The OpenCamp conference is being held later this month (August 27-29) in Addison Texas (close to Dallas). 

From the people that brought you WordCamp Dallas and DrupalCamp Dallas, OpenCamp is the SouthWest’s first multi-platform web conference. With top speakers covering topics ranging from social media to technical development, content creation, revenue generation and more, webmasters and web developers, bloggers, podcasters and technologists on any platform are welcome.

OpenCamp has strong roots in the PHP community but also welcomes other technologies.  In fact, a .NET track had been added to this year’s conference.  The audience of this conference includes professional podcasters, bloggers, community managers, web site managers, etc. 

My sessions

I will be attending as a speaker and representing Telerik & Sitefinity CMS.  I have two sessions scheduled for this conference:

1.  Introduction to Telerik’s Sitefinity CMS

Sitefinity CMS is a flexible ASP.NET-based content management platform that is used for ...

It looks like Matt Cooper’s insomnia resulted in a wonderful experiment.  Matt was able to get the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA running on Azure and SQL Azure. 

Click here to see Sitefinity 4.0 running in the cloud

This is just the beginning of the conversation though.  Telerik has long expressed an intent to have Sitefinity running in the cloud.  Cloud platforms offer the promise of elastic computing.  The idea that server resources are virtual and can be scaled up & down (dynamically) to handle real-time demand. 

However, web applications need engineered to be infinitely (or massively) scalable.  For one, web sites can’t utilize server-specific session state.  There is no guarantee that a web site visitor will be returned to the same server.  Thankfully Sitefinity 4.0 is naturally stateless.  Having multiple front-end servers will not pose a problem.

However, the persistence layer poses another challenge.  SQL Azure databases, for example, are ...

Lino Tadros at Falafel Software created an incredible video that demonstrates how to programmatically create pages using Sitefinity 4.0’s API.  This video also contrasts the conventional content manager (PageManager) API and the new Fluent API (introduced with 4.0). 

Watch the full video at Falafel TV.

If you are interested in playing with Sitefinity 4.0’s API this is a wonderful place to start!

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Update:  Falafel has now posted the code from this video.  If you would like to copy & paste this code use this blog post.  If you have problems, be sure to watch the video.  Lino does a good job of showing (and explaining) all the various steps.

Earlier today Telerik released the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA to the public.  [news release]

Telerik, a leading vendor of development tools and user interface components for Microsoft’s .NET platform, announced today the Beta Release of Sitefinity CMS 4.0.

This BETA release is intended to give customers a taste of things to come.  Additional information, videos, documentation and the download can be found on the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA page.

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During the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA webinar, it was mentioned that a Sitefinity SDK would be released 1 week after the release of the BETA.  This SDK would include information & tools needed to extend Sitefinity.  Watch Facebook, Twitter or the blogs for announcement details.

In the meantime, go download the BETA.

I’ve been a fan of Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog for a long time.  Because I was a fan, I also followed the creation of StackOverflow and became a listener of the podcast Jeff created with Joel Spolsky.  In one of these podcasts, Jeff & Joel interviewed Richard White with UserVoice.

During this interview, I became intrigued with UserVoice.  I liked the idea of letting the community post suggestions and vote for existing suggestions.  Here at Telerik we talked about creating a UserVoice community for Sitefinity suggestions.

I am now blogging primarily on the official Sitefinity Blogs.  This full blog post can be seen there.

Many of the web site configuration details for Sitefinity 3.x were stored in the web.config file.  Web.config is the main settings and configuration file for an ASP.NET web site. This file is an XML document that defines configuration information for the web application.

However, because this file is used for ASP.NET configuration (in addition to Sitefinity configuration), the web.config file became a place where Sitefinity configuration, Sitefinity customizations and ASP.NET configurations collided.  This overlap could then become an issue during Sitefinity upgrades.

I am now blogging primarily on the official Sitefinity Blogs.  This full blog post can be seen there.

Sitefinity uses Telerik’s RadEditor to bring a Word-like text editing experience to the web browser.  RadEditor allows content editors to easily style and format text .  However, RadEditor also contains an HTML mode that can be used to directly inject HTML into the content. 

Because HTML mode allows raw HTML to be injected into the content, this feature can be used by savvy editors to create very advanced content layouts.  However, in my opinion, it is inappropriate to toggle into RadEditor’s HTML mode and create HTML formatting.  This should never be done in Sitefinity.  Not even by highly technical editors.  In fact, RadEditor’s HTML mode fundamentally defeats the purpose of having a WCMS.

I am now blogging primarily on the official Sitefinity Blogs.  This full blog post can be seen there.

As of this writing, there is one public release of Sitefinity 4.0.  However, we are planning several additional releases (CTP2, CTP3, BETA, etc) in the coming weeks.  Our goal with Sitefinity 4.0 is to make installation effortless.  However, we also want to make Sitefinity upgrades effortless.

Sitefinity 4.0’s Project Manager contains an Upgrade button.  This button, when clicked, upgrades the selected web site to the current version.  One click and it’s done.  Period.

I am now blogging primarily on the official Sitefinity Blogs.  This full blog post can be seen there.

The purpose of this blog post is to announce that the Sitefinity 4.0 CTP Project Manager now creates Web Application Projects.

I am now blogging primarily on the official Sitefinity Blogs.  This full blog post can be seen there.

In my last blog post, I described our goal of making Sitefinity 4.0 installation effortless.  Within a couple of minutes of download, we wanted customers to be focused on building their web sites, not installation. 

We’re accomplishing this goal, in part, through Sitefinity 4.0’s built-in web server.

I am now blogging primarily on the official Sitefinity Blogs.  This full blog post can be seen there.