Around 1 year ago I wrote the Bullet Proof Guide to Installing Sitefinity 3.x.  This blog post weighs in at 21 pages and includes a 30 minute video.  This blog post was written after I reformatted my system to install the Windows 7 RC.  This system rebuild forced me to re-discover all the small steps needed to setup IIS, setup SQLExpress and then run Sitefinity’s Project Manager.  To this day, the Bullet Proof Guide is the most popular resource on Sitefinity Watch.

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

The day has finally arrived!  I've been biting my tongue for weeks and today I can finally start talking about 4.0.

During this past year the Sitefinity Team has been working on deep revisions & optimizations to Sitefinity's core architecture.  We have big plans for Sitefinity and our goal was to build a platform that would eagerly accommodate these lofty goals.

Today, I'm delighted to announce that we've reached an important milestone in this journey.  The CTP release of Sitefinity 4.0 is now available to all customers to download and test. 

The CTP can be downloaded from Sitefinity.com.

CTP is an acronym for Community Technology Preview.  This release is not yet feature complete.  Instead, this release is just a taste of things to come.  Additional modules and functionality will be will be delivered in later releases (BETA). 

Be sure to visit the Sitefinity 4.0 CTP launch page for a ...

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 ...

I’m happy to announce that the Sitefinity community has been very active lately creating new items for Sitefinity’s Marketplace.

Several new items have recently been posted to Sitefinity’s Marketplace. 

Events Map Plugin

Events Map is a plug-in that displays events on a global map via Google Maps. It produces the map with pins of all the events you have available on your website. A click of the pin will open a billboard-type section on the map with the event details with a link to the event page.

Created by Basem Emara.

Events Rotator Plugin

Events Rotator is a plug-in that displays events in a rotator fashion anywhere on your site. It slides through all the events you have available on your website and displays a nicely formatted thumbnail, title, and time of the event. A click of the slideshow will take you to the full event page

Created ...

Sitefinity’s Administrative Web Interface is accessed by adding /Sitefinity to the web site’s URL.  Users are then required to provide a valid username & password to gain entry to Sitefinity.  By default, Sitefinity’s administrative username is set to admin.

A few customers have expressed concern that this does not offer enough protection from malicious users or bots.  If an attacker knows a web site is using Sitefinity then they also know the login URL and the admin username. The only thing that remains is the admin password. 

This article explains how Sitefinity (and ASP.NET) help protect your web site.  This article also suggests a few techniques for adding additional layers of protection to Sitefinity’s Administrative UI.

Too Many Invalid Password Attempts

There are plenty of password cracking tools that will bombard a web login form with password variations.  These login attempts can stream as fast as the web server ...

In my last post, I described Web 3.0 (also known as the Semantic Web).  I also introduced a couple of formats (Microformats & RDF) that allow additional meaning (semantics) to be applied to web content when HTML fails to be descriptive enough. 

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to modify Sitefinity’s Events module to export events that are formatted using Microformat’s hCalendar format.  Once modified, these events can be easily consumed by services such as Yahoo! Calendar, Google Events or other services.

Understanding the hCalendar Format

Here is some typical HTML that might be used to display an event:

<h2>Google Buzz Launch</h2> 
<p>2/9/2010 11:06 AM</p> 
<p>Come witness the launch of a social media service that isn't limited to 140 characters.</p> 
<p>Gmail</p>
<p>Social Media</p>
<p>Google</p>  

Can you spot the organizer?  The location?  The category? 

If you’re having trouble, imagine how difficult it is for a computer to extract ...

Almost everyone has now heard of Web 2.0…and is probably tired of hearing it.  This phrase gets tossed around a lot and has largely been turned into a marketing gimmick.  Many products add the Web 2.0 descriptor simply to make the product appear cutting edge. 

For all the abuse of this descriptor, Web 2.0 really did signify a meaningful transition.  It wasn’t a sudden transition, but rather a gradual transition.  Web 2.0 represents the shift from static brochure web sites to interactive web sites that facilitate participation & information sharing. 

Technologies such as forums, blogs, profiles, comments, wiki’s, user reviews, etc. are all products of the Web 2.0 era.  Web 2.0 also birthed many highly visible companies such as MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, etc.  All of these technologies & companies enable people to participate online. 

The web is just a bunch of documents

Despite all these innovations, the web ...

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 ...

Sitefinity CMS has a built-in WYSIWYG page editor.  WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get.  This term is used to describe a system in which content displayed during editing looks similar (if not identical) to the final output

The alternative to WYSIWYG page editing is a sandboxed composition mode where content looks nothing like the final results.  In this environment, editors must constantly toggle into a preview mode to see the results of content changes.  Sitefinity deliberately choose a WYSIWYG editing experience to minimize the steps (and pain) needed to edit, preview & publish content changes. 

However, to create an accurate representation of the final page Sitefinity needs to execute the controls & code used on the page.  In some circumstances, this can create problems.  Thankfully there is an easy solution to this problem.

Disabling WYSIWYG

A few weekends ago during the WAM2010 charity ...

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, ...