Sitefinity 3.6 was slightly delayed and is now scheduled for release during the first week of February.  While we're waiting, we have a Beta version of Sitefinity 3.6 to play with. 

The Sitefinity team wrote a few blog posts introducing some of the new Sitefinity 3.6 features:

• Embedded Templates - Mapping views to use external templates
• Amazon S3 support in Sitefinity 3.6
• Custom Sitefinity 3.6 Module creation

We'll probably see more blog posts from the team during the next few weeks.  I'll update this blog post and Twitter Sitefinity Watch when new information is available.

As for myself, I'm still exploring Sitefinity 3.6 Beta and learning along with everyone else.  I will post information to this blog as I make discoveries. 

We're going to see one more incremental release of Sitefinity before the big 4.0 release (announcement #1, announcement #2).  Sitefinity 3.6 is currently scheduled to be released January/February 2009.  This is a minor release, but there are some interesting features being included.

New Features List

• Support for .NET 3.5 - there will also be a .NET 2.0 release of Sitefinity 3.6
• Embedded ControlTemplates - this will drastically reduce the # of files included in Sitefinity.
• Hierarchical categories.
• Latest version of RadControls for AJAX
• Data provider for video libraries using Amazon S3 for storage.
• .NET 3.5 version will include RadControls for Silverlight
• .NET 3.5 version will handle video content using RadMediaPlayer for Silverlight
• Data provider for video libraries stored using Amazon S3.

I'm personally very excited about the embedded ControlTemplates.  A fresh installation of Sitefinity consists of almost 7,000 files.  Deploying, upgrading and managing all of these files ...