Our experiences with Sitefinity 4

Having spent some time with Sitefinity 4, we thought it would be useful to share some of our experiences with their recent upgrade.

At the beginning of 2011 Telerik released the latest version of their content management system, Sitefinity 4. At dotcentric we've been using Sitefinity 3 for some time and whilst it proved itself to be a reliable and flexible CMS it also needed updating to deal with the demands of today's websites - so we were really excited about getting our hands on the latest version. We recently launched a website for Innovative Output solutions, www.i-os.com, for which we used Sitefinity 4. We thought it would be useful to share our experiences so that others, whether developers or businesses looking for a CMS solution might be able to get some hands-on feedback.

Interface & ease of use

The Sitefinity admin interface has been given a complete makeover from the ground up (as has the entire product). It is now very slick and easy to navigate. There is much use of Ajax throughout which means the interface is very responsive and quick to load. The design itself is quite minimalistic and makes really good use of the space available - this couldn't be said of version 3. Even on a very reasonably sized 19" monitor there is very little need to scroll and all of the main functions are available through a neat menu system which sits quite happily at the top of the page. The interface is certainly consistent throughout so once the user has become familiar with one part of the system it should be pretty easy to use any other part. As you may or may not be aware, Sitefinity allows end users to build web pages using a simple drag and drop interface - this has been made much easier to use in version 4 and with far better spacial awareness it is possible to view your entire web page whilst doing so, again without the need to scroll (unless of course you have lots of content!).

Development and Extensibility

In version 3 it was possible to do many of the things that you can do in version 4, i.e. create news, events, pages etc. During development of the IOS website it occurred to us that had we have been developing it in version 3 we would have written a lot more code. Version 3 always felt a bit like re-inventing the wheel every time you wanted to change some of the built-in functionality. For example, if you wanted to drastically change the way the news module worked you would have to overwrite almost every class, whereas in version 4 you can just add functionality to the existing classes.

Extending the built-in modules is also a bit of a breeze. For the IOS project we wanted to extend the news module so that for any given news article the user could select a PDF and a couple of images (i.e. a thumbnail and a main image). We didn't want the user to have to select these from within the WYSIWYG editor because we wanted control over how these were displayed on the news article page i.e. we wanted the pdf/image that was selected to be stored in it's own database field. Sitefinity 4 has a concept of dynamic fields allowing the developer to create their own functionality that will store data in any given field. To deliver this functionality we were able to add a dynamic field to the news module and build a custom control that allowed the administrator to select an image/pdf from the CMS. Why's this a benefit? Well it means that end-users can create content rich pages whilst sticking to the original design ideas that the web agency created i.e. images and pdfs displayed in the right places with the right styling.

Workflow

One of the features that we, along with many other developers in the Sitefinity community, have been asking for for a long time is workflow - it existed in version 3 but it really wasn't up to the job. The workflow in version 4 has been re-written using Microsoft's Workflow foundation and is a huge improvement. For our project we needed a solution that would allow several people within the business, Marketers, Product specialists etc to contribute content to the website, however that content needed to be approved by senior managers in the same way that any other marketing material is. Sitefinity has a few different workflows available, 2 out of the box and an advanced workflow that can be extended by any Microsoft developer. We chose to implement the 2-level workflow which allows one group of users to approve content and another group to publish it. This is perfect for lots of organisations, however if a business needs more advanced functionality then it is possible to develop custom workflows that will be executed by Sitefinity - we didn't need to use these for the IOS project, however when we do we'll be sure to write a blog post.

We did come up against one issue when we were working with the workflows, which is actually more of a usability issue than a technical one. When content is sent for approval, Sitefinity generates an email and sends it to those users with the appropriate rights to approve content (in our case the senior managers). The problem we experienced is that the email that is generated does not actually detail which content item is awaiting approval - nor can the user easily login and find the right content item, far from ideal!. We have made some suggestions to Telerik which hopefully will be improved in the Autumn.

Analytics

During previous projects we've often been asked about reporting and statistics. Rightly so, the website owner wants to see how well the website is performing, where their traffic is coming from, how many visitors they've had etc etc. We, like most other web agencies, use Google Analytics on every project. Telerik have acknowledged the widespread use of GA and have now implemented it into Sitefinity. I have to say it was never a major issue for us to direct a client to the GA website, however having it available directly from the Sitefinity admin console does mean that everything is in one-place which makes for a better user experience. In my opinion is does also encourage website owners/editors to regularly review the stats and perhaps their content - not a bad thing!

Other notable features

There are some other great features in version 4 worth mentioning which we did get to play around with, but we didn't need to use as part of this project (no better way of learning!). Once we've used these features a bit more extensively we will be sure to write a blog post.

• Form builder - drag and drop approach to building simple forms
• Shared content - content that's used on multiple pages can be updated just once
• Publish content directly to twitter
• Publish news and messages via the built-in enhanced RSS
• Improve your users online experience with the in-built search functionality
• Newsletter module - manage subscribers and email campaigns (BETA)

Conclusion

It has to be said we really did feel pretty impressed with the new version of Sitefinity, and it's also worth mentioning that Telerik do release regular updates to the product (view the roadmap). Using any new CMS for the first time has it's frustrations because there is a learning curve, but with Sitefinity that learning curve didn't feel too painful. If we had a technical question we had access to in-depth documentation, forums and of course the Telerik support team. At the time of release there were a few bugs, and there was some important functionality missing which was also frustrating, but these seem to have been ironed out now. For end-users the experience is far superior to that of version 3 and publishing content is not only much easier but getting it out to those important social media channels has also been well catered for. We feel confident that we made the right decision to adopt Sitefinity some time ago and look forward to watching it's evolution.