Ever since an updated version of Telerik assembly was shipped with DotNetNuke 5.4, people have continued to report that the Telerik assembly is missing from the \bin folder in the upgrade package.  Given the number of reports related to this issue, it is clear that there is a lack of available documentation for how DotNetNuke is packaged.  Some of these problems will be helped by the new wiki project that is being worked on by the Core Reference team.  The wiki will provide a place where we can document application behavior.  Since the wiki is not quite ready to open for public use, I’ll try to document what is going on with respect to Telerik in this post.

During the 5.3 release we originally intended to include an updated version of the Telerik controls. Our goal is to include new Telerik assemblies with each major release.  Since 5.3 was the first major release following the introduction of Telerik controls in 5.2 we had hoped to make the shift.  When we first created the 5.3 package, we found that attempting to upgrade from any of the 5.2.x packages resulted in a yellow screen when you first start the upgrade.  As a result we pushed the Telerik upgrade to 5.4 so we could better study the problem and find an appropriate solution.

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Last week, I discussed a new change in 5.4 where we have backported the RibbonBar from DotNetNuke Professional to the Community Edition.  Well that is not the only big change that is occurring with this release.  We are also backporting the Telerik Editor Provider!  This is another huge win for the community.

Over the course of the last 7 years we have primarily had 2 different HTML editors that we have shipped with DotNetNuke.  The first text editor we used was FreeTextBox.  It is a great little editor that served us well for the first couple of years of the project.  Unfortunately, FTB changed their license which caused us to re-evaluate the editor we should be using.

About 3 years ago we adopted FCKEditor as the default editor for DotNetNuke and it provided a lot of features that were not available in FreeTextBox.  The FCKEditor Provider has been developed and maintained by Mauricio Márquez and really made a lot of advances over the provider that was used with FreeTextBox.  Mauricio has done a great job on the FCKEditor Provider and has always been very responsive whenever we have had issues that needed to be addressed.  My only regret is that our internal release process was more difficult than it should have been which made Mauricio’s job more difficult. 

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