It’s that time a year again, when dozens of vendors help promote DevProConnections in an attempt to claim an award.  Every vendor will go crazy promoting this voting and telling their customers about DevProConnections.  At the conclusion of this process, winners can proudly display this award on marketing and sales material.  Losers scuttle off to lick their wounds. 

Either way DevProConnections gets a nice flurry of activity to their web site.  Kudos to them for engineering this entire situation.  ;)

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I would be derelict in my duties if I didn’t mention this voting to the community.  Obviously awards don’t control the CMS selection decision, but they help reassure customers that Sitefinity is worth evaluating.  We have a good product and we simply want the opportunity to demonstrate it.  These awards help us get that opportunity.  That’s it.

Consequently, it would help us if you would vote.  It only ...

Anthony Bolton with TJB Software just published a News Ticker widget in the Sitefinity Marketplace.  This widget pulls data from an XML feed (by default, the BBC) and produces a dynamic & attractive ticker for the stories found in the feed.  The stories fade out and back in again using the Glow javascript library:

Each headline contains a summary of the story as well as a thumbnail image.  The control has been designed to be easy to format - it only requires 3 literal controls in the template with specific names.  You are then free to add your own styling, formatting and content around these literal controls.

This widget has been priced at $30.  Licenses are purchased per-domain.  The first charge for a domain is $30 USD (£20 GBP).  Every domain thereafter is charged at $15 USD (£10 GBP).  More information on purchasing can be found in the downloaded ...

We hear a lot of wonderful stories from developers working with Sitefinity CMS.  Sitefinity was created with developers in mind.  We wanted developers to be capable adapting Sitefinity for their unique projects.

However, we had many other audiences in mind (system administrators, marketing, content editors, managers).  We recognize that an organization’s web presence impacts everyone (employees and customers).  Consequently, we wanted Sitefinity to be a good fit for each of the diverse audiences.

Consequently, it’s great to hear a variety of perspectives on Sitefinity.  Jason Swenk, CEO of Sitefinity-partner Solar Velocity, recently wrote about the Sitefinity features that are important for marketing managers. 

Below are some of the features mentioned:

• Accessible web-based administration
• Oversight through workflow
• Governance through granular permissions
• Protection through versioning / rollback
• Brand consistency through templates & themes
• Lots of features, out of the box
• Worldwide engagement with multi-lingual support

Read the full article: Why ...

There is always something happening in the Telerik Sitefinity CMS ecosystem.  We are blessed with a vibrant community, as well as an internal environment (at Telerik) that encourages employees to speak.  As a result, there is a steady stream of information about Sitefinity.  Staying on top of all this information can sometimes be a challenge.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about this, so in this blog post I thought I would summarize the various online sources where you can tune in to get Sitefinity news & tips.

Must have:

• Sitefinity Newsletter – monthly summarized recaps of the highlights, stuff you might have missed

Useful information:

• Sitefinity Developer Blogs – detailed articles from the Sitefinity team
• Sitefinity Watch – news from the wider Sitefinity community

Being social:

• @Sitefinity on Twitter – Sitefinity news & official announcements
• @SitefinityWatch on Twitter – a celebration of everything Sitefinity
• Sitefinity on ...

Joshua Bixby recently published a quick unscientific performance comparison of a handful of ASP.NET-based CMS’s.  For this comparison, Joshua took a handful of case study web sites from each CMS vendor’s web site and measured the performance of these web pages.

Sitefinity CMS came out on top in this informal comparison:

[ Click here for the full report ]

Uncovering Truthiness

So…the inclination in the CMS industry seems to be to celebrate reports that make you look good and discredit reports that make you look bad.  However, I find this practice distasteful.  So, I’ll admit that these results should be taken with a grain of salt.  In his post, Joshua eloquently describes the considerations for these results:

Now, as I’ve already said, this was a pretty unscientific study — like most studies that take place between 10 pm and 2 am on a Saturday night. In all fairness to ...

