It appears as though EPiServer has gone straight from 5.0 RC 4 to 5.1 RTM !  Wow!  That's progress for you.  Anyway, if you have access or want a demo, go get it now. 

If you don't know what EPiServer is then let me tell you.  It's a fantastic ASP.Net CMS.  The latest version is a huge improvement over the previous 4.6 release. Primarily it provides a catch-up with many ASP.Net 2.0 and .Net 3.0 features.  It does away will lots of specialised server controls and instead uses DataSources for menus and pages and many other things.  Workflow has been replaced with Microsoft's Workflow foundation which makes complex customised workflows possible. URL rewriting & friendly URLs are vastly improved.  Performance is improved via a readonly cache mode.  It uses the standard membership and role providers. And many more features.

But best of all, creating a new EPiServer site is now a real snap.  It used to take me about 1 - 2 hours to setup a new site ready for development.  With the integration into Visual Studio 2005 (haven't tried 2008 yet) this takes about 5 minutes.  Simply select New, EPiServer project and away you go:

This will create a Web Application project with a local SQL Express database.  You configure security providers and initial users via the ASP.Net Web Site configuration tool - accessible from the Visual Studio toolbar, add a default page and your done.  Well, at least you are ready to create templates and master pages.

Creating templates, custom plugins, properties and user controls is similarly easy:

I'm in the process of creating my 1st EPiServer 5 site and it's quite a pleasure after using another couple of CMS products recently ... but let's not talk about that right now :)

More on this as I discover things...