Last week was a BIG WEEK for Telerik developer tools.  This past Wednesday, Telerik released updates for 8 developer tools.  This includes - RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, WinForms, Silverlight, WPF, Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, Telerik Reporting, OpenAccess ORM, and JustCode.

Today, Sitefinity CMS is also getting an update with Service Pack 3.  This Service Pack includes the updated Q1 2010 RadControls, impressive performance improvements, and the option to store Images & Documents on the file system (as opposed to the database).

• Download Sitefinity 3.7 SP3
• Upgrade Instructions

Highlights

Here are a few highlights from this release (full details are listed below):

Performance Improvements for Large Web Sites

Service Pack 3 improves performance dramatically for web sites with thousands of pages.  These performance improvements were applied to scenarios where a data grid is being bound to very large SiteMaps.  This includes Sitefinity’s Page Admin as well as other ...

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 ...

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, ...

Earlier this week Sitefinity 3.7 was released.  The primary focus of this release was the inclusion of the latest RadControls for AJAX.  However, hidden in this release were a few nice extras.  Among these extras were 2 new design template designs.  This brings the total number of Sitefinity templates to 8.

These new templates can be found in the Community or Standard exe version of Sitefinity 3.7.  [screenshots of the new templates]

Using the new Templates

When a new web site is created using the Sitefinity Project Manager, these new templates will be available in the templates list.  Select the desired template and click Create this Project.

Company-Inspiration Template

Community-Summer Template

Earlier today Georgi Chokov announced the release of Sitefinity 3.7 on the official Sitefinity blogs.  The primary focus of this release was the inclusion of the Q2 release of RadControls.  However, after reading the release notes, I was delighted to see how many items the team snuck into this minor release.  Download this release and check out the upgrade notes.

Here are the release notes:

Release Highlights

Wiki module
- Wiki Module for managing Wikis is now part of the Standard and Community versions. You can find its documentation in the User Manual.

RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q2 2009 
- The latest RadControls are now shipped with Sitefinity

2 new site templates
- Community Summer and Company Inspiration

Group Operations
- Group Operations for Generic Content based modules (Move/Delete content items)

New Social Bookmark buttons
- Twitter is added to the social toolbar

Domain to ...

This one even caught me by surprise.  I knew it was in the works, but I didn’t expect it so soon. 

This morning I noticed a Tweet by Senior Sitefinity Developer Ivan Osmak announcing that the new Sitefinity.com was up & running.  Click here to see the new Sitefinity.com:

The new version of Sitefinity.com uses the latest version of Sitefinity ASP.NET CMS.  It also includes several enhancements that were made for Telerik.com (also running on Sitefinity). 

In addition, Sitefinity.com now features a new Business Users page.  We wanted to make it clear that Sitefinity has tons of features for non-developers, as well as developers. 

Be sure to check out:

• Features – it’s easy to forget how many features Sitefinity includes
• Showcase – see real-world examples of Sitefinity-powered web sites
• Support – videos, blogs, articles, documentation, etc, etc, etc
• Forums – we now have brand ...

Sitefinity 3.6 was originally scheduled to be released today, however it is being delayed.  Ivan posted about the delay on the Sitefinity Blogs.  A BETA of Sitefinity 3.6 will be available later this week or early next week.

Delays are never fun, but the additional polish and features will be appreciated. 

Here is what the updated features list is looking like:

New Stuff

• .NET Framework 3.5 Support - .NET 2.0 will also be supported and provided as a separate distribution.
• Embedded Templates - Sitefinity will become MUCH smaller.  All ControlTemplates will be embedded within the DLL's.  The templates can be extracted if you wish to customize them. 
• Easier Module Creation - I'm anxious to explore module creation with 3.6.
• Dynamic Links - CMS page links created in RadEditor will become unbreakable.
• Caching - New base classes for implementing cache substitution controls and custom cache dependencies.  To be honest, I'm ...

We're going to see one more incremental release of Sitefinity before the big 4.0 release (announcement #1, announcement #2).  Sitefinity 3.6 is currently scheduled to be released January/February 2009.  This is a minor release, but there are some interesting features being included.

New Features List

• Support for .NET 3.5 - there will also be a .NET 2.0 release of Sitefinity 3.6
• Embedded ControlTemplates - this will drastically reduce the # of files included in Sitefinity.
• Hierarchical categories.
• Latest version of RadControls for AJAX
• Data provider for video libraries using Amazon S3 for storage.
• .NET 3.5 version will include RadControls for Silverlight
• .NET 3.5 version will handle video content using RadMediaPlayer for Silverlight
• Data provider for video libraries stored using Amazon S3.

I'm personally very excited about the embedded ControlTemplates.  A fresh installation of Sitefinity consists of almost 7,000 files.  Deploying, upgrading and managing all of these files ...

Ivan already blogged about this, but I wanted to mention it here as well.

Next week there are two CMS conferences being held simultaneously.  One of these conferences is in London and the other in Boston.  There will be Sitefinity team members at each conference.

• Ivan, Slavo, Marto and myself (Gabe) will be in London at the the IMS conference.
• Bob, Harry and Joe will be in Boston at the Gilbane conference.

If you're attending either conference, be sure to say hello.  Apart from the loooong airplane ride, I'm looking forward to the coming week and getting lots of Sitefinity feedback.

Hello, my name is Gabe Sumner and I'm the Telerik Developer Evangelist behind Sitefinity. 

Part of my job is merely to stay informed.  This means not only staying up to date on what the Sitefinity team is up to, but also what the Sitefinity community is doing.  I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds, monitor several forums and read a ton of email.  I also get to chat with Sitefinity customers at the various conferences I travel to.

I've now had this job 3 months and each week I see something I think would be interesting to the wider Sitefinity community.  However, in the past, I haven't had a good place to feature these items. 

Today I spent a few hours putting together this very basic web site.  Yes, I know it's not much to look at.  I have many more future plans for it.  But for now, ...