Sitefinity ASP.NET CMS is deigned to be very flexible, extensible and customizable. However, in the past customizations required modifying the Control Templates included in Sitefinity. Managing these customizations during deployment & upgrades was sometimes cumbersome.
With Sitefinity 3.6, these templates are embedded into the assemblies (DLLs). Ivan Osmak detailed the advantage of embedded templates on his blog:
One of the major new improvements are embedded control templates. By embedding templates we were able to drastically reduce the number of files that comes with Sitefinity website, but even more importantly, we have ensured that on upgrades we do not override your customized templates anymore.
This represents a fundamental shift in how resources & customizations will be handled in future versions of Sitefinity.
Fewer Files = Fewer Problems
In J. Edward Anderson's 15 Rules of Engineering Design, rule #11 is:
Minimize the number of moving parts. Some engineers become fascinated with extremely complex designs, but they all too often are subject to more failures and end up with higher life-cycle cost. Examine carefully the function of each part.
Web sites don't have moving parts, but they do have files. These files need transferred during deployment and managed during upgrades. Web site files represent "moving parts" and introduce additional complexity.
The use of embedded resources & templates is part of a long-running trend of reducing the overall size and complexity of Sitefinity. This makes it much easier to manage & deploy a Sitefinity installation.
Sitefinity 3.6 is 12% smaller than 3.5 and 55% smaller than 3.2. The number of Control Templates in Sitefinity 3.6 was reduced by 35%. This trend will continue with future versions of Sitefinity.
What Happened to my Customizations?
Sitefinity has always invited developers to customize the product. In the past, many of these customizations were made directly to the Control Template files included in Sitefinity.
- ~/Sitefinity/ControlTemplates
- ~/Sitefinity/Admin/ControlTemplates
This made it difficult to maintain clean separation between My Stuff and Sitefinity's Stuff. Customizations to the product became co-mingled with Sitefinity's core files. During upgrades these customizations would be overwritten or broken.
Embedded templates make it impossible for Sitefinity to overwrite your customizations. Sitefinity's Stuff is embedded inside an assembly file. Unless instructed otherwise, Sitefinity will use these embedded templates. Any Sitefinity customizations that exist will be contained in separate files and never overwritten.
Making Customizations to Controls in Sitefinity 3.6
To use a custom template with an existing Sitefinity control, simply point the control to your own custom control template.
For example, I wanted Sitefinity Watch to use a custom template for the BlogPosts control. To do this I clicked Edit for the control, clicked the Advanced tab and pointed Sitefinity to my custom control templates.
The custom control template I use must contain certain required webcontrols. The required webcontrols will vary from control to control. For reference, download the embedded templates included with Sitefinity from this KB article.
These templates can be used as a starting place for your customizations. Find the template you're interested in using, modify it, save it to a location of your choosing and then point a control to this new template.
