We've upgraded cloudscribe to integrate with the new Google Analytics 4, with a seamless transition from Universal Analytics, which Google are retiring at the end of June 2023.

If you have an existing cloudscribe site (at version 6), simply build and publish your site - the updated cloudscribe code will come into your solution automatically so long as you have a reference like this:

<PackageReference Include="cloudscribe.Core.Web" Version="6.0.*" />

Then, in your running website, visit Administration > Site Settings ( /siteadmin/siteinfo ) and add the GA4 Measurement Id into the Google Analytics Tracking Id setting. You should find that GA4 starts receiving information immediately.

Find out more about the integration here https://www.cloudscribe.com/google-analytics-ga4-integration

Google Analytics 4 screenshot

We are pleased to announce a new release of cloudscribe that now targets .net6.0, Bootstrap5.0 and Visual Studio 2022.

We've released a new version of the Visual Studio template. Please do leave a review!

We recommend that the VSIX template should be installed into Visual Studio 2022. Although it will also install and create a template site in VS2019, you may encounter difficulties building and working with a .NET 6.0 application in VS2019.

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotnet-6 for information about what's new in .NET 6.

There is one key potential breaking change to be aware of: if you are targeting PostgreSql database, please note that changes to the Npgsql Entity Framework Core Provider at version 6.0 now mean that the recommended way of handling Timestamp values is to migrate any "timestamp without time zone" columns to "timestamp with time zone", and always use either DateTime with Kind=Utc or DateTimeOffset with offset 0. See details here: https://www.npgsql.org/efcore/release-notes/6.0.html?tabs=annotations

This release of cloudscribe will implement the above migration on some key columns in the database (e.g. the cs_user table, and SimpleContent cs_page and cs_post) but you should be aware of the potential for timezone offset bugs in any similar columns of your own. We would recommend that you take a backup of your existing application database before applying this major version upgrade.

Older versions of the VSIX template remain available here: https://github.com/cloudscribe/cloudscribe.templates/tree/master/Archive.

As always, feedback welcome in the forums or on GitHub.

We've completed the upgrade of cloudscribe to .NET 5 and released a new version of the Visual Studio template. If you try it out, please do leave a review!

See our previous post for some more information and useful links.

And one of the first things we did was upgrade this site to run in .NET 5 - really easy and everything works beautifully so far. We've also upgrade some client projects without problems.

cloudscribecom home page in .NET 5
cloudscribe.com home page in .NET 5

Next we'll work on Bootstrap 5 views, and after that, .NET 6! As always, feedback welcome in the forums or on GitHub.

This is our first post here since our adoption of cloudscribe from Joe Audette! And it's to let people know we're starting the upgrade of all cloudscribe components to .NET 5. This is a significant upgrade, so we expect it to take a few weeks, and we'll post again when it's complete.

Find out more about .NET 5 here, and the list of breaking changes we will have to look out for!

Side by side with this work, for release shortly afterwards if everything goes to plan, we'll be working on a new Bootstrap 5 presentation layer, that will then become the default for a new cloudscribe project built using our Visual Studio project template. 

We should probably also mention some of the improvements we've made to cloudscribe:-

  • SimpleContent now has more sophisticated handling of versions and drafts, especially when using Content Templates.
  • We gave the TalkAbout Forums product a bit of a makeover, fixed lots of bugs, and added a configurable file upload capability.
  • When using multi-tenancy we added a new mode to help administrators, called "RootUserCanSignInToTenants Mode"  - see the documentation for more details.
  • We've fixed NoDB bugs that prevented using markdown.
  • We improved the registration page experience and fixed a bug that could cause hangs.
  • And we've fixed a load of other niggles and made lots of small improvements thanks to the feedback from cloudscribe users. Please do post in our Forums, comment on any of our documentation pages, or post issues in the various cloudscribe component GitHub repositories!

And of course we've been using cloudscribe components to build some great new applications for clients, such as the York Historic Environment Record. They love that their projects are built on a fully open source stack, and using cloudscribe means we can focus our effort on what's unique about their requirements and deliver best value. If you'd like help building an application on cloudscribe, please feel free to contact us.

City or York Historic Environment Record website, built with cloudscribe