I was wondering if anybody had any experience with shared layouts when upgrading from Sitecore 7.5 to 8.
In our solution we needed versioned layouts so we followed this guide. Now this field is unshared and we have versioning on layout level.
I see in these release notes that this problem has been solved in Sitecore 8.
If we were to upgrade our solution to Sitecore 8, would there be any problems with having the layout field unshared? Anyone have any experience with this situation?
The versioned layouts issue has been solved in Sitecore 8 by the addition of a new final renderings field, which is a delta of the regular renderings field.
It is the final renderings field which allows the versioning per language and the renderings field still remains shared, so in short you should be ok. - To double check, I tried it in Sitecore 8 and the unsharing of the renderings field still worked.
If you want to use versioned layouts as well as unshared renderings I'm not sure how this will work out - you'll have to check that one.
If you are moving over to Sitecore 8, personally I would start using versioned layouts rather than unsharing the existing renderings field as personally I see the unsharing as a little scary.
As Jan Hebnes states "you may get burned" further down the line. Although I have worked on a solution with the layout unshared and the only issue I have experienced is when parameter templates are used, and the content editors have to specify settings for each language and there can be a lot of "noise" when creating content.
Pre sitecore 8 I use the conditional renderings logic and the rules engine to swap out components based on the user's language - I find this quite powerful and less scary.