Sitefinity has always been a very developer friendly and extensible CMS platform.  This adaptability led to a rich collection of custom modules available through Sitefinity’s Marketplace.  However, Sitefinity 4.0 has now arrived and many of these modules require tweaking before becoming usable in the latest version of Sitefinity.

Sitefinity partner Falafel has been a very active contributor of modules to Sitefinity’s marketplace.  Recently Falafel published a blog post demonstrating the process used to upgrade these modules to support Sitefinity 4.0:

Be sure to read this article for instructions on how to move from 3.x to 4.0.

Last week, Shawn Brandt was contacted by a friend who works for a non-profit organization called Just Kids Dental.  This organization is a school-based dental health program focused on providing children with oral hygiene services & information. 

This organization was looking for a web site, but didn’t have a budget to work with.  Shawn thought immediately of GiveCamp…

The first thing that popped into my head was a GiveCamp.  A GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where technology professionals from designers, developers and database administrators to marketers and web strategists donate their time to provide solutions for non-profit organizations. [ Read more ]

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a GiveCamp scheduled in Shawn’s area in the near future.  On a whim Shawn decided to shoot Telerik an email…

So I went out on a limb and sent Telerik an email asking if they would support JKD by providing a license ...

It’s been quite a week.  I’m again behind on this blog and there is a lot of news I need to quickly relay.  Below I’m going to quickly run through the highlights:

The webinar to rival all webinars

Last week, we had a webinar to show the latest pre-release version of Sitefinity 4.0 (the RC release).  This webinar had a record number of attendees (not to mention a record number of questions).  For those who missed the webinar, you can watch it here.

Watch the full-sized video on Sitefinity.com.

The questions & answers from this webinar can be found on Falafel’s web site.

New Sitefinity 4.0 features in the RC

The latest release of Sitefinity 4.0 includes a number of brand new features.  These features are described in Josh Morales’ blog post and shown in the video below.

Watch the full-sized video on Telerik.TV

The RC will be ...

Hey everyone, I just downloaded a fresh build of the upcoming Sitefinity 4.0 RC release and grabbed a few screenshots (posted below).  We’ll show a lot more in the upcoming webinar but this will hopefully give everyone a small taste of things to come. 

Easily configure common Sitefinity settings

See, at a glance, which pages await language translation

Easily create custom data export feeds

Edit Sitefinity Widget templates using Sitefinity

Compare data using dimensional web analytics

Please attend the webinar

If you haven’t already registered, be sure to register & attend the upcoming Sitefinity 4.0 RC webinar.  In addition, to showing the RC and the features above, I’ll also show:

• 4.0’s new pricing & licensing
• Discounts available to current customers
• 4.0’s official release date

Please register & attend.

Wow, I’m way behind on my blogging.  2 weeks ago I was visiting with the Sitefinity product team in Bulgaria.  After returning from Bulgaria, I became immediately focused on the upcoming RC release.  This is an exciting release and it has kept me very busy lately.

Plenty of new Sitefinity stuff

This upcoming release will introduce the following new features to Sitefinity 4.0: 

• Workflow
• Localization
• Meta Field Editor – slightly delayed, :(
• Widget Template Editor
• Basic Settings Editor
• Additional Web Analytics
• Publishing System
• Live Writer Support
• Migration Tool

See these features in the upcoming RC webinar.

Old programmers don’t die, they just relocate to MS Word

While the development team is hard at work on the features shown above, I’ve been helping to create messaging around these features.   Meaning I spend a lot of my time in Word instead of Visual Studio.  If this keeps up, I’m fearful I’ll ...

Hey everyone, later today I’m getting on a plane to Sofia, Bulgaria to visit Telerik HQ and the brains behind Sitefinity.  While there, we’ll be discussing the Sitefinity 4.0 release plans, as well as what’s in store for Sitefinity in 2011.  I’ll get some photos and information while visiting with the team.

For the next week, expect for SitefinityWatch (blog, twitter) to be quieter.  Thankfully, there are other great sources of Sitefinity news.  Be sure to watch the following sources:

• Sitefinity Blogs
• Sitefinity on Twitter
• Sitefinity on Facebook

In addition to these official sources, there are plenty of extra community sources for Sitefinity news:

• EasySitefinity on Twitter
• SelAromDotNet on Twitter
• AntonHstrivo on Twitter

Sitefinity 3.x includes a feature that enables you to export (and later import) your web site.  This feature is mainly used by Sitefinity 3.x’s Project Manager to create new web sites from Sitefinity’s included templates.

However, Marnix van Valen recently published a wonderful blog post demonstrating that this feature can also be used to migrate Sitefinity web sites between databases (for example, from developer to production):

This allows you to export an entire site into a zip. The zip can be used to create a new site. Under the hood there’s and ExportModule that’s doing all the work. The zip contains both the site’s files and a set of XML files that hold the site structure and any content you may have entered. So, to duplicate a site into an existing database here’s what to do… [Read more]

The full details can be found on Marnix’s blog ...

Nick Bobak posted a blog post describing how Sitefinity helps Grafx address their client’s projects.

Sitefinity is already one of the most user-centric and graphically pleasing Content Management Systems (CMS) out there. It’s extremely robust – it meets and exceeds many of the strictest IT policies. It’s a complete solution that’s practical enough to drive many large-scale corporate websites and affordable enough to meet the budgets of smaller companies.  [Read more]

Part of what makes Sitefinity a good fit for Grafx is its ability to be customized & adapted:

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits to using the Sitefinity CMS is the flexibility it lends to developers. Not only can you develop modules and custom user controls to meet client needs, but you can take it to the next level and tweak the CMS as needed. [Read more]

Sitefinity’s adaptability enabled Grafx to leverage their own ...

Kiran recently published a blog post describing how he drastically reduced the size of his Sitefinity pages by eliminating unneeded script references from the page.  Kiran was able to accomplish this by removing the ScriptManager tag from his Sitefinity templates:

If you use script manager anywhere in the website it will load lot of unwanted javascript files along with the target page.  [Read more]

Kiran later explains why the ScriptManager might be needed though:

It is better we don’t write script manager in any website unless we are building a complex website which needs ajax framework and other javascript libraries.  [Read more]

The ASP.NET ScriptManager finds it’s roots with the introduction of ASP.NET AJAX.  AJAX, simply refers to using client-side browser technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript) to create interactive web interfaces.  ASP.NET AJAX is a set of Microsoft libraries and extensions for wielding AJAX.  The ScriptManager ...

All Sitefinity pages and page data get stored in a database.  Associated with this page’s database entry is an ID (a GUID) that uniquely identifies a given page.  Links to this page (in the CMS) are based on this unique and unchanging ID.  Consequently, this enables users to create unbreakable links to internal Sitefinity page.  Even when the page URL changes, the links continue to function.

Shawson (who has one of the best About Me pictures I’ve ever seen) recently needed to fetch a Sitefinity page ID based on a URL. 

I recently started work at my new job, and here we use Telerik Sitefinity as the CMS for some websites.  I was recently tasked with writing some code which involved supplying the end url for a page, and then matching this against the corresponding record in the CMS- after much searching I found nothing and eventually got a ...