Breaking Changes

The following are breaking changes that can impact upgrades as well as third party extensions:

.NET 4.5.1 or higher is now required
Removed the following administration modules from the product: Site Log, Newsletters, Vendors & Banners
- Although no longer supported, these can be downloaded from https://github.com/DNNCommunity
Removed the following navigation providers: ASP2Menu, DNNDropDown, DNNMenu, DNNTree, Solpart
Removed the following functionality/modules: What’s New, Feed Browser, Widget Framework, Getting Started, Content List
Removed the 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 so phase them out completely in the next series of releases)
Removed support for Internet Explorer 8
Third Party Modules (formerly core modules that shipped with the Platform) known to break on this upgrade and require new versions to be installed:
- FAQ
- Feedback
- Iframe
- Events
- Form and List

Developer Updates

The following are updates geared towards extension & theme developers/designers:

Added Single Page Application (SPA) & MVC module support so developers can create non Webforms based modules
- Released Visual Studio 2015 templates for both types
Updated module settings API to support strongly typed settings
Incremental upgrade support now possible via SqlDataProvider, cleanup files and configuration merge files. This allows changes to the platform product or third party extensions to be made without requiring a new versioned release
Extension developers can now create admin and host pages via the manifest (dnn) file
Added a new control which allows developers to exclude individual CSS and/or JS files from being loaded or combined for minification
Default.css now has versioning support which can be set by theme designers to limit the amount of CSS they must override in their own designs
Updated the following third party components to newer versions: CodeMirror, Newtonsoft
Enhanced DAL 2 to add a fluent configuration API that allows developers to keep their Data implementation details and their Models separate
Moved to Web API 2.0
JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication support added to allow developers a way to expose WebAPI services for consumption outside of the framework, such as mobile applications. - BETA

Added a new image handler that is exposed to developers. Also utilized for profile pictures throughout the application
Made CK Editor the new default HTML provider in new installations (replacing the Telerik RadEditor as default)
Extracted all administration modules from the base platform so they can be installed/uninstalled separately
Added new default theme that makes use of bootstrap 3
Converted the base project from WSP (Website project) to a WAP (Web application project) to help reduce application startup time
Added page output caching provider (moved from Evoq)
Made password reset utilize the same token as long as it isn’t expired (so if the user clicks the send password multiple times quickly, only a single token will be generated)
Updated password inputs to allow 39 characters instead of 20
Changed default robots.txt to allow client-side resources to be indexed
Reviewed and revised the text used throughout the entire application for consistency
Breadcrumb skin object now outputs schema.org markup
Corrected problem where some platform functionality injected CSS files too late where they couldn’t be modified by skin.css
Updated SMTP to support TLS authentication