By Rich Read, Bayshore Solutions Development Team
Telerik Sitefinity released version 8.0 on March 17, 2015. This release includes important technology updates, performance boosts, improved support for some of the most popular responsive frameworks, and new enterprise features. Bayshore Solutions is a Sitefinity Solution Partner with certified developers on staff.
Here are some of the highlights of Sitefinity 8.0:
Performance
When deploying updates to a Sitefinity website, the first request for a given page will typically take a performance hit while the web application is recompiling and caching that page. Sitefinity 8.0 provides a page pre-compilation tool that compiles generated markup in advance. This helps pages load faster and reduces the processor load on the server.
More MVC Goodness
One of the reasons we recommend Sitefinity CMS to our clients for their custom websites is the high degree of extensibility that enables us to do just about anything we want with it. This enabled Sitefinity to introduce ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) support for developers back in version 5.1. Good for them, and for us, because this is the direction that Microsoft appears to be heading.
Sitefinity 8.0 introduces more than 20 new MVC components. There are widgets for things like search, social sharing, and image galleries. They have also developed many front-end components that support infinite scroll, drag-and-drop, and image selectors.
Responsive Frameworks Out-of-the-Box
It’s important for every website to look good on desktop browsers, tablets, and mobile devices. Responsive layouts are what provide this capability. Sitefinity has had their own responsive layout features for a number of years. They are now bundling Bootstrap, Foundation, and SemanticUI to allow designers to base their design on one of these popular responsive frameworks. Developers can even add support for others through the new resource package feature. A resource package is essentially a website theme that can contain stylesheets, scripts, images, and layout templates.
New Multi-Site Updates
When running a multi-site scenario you can now choose which sites you want to sync content with. For example, you may want to share Blog content between some of your sites, but not all. Content approval workflows have also been updated to allow you to specify which site and language you wish to apply the workflow to.
Wrap-up
Sitefinity’s desire to stay on the leading edge of technology, combined with their rapid release cycle of four versions per year, guarantees that the platform will continue to evolve with the industry. This provides Bayshore Solutions the opportunity to offer our customers best-in-class solutions built on top of relevant, up-to-date, technologies.
Bayshore Solutions can determine the website CMS platform best suited to your needs and create a high-performance web presence that delivers measurable growth results for your business. To learn more about how we can help you, contact us today!