Almost everyone has now heard of Web 2.0…and is probably tired of hearing it.  This phrase gets tossed around a lot and has largely been turned into a marketing gimmick.  Many products add the Web 2.0 descriptor simply to make the product appear cutting edge. 

For all the abuse of this descriptor, Web 2.0 really did signify a meaningful transition.  It wasn’t a sudden transition, but rather a gradual transition.  Web 2.0 represents the shift from static brochure web sites to interactive web sites that facilitate participation & information sharing. 

Technologies such as forums, blogs, profiles, comments, wiki’s, user reviews, etc. are all products of the Web 2.0 era.  Web 2.0 also birthed many highly visible companies such as MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, etc.  All of these technologies & companies enable people to participate online. 

The web is just a bunch of documents

Despite all these innovations, the web ...

Telerik’s customers are extremely Internet savvy.  Consequently, it’s always been essential that we actively engage with the online community.  Telerik employees (at all levels of the company) are very active on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums and a myriad of other web sites. 

Within the Sitefinity community we’re also working to engage with the online community.  Many members of the Sitefinity Team are very active on blogs, Twitter and forums.  It’s important that we provide a steady stream of information & insights to our customers.  It’s even more important that we listen to customer feedback and incorporate this feedback into our future product roadmaps.  We want to make it easy for our customers to engage with us.

Towards that end, Sitefinity now has Facebook fan page.  We’ll post the latest Sitefinity news & information on this fan page.  You are also welcome to make ...

Sitefinity CMS has a built-in WYSIWYG page editor.  WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get.  This term is used to describe a system in which content displayed during editing looks similar (if not identical) to the final output

The alternative to WYSIWYG page editing is a sandboxed composition mode where content looks nothing like the final results.  In this environment, editors must constantly toggle into a preview mode to see the results of content changes.  Sitefinity deliberately choose a WYSIWYG editing experience to minimize the steps (and pain) needed to edit, preview & publish content changes. 

However, to create an accurate representation of the final page Sitefinity needs to execute the controls & code used on the page.  In some circumstances, this can create problems.  Thankfully there is an easy solution to this problem.

Disabling WYSIWYG

A few weekends ago during the WAM2010 charity ...

A few weekends ago I renewed my efforts to get organized.  Like everyone else, there is a lot of news & information I need to be aware of.  However, I don’t have time to browse the hundreds of sources necessary to extract the handful of items I need to be aware of.  Doing this could easily turn into a full time job.  I need a single source for these news items.

After experimenting with various sources (FriendFeed, Twitter, etc.), I’m again back to using Google Reader as my primary source of information.  Despite, the claims that Twitter has killed RSS, Google Reader is the best tool I’ve found for staying informed.  Using Google Reader I can assemble multiple information sources into a single source. 

All Sitefinity News & Information in One Place

To help others who are also interested in monitoring all things Sitefinity, ...

This past weekend, while attending WAM2010, I noticed a couple of projects where Sitefinity was using an intimidating project name.  These project names are visible on Sitefinity’s login screen, as well as inside Sitefinity’s Admin. 

When the project name is too long, it can cause minor display problems:

Project Names are configured in the web.config file (this file sits in the root of your Sitefinity web site).

1.  Use Visual Studio (or another text editor) to open the ~/web.config file

2.  Search for the “<cms” section in this file

3.  Modify the projectName property of this section.  If missing, the projectName property can be added.

<cms defaultProvider="Sitefinity" pageExtension=".aspx" siteTemplate="" disabled="false" pageEditorUIMode="Overlay" projectName="SitefinityWatch">

4.  Now refresh Sitefinity’s Admin in your browser.

CMSWatch (an independent resource that evaluates content-oriented technologies) identified the 5 biggest mistakes in CMS selection.  Here is #2:

Not establishing a broad-based selection team

This may be the biggest mistake made in the selection of a Web content management system. Many times Web CMS product selection teams are formed in a casual manner, without actual implementation in mind. One typical situation is that either the content team or the Web site technical team manages the selection process independently without consulting their partner team -- or, more commonly, there is an imbalance between the two groups.

Developers obviously feel comfortable with web technologies and, consequently, tend to underestimate the value of end-user features.  Content managers, on the other hand, understand their business objectives but nothing about the technical factors that could potentially cripple a project.

As the quote from CMSWatch indicates, successful CMS selection involves input from multiple departments.  ...

Sitefinity CMS comes included with a powerful Lucene-based search engine.  Using Sitefinity, new search indexes can quickly be created.  Once the index is in place, search boxes & results can be easily dragged & dropped onto any Sitefinity page.

However, by default Sitefinity will index the entire contents of a page.  This includes elements that exist on all pages such as navigation, headers, footers, etc.  These site-wide elements can impact the search results and pollute the snippets associated with each of the search results.

Removing Unwanted Content from Search Indexes

Each time a new search index is created, Sitefinity creates a new new ~/App_Code/Search/[SearchIndex-Name] folder.  Inside this folder is a fieldsInfoProvider.xml file.  This file defines the content that gets indexed, ignored or emphasized. 

Sitefinity identifies content sections by matching HTML tags.  These HTML section are defined in the fieldsInfoProvider.xml file.  Here is some example HTML for a web page:...

Whew!  What a weekend.  Over the span of 48 hours I was frantically working for 42 hours…and I wasn’t alone.  There were 20 teams and 20 charities at the Dallas We Are Microsoft Charity Event and it was incredible to watch the final presentations made by each of the exhausted teams. 

Lots of great work was done by all.  Huge congratulations to everyone involved! 

Telerik/Sitefinity lends a hand to Charities

Just like last year, Telerik donated Sitefinity CMS to any charity team that decided to use it.  I was delighted that most of the charity teams decided to use Sitefinity for their projects.   

Easy to use?  Prove it!

One of key benefits of Sitefinity is that it’s easy to learn & customize for both developers & end-users.  These charity events are a great test of this claim. 

Over 48 hours .NET developers are introduced to Sitefinity CMS and then ...

What happens when you combine a bunch of developers and several charities and their IT needs over a weekend of caffeine-fueled sleep deprivation?  I guess we’ll find out this weekend at the Dallas We Are Microsoft: Charity Challenge Weekend.

Telerik participated in this event last year, and we’re participating again this year.  Like last year, we’re donating Sitefinity CMS to each of the charities.  However, we’re are also entering with a team of our own this year (Team Telerik).  We’ll be building a new website for WHO (We Help Ourselves), an organization that provides education to children to help them avoid becoming victims of abuse.

In addition to our project, I’ll be doing training for any charity teams who wish to use Sitefinity.  I’m anxious to see what the teams are able to do with Sitefinity.  We’ll be chronicling these adventures in blog posts that will ...

One of our Sitefinity Partners had a project that required them to migrate content from a legacy homegrown CMS to Sitefinity CMS.  To address this challenge they built a small WinForms application that was able to retrieve and parse information from the old web site. 

However, after retrieving information from the old web site, the remaining challenge was to use this information to create pages programmatically in Sitefinity.

Sitefinity Pages API + Web Services

Any task that can be done using Sitefinity’s UI can also be done using Sitefinity’s API [webinar].  However, this API is only available within the scope of the Sitefinity web site.  Consequently, Sitefinity’s API cannot be used directly from a WinForms application; doing so will result in errors as the API attempts to find missing resources. 

Thankfully it’s relatively easy to build a bridge to Sitefinity by creating a custom Web Service.  ...