Jody Roberts
By: Jody Roberts – Bayshore Solutions Development Team
Telerik’s powerful and feature rich Web Content Management (WCM) Platform, Sitefinity 7.0, is industry leading and responsible for serving a 70,000- strong user base. Bayshore Solutions’ Sitefinity certified development team creates Sitefinity websites that are compelling, engaging, and mobile-responsive to captivate your customers.
In April, Telerik released Sitefinity 7.0 which is by far the most feature rich, customer focused, and flexible to date, enabling greater control over a wide range of content from individual items to multiple websites.
Let’s take a look at a number of the new enhancements and improvements in Sitefinity 7:
Relate Content to Any Other Content Quickly
New in Sitefinity is the ability to relate content to any other content, including dynamic content. Example: If you are creating content for a music business, instead of having to first add content called “Artist” and then create a content item called “Album”, which was necessary prior to this release for creating a relationship, you can now add in the Album first and immediately create/edit the related Artist straight from the Album UI. This feature allows you to build one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many relations for any type of complex structure you can imagine. Displaying related content that your visitors are currently viewing helps them to find other relevant information on your website. This functionality also allows enhancing any of your content (blogs, news, custom content) with images, videos, or associated downloadable files directly by the content author. Adding in rich media into your content is an important way to make your website eye-popping, attractive, and more engaging to your visitors and customers.
Quickly Duplicate Page Templates, Pages, and Forms
Many times content authors are faced with creating pages that are very similar where the new page only requires a slight modification. Prior to Sitefinity 7, this was a very manual process of cutting and pasting. Sitefinity 7 has added a “duplicate” feature and, with a few clicks, an author can quickly reproduce a new page from an existing one and will even duplicate child pages as well. This has also been implemented for page templates and even the forms (the most tedious to duplicate), saving lots of time for the user.
HTML5 Video Player for Browsers and Mobile
The rich HTML5 video player widget allows you to add video to your website without additional browser plugins to support multiple browsers. This relieves content authors and developers of the worry that multiple browsers and mobile devices will miss out on important video content on their pages.
Custom Fields for Pages
This feature has been a top request at Sitefinity. This release allows you to extend Sitefinity’s built in widgets, like News and Blogs, by adding custom fields. This could include icons for your page menus, custom text, categories, related pages, media and content, additional metadata for SEO, or even third party tools without any additional coding. All of this can be done through the familiar Sitefinity page admin quickly and easily.
Products and Content with Ratings and Reviews
The eCommerce module and other content such as blog posts and news now have the ability for users to add ratings and reviews. For Products, this provides important feedback to the shop owner about the products they offer. For other types of content, it can provide valuable popularity feedback about what content is most interesting to your site visitors.
Sitefinity 7 is a major step forward for the platform. Telerik really listened to their customers and users in compiling this release. In this post, I have only touched on a few areas that have been enhanced in Sitefinity 7. For a complete list of enhancements in this release, explore here:
http://www.sitefinity.com/product/version-notes/sitefinity-7.0.
Bayshore Solutions is dedicated to developing Sitefinity solutions that fully meet customers’ needs for cutting edge websites, and partnered with Telerik and Sitefinity, we are making sure our customers get an easy to use, comprehensive, and all-inclusive platform
Jody Roberts is a Senior Developer at Bayshore Solutions—a Web Design, Web Development, and Digital Marketing Company.