Telerik have released Sitefinity 4.1 which introduces a number of upgrades and improvements
to the system, including enhancements delivering performance increases
of up to 35 percent. Also being debuted is support for Windows® Azure,
Microsoft’s cloud services operating system, and native language packs
for international Sitefinity users.
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Ready for the cloud! Sitefinity supports Microsoft Azure
Sitefinity
4.1 now offers native support for Windows Azure and SQL Azure. All
websites created with Sitefinity 4.1 are ready for the cloud. By using
Sitefinity and Azure, customers can focus on solving business
challenges, instead of managing the underlying hardware and
technologies.
In addition, customers will benefit from increased
reliability. The Azure operating environment is completely virtualized
with no dependence on the physical underlying hardware. Consequently,
Azure applications are protected from hardware failures.
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Newsletters Module Enhancements (Beta)
The
new Newsletters module provides users with out-of-the-box support for
rich email campaigns and newsletters. The module offers broad tools and
functionality, such as dynamic mailing list support, A/B campaign
metrics and measurement features, and flexible, customizable scheduling
options for better campaign targeting. The module provides a granular
view of overall campaign effectiveness through embedded campaign
statistics reporting and integration of Google Analytics data. Learn more.
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Sitefinity is now 35% faster
The
latest release of Sitefinity is packed with underlying improvements
that make the system faster and more stable than ever. This is a part of
an ongoing initiative to refine and optimize the product with each new
release. Based on ongoing internal testing Sitefinity 4.1 is 35% faster
than the initial Sitefinity 4.0 release.
Furthermore,
4.1 includes several important improvements that enable non-technical
end-users to automatically take advantage of Sitefinity’s existing
performance engineering. All pages are now cached by default and
Sitefinity’s Cache Expiration Monitor will automatically &
intelligently refresh the page cache when required.
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Now available in 9 languages
Sitefinity
has always offered rich localization support. This enables customers to
translate their public web pages into multiple languages or cultures.
Now with the Sitefinity 4.1 release, Sitefinity also comes fully
translated into 8 new languages. These new language packs enable content
creators to be more productive by interacting with fully localized
user-interface. The languages available out of the box are:
English
German
Dutch
Italian
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Turkish
Arabic
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Stop retyping, start sharing – Shared Content
Web
sites frequently contain duplicated content. For example, the company
address, hours of operation, phone numbers, product descriptions and
call to action links. There are blocks of content all over your web site
that get repeated again and again. When this information changes, it
can be a huge hassle to discover and modify each hidden version of this
text.
Using
Sitefinity Shared Content this text can be typed once and shared
everywhere. If the content ever changes, it can be modified effortlessly
in a single location.
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Managing your old URL’s – Page Redirects & Alternate URLs
Most
organizations have been through several website designs (and CMS
replacements). Furthermore, an organization might have substantial
investment attached to old URL’s (business cards, brochures, links,
etc.).
Sitefinity
includes several features that enable organizations to manage these
legacy URL’s while still taking advantage of modern CMS features (SEO
friendly URL’s). Each page in Sitefinity can have multiple URL’s
associated with it. Alternately, Sitefinity can redirect these legacy
URL’s to newer pages. Furthermore, these redirects (HTTP 301) are
specially configured to inform search engines that the page has moved
and the old links should be updated.
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Create content collections using the Lists Module
It’s
relatively easy to use regular Sitefinity content blocks to create
lists of content (FAQ, Contacts, Locations, etc.) However, it can be
difficult to sort or re-order these items later. Typically this would
require moving content widgets or copying & pasting content.
Using
the List Module in Sitefinity 4.1, it’s easy to create and manage lists
of related content. Once created these lists can be dragged &
dropped onto 1 or more Sitefinity pages.
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Extended User Profiles through Custom Profile Types
It
is very typical for a web site to associate unique information with
their user’s profiles. This custom information might include addresses,
phone numbers, customer classifications, social media information and
more.
In Sitefinity 4.1 it is extremely easy to associate new
information with your user profiles. This is done using Sitefinity’s
Custom Profiles and Custom Profile Field feature:
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Improvements in documentation
In addition to new documentation for all of the Sitefinity 4.1 features, we updated the online versions of the Developers Guide, User Guide, Designers Guide and Installation and Administration Guide.
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Compatible with ASP.NET Membership & Role Providers
Sitefinity
4.1 is now fully compatible with any ASP.NET Membership & Role
Provider. As a result, Sitefinity is easier to integrate with external
solutions. These 2 solutions can share a common set of user accounts
(usernames & passwords). In fact, any 3rd party solution that
standardizes on ASP.NET Membership & Role providers can be
integrated with Sitefinity.
As a proof of this, we’ve integrated YAF (Yet Another Forum) into Sitefinity.
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Support for ViewState, PostBacks and the .NET LifeCycle
Sitefinity
4.x’s Backend UI does not rely on PostBacks. Instead, the Sitefinity
architecture uses client-side Javascript and WCF RESTful web services to
respond to end-user actions. This approach has several advantages, but
it introduced challenges for customers who wanted to use traditional
ASP.NET solutions in the Backend UI.
Sitefinity 4.1 contains
several new enhancements to provide backwards compatibility with
traditional ASP.NET technologies. This means developers can now extend
Sitefinity’s Backend UI using familiar ASP.NET WebForms technologies.