Telerik’s Sitefinity CMS includes a media management module.  This module can be use to upload and organize images, documents, videos and miscellaneous files.  Once a set of images is uploaded, Sitefinity can automatically generate an image gallery and thumbnails based on these uploaded images.

In addition, images can be linked to specific content items (for example, news, events, blogs, etc).  Once an image is linked with a content item, Sitefinity can associate thumbnails when the content  item is linked.  (Example: displaying thumbnails for news items.)

Scott Rozman recently published a blog post describing how he added some visual flair to these thumbnails using the jQuery Fancy Thumbnail Hover Effect (click here for a demo).

Here is a quote from Scott’s blog post:

For a little extra visual fun, I've added some jQuery to create a zoom animation when you hover on the thumbnails. If you are interested ...

Sitefinity’s included newsletter module is pretty basic.  We (inside Telerik) are well aware of this.  It works fine for general scenarios, but starts to struggle with very large newsletters (including our own Telerik & Sitefinity newsletters).  On his blog, Basem Emara details some of these enhanced features:

Although a quick and basic solution, you will notice big shortcomings when sending 100+ emails through Sitefinity's Newsletter Module. For starters, how about subscriber fields other than just email and name? Nope. Can it handle subscribers in multiple categories? Think again. What about the import/export of subscribers? Do not pass go. Filter lists for mailing? Forget about it. How about click-thru reports? Too much to ask.

Your success with Sitefinity’s newsletter module will depend on whether these extra features are needed.  [This sentence led to me writing this.]  When you encounter extra requirements for your newsletter, Sitefinity’s built-in newsletter ...

Neil Newman posted an incredible video demonstrating how to create a new Sitefinity 4.0 project in IIS (Internet Information Server).  I’ve embedded the video below:

[ Here is the original link on Viddler ]

This video demonstrates the following:

• Setting up a new IIS web site in the IIS Manager
• Creating a new SQL Server database in SQL Server Management Studio
• Using Sitefinity 4.0’s project manager to create a new IIS project
• Opening the new project in Visual Studio
• Removing the WebDavModule  (Why?)
• Use the Sitefinity 4.0 setup wizard to setup a database connection
• Creating the administrator account
• Logging into Sitefinity for the first time
• Creating a new page

Great work Neil!  Neil’s company is Nenit which is located in Shropshire, UK.  Be sure to subscribe to their blog or follow Neil on Twitter for more updates.

Patrick Julicher is putting together an incredible collection of Sitefinity How-To guides.  These guides are designed to help Sitefinity ”newbie’s” learn the CMS and tackle common requirements.  You can find fine these articles on the WE ICT web site. 

In addition, Patrick has created a Twitter presence (EasySitefinity) around these resources that he is using to offer help to the Twitter community with Sitefinity questions.

Here is quick outline of the current Easy Sitefinity articles:

• Using Code Snippets
• Organizing Controls
• Target in Downloads
• Downloading External Templates
• Using the Header Control
• Dutch Social Bookmarks in Sitefinity
Please give these wonderful how-to guides a look. 
Huge thanks Patrick for putting this stuff together.  I know creating this content requires a lot effort.  We are very thankful for your contributions and anxious for more.

Last week, Matt Cooper was able to get the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA running in the cloud (using Azure & SQL Azure).  Matt was kind enough to share a lot of feedback in the forums about how this was accomplished.  He has now assembled these experiences into a blog post and a video.

[ Be sure to read the full blog post on Matt’s blog. ]

How was it done?

One of the first things Matt wanted to determine is whether Sitefinity 4.0’s database schema was compatible with SQL Azure:

So the first task was to see if the database can be easily moved to SQL Azure

As Matt describes, SQL Azure is still SQL, but some features are missing:

Although  SQL Azure is essentially a high availability 2008 SQL instance, because of the architecture of the system some features on standard 2008 are not available. For ...