Telerik was founded on .NET developer tools.  These roots are evident in our company culture and in our CMS.   Although the CMS touches other parts of the organization (marketing, management, IT, etc.), we continue to put a lot of thought & effort into making Sitefinity a superb developer platform.

As a result, it was wonderful to see a confirmation of Sitefinity’s developer friendliness from a Quba developer.  Last week, Sitefinity partner Quba published a blog post describing, from a developer’s perspective, why Sitefinity offers an enjoyable development experience..

Sitefinity is .NET based (which happens to be a forté of the Quban development team), but it is also built in an extensible way, resulting in almost endless possibilities, and a high degree of customisation. It comes with inbuilt functionality such as News, Events and Blogs, but if bespoke elements are required then a new module can be ...

Josh Morales has been a longtime contributor and friend to Telerik & Sitefinity.  While working for the City of McAllen Josh created and administered several Sitefinity-based city web sites.  During this journey Josh regularly shared his explorations, experiences and extensions to Sitefinity through his blog and through our forums. 

It is my pleasure to announce that Josh Morales has now joined Telerik.  In his role he’ll bring some practical real-world technical experience and contributions to evangelism and sales.  He’ll then be sharing these creations and lessons with the wider community through Sitefinity add-on’s, blog posts, code samples demos, etc.   As an aside, Josh has plans for giving the Sitefinity Toolkit a huge shot in the arm.  (Any requests?)

Expect to see Josh appearing soon on the official Sitefinity blogs.  We have great things planned.  In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Josh.

Click here to ...

Sitefinity community member Saeed started a fun thread on the Sitefinity forums asking about the origins of the name Sitefinity.  The product naming was before my time at Telerik and, consequently, I didn’t have a conclusive answer. 

As a customer, I had always assumed it was a combination of words “Website” and “Infinity”.  The subtext being that Sitefinity is a web site management product that is infinitely capable & adaptable.

Matt Cooper (who was able to get the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA running on Azure) suggested that someone was probably a Buzz Lightyear fan.  Matt suggested the phrase “To Sitefinity and Beyond”.  Later, Telerik’s CEO Vassil Terziev posted to the thread:

Matt hit the nail on the head - that's exactly how the name was coined. We wanted the name to speak out loud that Sitefinity is the end of typical websites and the systems that manage them. Our ...

A few weeks ago, I watched a documentary called Helvetica on Netflix Instant.  Helvetica, for those who don’t already know, is a typeface.  Although, this might be an understatement.  Helvetica is THE typeface.  It is [perhaps] the most widely used typeface on the planet.

I’m a sucker for documentaries.   I’ll eagerly watch a documentary on almost any subject (even Donkey Kong), however I was extremely skeptical about a documentary about fonts.  How interesting could it be?  It was compelling though.  As it turns out, there are a lot of really strong opinions about fonts.  Furthermore, the choice of font can sometimes be as telling as the content it spells out.

Web sites, historically, have been very limited in this area.  Our choices were basically limited to Arial, Times and Courier.  However, recent advances in HTML, CSS and browsers have opened many more options.

Today there are many cross-browser options ...

Social Media services are a dime a dozen: Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Posterous, etc.  Because of my evangelist role with Telerik, I’ve felt obligated to create accounts on all of these services.  However, I only actively engage with a few of them.

If these services look like too much to handle, don’t worry about it.  From a numbers perspective, you only need to worry about one service; Facebook.  Facebook has more than 500 million active users.  To put that in perspective, there are only 2 countries in the world with bigger populations than Facebook:

[Image courtesy of the Economist]

Internally, at Telerik, we’ve had many conversations about the relationship between CMS and social media.  However, any tools we’ve created [at this point] are purely internal solutions.

Which is why I was delighted to see Basem Emara’s recent blog post on this subject.  Basem created a Facebook ...

Late last week I spotted the first handful of posts about the ASP.NET security vulnerability.  I’m no security expert and without tons of research it’s often hard to properly assess the level of danger posed by these vulnerabilities. 

However, this news quickly gained momentum quickly and Microsoft posted a Security Advisory.  Later, Scott Guthrie weighed in on the topic.  As more information became available, it appeared this was the real deal and it looked downright scary.

[ Like most YouTube videos, I recommend turning down the volume for this video.  ]

A lot of the blog posts and videos, seem to demonstrate this vulnerability against DotNetNuke.  However, in reality, many (if not most) ASP.NET-based CMS’s are vulnerable at some level.  Internally, at Telerik, we had a flurry of conversations on this topic over the weekend.  We are still fully assessing the level of risk, but it seems there ...

Sitefinity CMS can be easily extended using traditional ASP.NET controls.  Once added to Sitefinity, these controls can be dragged & dropped onto any Sitefinity page.  In addition, these controls can be shared between Sitefinity web sites or through the Sitefinity marketplace.

However, each time a control is duplicated in multiple places you also encounter the challenge of versioning.  Meaning, the control gets updated on one web site, but fails to be updated on another web sites.  Scott Rozman (who is a blogging machine) recently posted a quick solution to this:

There is a particular user control that I've developed that will be used on a bunch of our Sitefinity sites and is still undergoing further development. I wanted a simple way to see from Sitefinity that I am using the latest version of my control in a particular Sitefinity instance. – [ Read More ]

Scott’s solution to ...

Telerik’s RadEditor plays a very key role in Sitefinity CMS.  RadEditor enables content editors to create HTML, without knowing HTML.  It does this through a web-based WYSIWYG editor.  This text editor feels like MS Word and enables content editors to easily create rich HTML content. 

Telerik sells RadEditor as a stand-alone product and it has a ton of features.  However, many of these features are disabled, by default, in Sitefinity. 

In a recent blog post, Paul Nieuwelaar describes this challenge:

In Sitefinity, whether you are creating a blog post, a news item, or even an event, you will use the Radeditor tools for the formatting. But sometimes the tools that you require aren’t there, or if they are there, they aren’t in the right place. - [Read more]

Thankfully there is a solution to this:

A solution to this is customizing the Radeditor toolbar, to personalize it, or ...

After content is published,webmasters are often forced wait for search engines to randomly stumble into (and index) the content.  If the new content has very few incoming links, then it can be difficult for search engines to notice.

A sitemap allows webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling.   This makes it easier for search engines to locate & index the content.  This can result in better search engine placement.

Scott Rozman recently published an article that describes how to use Josh Morales’ Sitefinity Toolkit Sitemap and an httpRedirect to create a search engine accessible sitemap (~/sitemap.xml) for a Sitefinity web site:

After setting up the Sitefinity Toolkit Sitemap, I had the idea of trying to make it so crawlers would find it as sitemap.xml.  Sitemap.ashx works, but you need to manually tell the search engines where it is.

[ Read the ...

Easy Sitefinity published another great article describing how to use custom web fonts within your Sitefinity web site.  The technique described utilizes Cufon to generate a web font version from traditional font files (TTF):

Read the full article on WE ICT.

This is part 1 in a series of articles on on web fonts.

On that note, a few months ago Google announced a library of high quality open source web fonts that can be used on your web site.  These fonts are being made available in Google’s Font Directory.  I’ve wanted to apply some of these fonts to Sitefinity Watch, but have not yet found the time. 

It’s possible this is where Patrick is going with this article series.   If so, we’ll get more details soon.