that yet. This serves multiple purposes: we publish bugfixes for issues that are brought to us, and to enable individual or modular features appear before Beta milestones. Every check in will of course include a summary of changes: new features and fixes, changes to the API, etc.

It's been a long way. It started with the Sense/Net Portal Engine 1.0 back in 1998. From this construction evolved the 2.0 and upcoming versions all the way up to the Sense/Net Portal Engine 5.5 Release 2 released in 2006. This was a truly enterprise CMS but with the source closed. Two years ago we decided to start from scratch and develop a radically new concept under an open source lincense. And today we've come to the point when all of the Sense/Net team is happy to announce that 

Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 1 has been released!

This is the end of a long road, and the beginning of an even longer one. By opening up the project and the source we want you to use, spread and help the develop a project truly unique.

Join us on this journey 

And harvest the most of SenseNet 6.0.

Huhh, quite a time since the last post, so many things to care about as the planned release commences. Last week we've finalized the cache implementation of the Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG so I decided to share some of its more important or interesting aspects. More...

One thing I was really seduced by getting a member of the TNG dev team was the totally cool and enterprise level way the product is created.

Unit tests are crucial. And not just by the corporate quality rulebook: developers have adopted the concept of only treating a code ready when sufficient tests are also created. So we have tests, lots of tests covering as much of the source and the functionality as possible. Today Gyeby - the TNG dev lead - revealed that for the PortalFileSystem we have the 74% of source covered by tests, and for the PortalEngine this is 45%. And of course - we will release the test projects together with the Portal Engine TNG source - so everyone can rely on it. This is pretty cool I guess.

Our source management is based on Team Foundation Server and check in time automated test runs provide us continuous integration features. No source can get in the system unless it is proved itself correct and GREEN. This saves us from regular homicide situations when let's say his or her loosely tested and failing interface implementation would ruin my silverlight prototype application or vice versa.

Plus source code related events from our TFS are routed to the company quality management framework - required by the ISO9000. This puts the question of the source code quality management to overall company focus.

We are building an enterprise portal engine not only in the means of product functionality.

We have started preparing for the First Release. In the installation packed, we needed a Default Skin, a skin which will be used to build the pages in the default installation. We have abandoned the idea of using a Beer manufacturing company for the demo portal, as we respect cultures where alcohol is not welcome. so we decided to use the design of our own intranet, which is totally politically correct. This is the screenshot of our current intranet, similar to our website.

The HTML used to build the site is Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. There is a slight difference in the HTML of our site and the HTML produced by the Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG portlets, because we wanted to give designers greater flexibility in changing the design with CSS only. If we use a very simple HTML, some designs can only be implemeted, if the designers make changes to the HTML itself. If we create a slightly more detailed HTML, adding some extra DIV-s, designers will be able to implement portlas without the need to change the HTML.

In the previous version of Sense/Net Portal Engine, HTML had to be produced by an XSLT stylesheet, which was cumbersome and sometimes ugly to work with. In TNG, we produce HTML which is built in such a way, that it covers almost all design scenarios, except for the most complicated. This way, about 90% of portals will not need to change the HTML, so 90% of designers will not have to use XSLT, which is good news, you know, time is money. And who wants to author XSLT-s anyway.

To implemet your own design, you take the Default Skin's CSS, and make changes to it. The HTML is so nice, it works pretty well in WYSIWYG HTML editors, such as seen on the screenshot below. You can also get a sneek preview of the source here.

Note, that the font in the blue caption of the portlet is not the same as in our website. This is because in the website, we use a technique called sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) to change the text into a little piece of flash, which displays the same text, but withour brand font, Frutiger.

This is the first in a series of posts on building custom portlets for the Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG. The good news is: it is as simple as it can be and all you have to do is to subclass from the SenseNet.PortalEngine.Portlet class, implement your custom portlet logic with C# code and then place yours assembly in the portal application assembly discovery path (for example the Bin folder). That's it. As for the bad news there is no bad news here as the Portal Engine TNG Portlet API is basically the ASP.NET WebPart framework, extended with some Portal Engine TNG specific services and tools to simplify development, deployment and maintainance of WebPart based applications.

In these documents it is assumed that you are new to both the WebPart and the Portal Engine TNG technology but you bear with at least a minimal understanding of the ASP.NET Custom Control concept.

So here are the steps for creating a portlet that can be placed on a portal page and will say "Hello World" to me.

More...

Like other portal engines TNG integrates a versioning system. The basic versioning modes are None versioning for unimportant content, Major Only versioning (1.0, 2.0, etc.) for regular changing important content and Major and Minor versioning (1.0, 1.1, 1.2, ....1.6, 2.0, 2.1, etc) for content that is created by a team.

Besides this Sense/Net introduces the publishing with approval. Whether it concerns content with or without versioning, we can limit publishing by inducting approval. Actually a content element version in the Portal File Structure (PFS) can have several states, which internally are marked: P for last valid (“Published”), L for Locked, D for Draft, A for waiting for Approval and R for Reject.

If approval is required for certain content, after creation or modification the system creates a version waiting for approval. This is only visible for the user who has the permissions to approve it or reject it. When the content is accepted by clicking the Approve button, it gets the next version number with the character P and it is visual for other users.

In a later version we implement a workflow solution which can use those states seamlessly and which takes for the delivery through the system.

When your content is an important part of your business, this solution is an extra guarantee for reliable and error free storage and publishing.

Our first TNG customer has agreed to disclosing their identity. We have started a Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG based real-life portal project for the second biggest telco in Hungary, Invitel.

If you check out www.invitel.hu today (see date of post), you will see that it is running on the current version of Sense/Net Portal Engine. I have to admit, that taking part in such a project with a still beta product is a brave move from Invitel. I personally respect companies that make such decisions and support companies like Sense/Net and open source projects like TNG.

Completing the project will affect the beta test phase, as we have a deadline. We postpone the public beta testing until the new Invitel portal is up and running. The good news is that by the time beta testing starts, TNG will be stable enough for running a serious corporate portal.

Invitel also allowed us to publish some screenshots later.

We ask for your patience and please keep registering for the beta or subscribe to this RSS feed.