SiteFinity Content Management System (CMS)

Friendly URLs – Sitefinity lets you define your own aliases to appear in the address bar. This not only makes it easy for end-user to remember a certain URL, but also results in much better search-engine indexing.

Metadata Keywords – With Sitefinity, you can tag your content with metadata and use metadata keywords to describe website content and make it easy to retrieve and reuse. Keywords are also used by browsers or search engines to categorize and rank a page for improved search engine optimization.

Another valuable feature is the ability to insert external pages to your Sitefinity navigation. You can naturally add existing pages created in other applications and insert them into your website navigation. This functionality can be used through the graphical user interface.

Sitefinity automatically creates a Sitemap of your website and keeps you up to date with any navigational changes. An automated sitemap also ensures that search engines can find and index all your pages without additional effort.

Sitefinity integrates advanced page caching capabilities that are fundamental for removing performance bottlenecks. Caching is an effective manner of improving web pages speed delivery and reducing access time. This guarantees user satisfaction and responsiveness in high-load environments.

Sitefinity integrates multilingual support for language content, so you can effortlessly create and maintain content in multiple languages. The character set to use for the display of the content can be defined on both page and content level.

The structure and basic layout of Sitefinity web-sites are defined in the Master Page, while the page specific differences are defined in the page Templates. Sitefinity’s templating technology allows users to make easier site-wide and page-specific changes when needed via a single location. It reduces the amount of work involved in creating many pages with the same basic layout.

Sitefinity incorporates its own Template Manager that supports rapid creation and maintenance of templates. It automatically generates a template for an existing Master Page, allowing you to edit and design the look of your template directly thorough the Sitefinity interface.

One key advantage of Sitefinity is that it ships with the latest version of Telerik’s award-winning suite of UI components for ASP.NET. The toolset enables developers to rapidly build the site interface and enjoy tight integration with the core CMS application.

Sitefinity contains a set of pre-built pluggable modules to present website content or extend the functionality of your website:

Generic Content - This is a self-contained module that offers 100% WYSIWYG environment in which non-technical users can create content chunks and reuse them across many pages, as well as multiple projects. If you are using the same content across many pages and it needs editing, you can make sure that changes will affect all pages where this item appears. With the generic content module you create, store and manage content items most conveniently.

News – The news module provides a comfortable way to incorporate and categorize news articles and display them on your website. It is based on the Generic Content module and leverages all of its functionality, such as workflow, versioning, shared content, etc.

Blogs – The module enables you to create, deploy and manage your own personal or corporate web blog. Similarly to the News module, Blogs combines the functionality of the Generic Content to enable workflow, versioning and RSS feeds, with no additional code.

Lists Module – The Lists module provides a simple and efficient way of organizing FAQs, contacts, interviews, testimonials, instructions, tasks, to-do lists, links, dictionaries, and much more. It allows you to create logically related list items, each with a headline and content, and eliminates the need to format them while writing. All formatting comes from the CSS files and themes, and content contributors do not have to worry about bullet styles, separators between the items, different CSS classes for each item, etc

Polls - With Sitefinity Polls module, you can quickly create and publish online Polls for your site through an intuitive user interface. It literally takes a few minutes to create a new Poll and publish it on the site.

Sitefinity includes the latest version of Telerik RadEditor, the leading WYSIWYG rich-text editor for ASP.NET. The product can replace any TextBox with an intuitive Word-like editor and assist even non-technical users to author and manage HTML content as easily as writing a document.

Sitefinity facilitates native content reuse model to distribute your writing items across multiple web pages within projects, as well as among multiple projects. Whenever one instance of shared content is updated, all pages where the same item appears are updated simultaneously. This feature is especially convenient when there are users responsible for content editing only and others responsible for adding the content to the Web pages.

Sitefinity incorporates its own manager to streamline an easy and effective file upload. It displays a hierarchical structure of folders and files in your project. You can delete, copy, move any kind of files necessary for website construction and organize them into folders. The File Manager helps you to better manage your sites through Sitefinity’s interface.

In an effort to make rapid and easy content presentation, Sitefinity provides a drag and drop interface, for visual construction of web pages. You can drag and drop different page elements and quickly organize your page structure – drag them from the control toolbar, replace or move them around and easily fill the page cells with content.

For any page change or repurposed content, there is a preview capability to verify the content look-and-feel in a website environment before publishing. You may preview content items in all different renditions where they will appear and ensure perfect content quality management before going on air.

Sitefinity supports different versions of the same building block allowing rollback and comparison to previous versions. Every time a user modifies content, a copy is created in the Database – the old version is not deleted, but stored in the Database together with the newer versions. Versioning provides a more powerful alternative to keeping backup files. It can be applied to pages, page templates and any content.

The main purpose of every CMS is to ensure that new or modified content does not go live immediately but rather passes through a process of approval. Sitefinity has a robust workflow mechanism, supporting different levels of workflow complexity. It can be easily enabled and disabled, as well as applied on both content and pages level. Users can coordinate the different roles throughout the content management process to guarantee accuracy in public content.

Sitefinity supports RSS, a straightforward XML model, allowing external websites and sources to pull your newsfeeds. This is an excellent way to syndicate descriptions or news sources to RSS readers. With the RSS engine incorporated in the Generic Content module, you can conveniently feed your website visitors and keep them up to date with your latest news, blog posts, etc.

Sitefinity takes full advantage of ASP.NET 2.0 membership services by providing interface for managing them. You can use multiple providers for the ASP.NET membership services, such as Active Directory. This functionality empowers administrators to validate user credentials, create and modify membership users, and manage user settings such as passwords and e-mail addresses.

The main purpose of every CMS is to ensure that new or modified content does not go live immediately but rather passes through a process of approval. Sitefinity has a robust workflow mechanism, supporting different states of the workflow process. It can be easily enabled and disabled, as well as applied on both content and pages level. Users can coordinate the different roles throughout the content management process to guarantee accuracy in public content.

Sitefinity supports security socket layer (SSL) protocol and its use on page level. All information that is transmitted between the visitor browser and the web server is encrypted.

Sitefinity can operate in a partially trusted environment. It gives server administrators the flexibility to set execution permissions on assemblies and tailor them to their needs.

Sitefinity exposes a comprehensive set of methods and events allowing developers to handle and customize almost every aspect of the application and create programmatically pages and content, etc. To get you started, a developer guide with a full API reference and code examples is provided.

Sitefinity can be heavily customized and extended using traditional .NET approaches. Developers are able to easily integrate third party systems in Sitefinity, thus making their own application tools available in the CMS. This includes adding completely new modules. Moreover, users can directly add .aspx controls with no classes inheritance or interface implementations needed.

Sitefinity is completely interoperable with Visual Studio .NET. Side-by-side development and result testing in the working project has never been easier. You can write new user controls, modify the functionality of existing ones, or reuse readily-available code. At the end, all you need to do is build the project and refresh the browser window.

You easily upload custom or user controls through the control uploader to the control toolbox. It is a very handy way to visualize all controls you need. Just like in Visual Studio.

Control templates are a great aid in controlling the output of all public and most of the administrative controls in Sitefinity. Each control has a built-in template for its layout. This template is loaded in case there is no external template specified for the control.