Issue with modules not being found in CMS 11

Hello everyone! I want to quickly address the issues around add-on modules not being found after upgrading to CMS 11 before misinformation starts to spread. Marija mentioned some of these issues in her previous blog post http://mariajemaria.net/upgraded-several-packages-episerver-11 and there have been some questions on the forum.

The problem usually manifests itself as either an assembly not being found at runtime or a route not resolving correctly in the UI.

It is caused by the following, and I'm not sure if this is a breaking change but as far as I know it has not been documented (I will have the breaking changes document updated in any case). As part of the CMS 11 release the dependencies of the EPiServer.CMS nuget package were changed to no longer include EPiServer.Packaging.UI, you can compare the versions here:

http://nuget.episerver.com/en/OtherPages/Package/?packageId=EPiServer.CMS&packageVersion=11.1.0

http://nuget.episerver.com/en/OtherPages/Package/?packageId=EPiServer.CMS&packageVersion=10.10.4

For some reason, unknown to me, having EPiServer.Packaging installed changes the default behavior of the modules system to scan the protected modules folder and automatically load modules found there during startup. The default behavior without it installed is not to scan the protected modules folder. However this can be configured via the episerver.shell section of the web.config.

So there are a couple of easy options to fix this, either:

1. Add autoDiscovery="Modules" to the protectedModules element under episerver.shell in the web.config

<protectedModules rootPath="~/EPiServer/" autoDiscovery="Modules />

2. Or add each protected module that should be loaded as a child to the protectedModules element (this is the default setup)

<protectedModules rootPath="~/EPiServer/">
  <add name="Shell" />
  <add name="CMS" />
  <add name="EPiServer.Cms.TinyMce" />
</protectedModules>

Also as a side note, I recommend against installing EPiServer.Packaging. The recommended way of installing add-ons is via nuget.