Sitefinity v12: Updates and Improvements

Earlier this year, Progress released Sitefinity 12 to the public, providing a number of new features, updated functionality, and a wide array of bug fixes. As a content manager, you should know about all the new tools that could be at your disposal, so you can dream about them, envy your peers that do have them, and then finally upgrade so you can sleep at night.

Sitefinity 12 provides an easy and accessible content management experience driven by the recently implemented AdminApp backend interface. If you aren’t familiar with the newest interface updates from Sitefinity 11, you can read about those in the Progress documentation here: New content editing experience.

With Sitefinity 12, Progress has extended this functionality to the page editing process as well. They have also simplified the page creation screen, allowing content managers to create pages with less settings initially. Of course, those properties are readily available once the page is created, but by removing them from initial creation, it streamlines the whole page management workflow. Within page editing, the WYSIWYG update that also came with new the interface is now available.

This provides a huge quality-of-life improvement for editors by letting you see a more accurate representation of what your pages will look like before you publish them. For those savvier with frontend development through HTML and CSS, the code editor now provides validation, syntax highlighting, and IntelliSense auto completion—a massive upgrade from the previous version’s text editors. Overall creating, editing, and managing the content your users see has become easier and faster, thanks to the new interface.

Sometimes when editing content (and many other times in life), an undo button would be very helpful to rewind the last few things you’ve done. Previously, Sitefinity offered a revision history for content items like News, Events, and pages, which I’m sure has come in handy for plenty of content managers. In Sitefinity 12, images, documents, and videos now have full revision history, including a side-by-side comparison of the two items to make sure you don’t need that undo button twice. This also means that media items placed on a page will hold their revision history with that page, so if you were to revert a page to a previous version, all media on that page would be reverted to the version it was when that version of the page was saved.

Of course, as a content manager, you work with more than just static data like content blocks and images—you need a way to collect information from your users. Sitefinity forms have always provided a concise way to put together a form for this, with options for everything from a simple text field to a multi-step form that signs users up for a newsletter and notifies an administrator upon submission, and everything in between. To help make your data hoarding more dynamic and engaging to your users, a Rule manager has been added in Sitefinity 12. This allows you to create conditional statements based on individual form fields and tie an action to their value. For example, if you have a Country drop down list and you want to show a State drop down list only if a user selects “USA” from the Country drop down, you can create a rule to manage that. 

For those familiar with editing Sitefinity forms, the options of what the form should do when it is submitted have been moved to this Rule manager as well, allowing you to select a page for the user to be directed to or displaying a message when the user submits the form. For you marketing gurus out there, you can also now map a form to Sitefinity Digital Experience Connector on a field-by-field basis, allowing you to create extensive user profiles and further provide personalized content based on them. With all the new options with forms and data collection, you might even be able to replace a content manager or two and let the user profiles generate the displayed content for you. Not you though...you’re irreplaceable.

Now that you have all these tools to create more complete and engaging content, what is the best way to make sure you have space to work in a sandbox type environment but not have to duplicate content between multiple sites? Those already using Sitefinity might be familiar with an optional module called SiteSync, which allows you to do just that. As the name suggests, SiteSync provides a simple and effective way to get any type of content and all the items of that type from your staging site to your users.

Now you might be asking yourself, “Mr. Smooth Fusion Developer, what if I only want to sync a single page or piece of content, not all the content of that type?”. Well quizzical content manager, before Sitefinity 12, I would have been disappointed to tell you that was not possible, but today I can tell you “Of course you can do that”! With the new ability to select individual pieces of content and sync them immediately or on a schedule, you can now keep your users up to date with your blog without syncing all your half-written posts that you’ll definitely finish one day.

So now that you know all the perks and benefits of Sitefinity 12, what are you waiting for? Send us a message at www.smoothfusion.com/contact and ask about how we can get your current site upgraded or have us build you a new one on the latest and greatest version of Sitefinity!

Smooth Fusion is a custom web and mobile development company and leading Progress Sitefinity CMS Partner. We create functional, usable, secure, and elegant software while striving to make the process painless for our customers. We offer a set of core services that we've adapted and refined for more than 250 clients over our 18 years in business. We've completed more than 1800 projects across dozens of industries. To talk to us about your project or review our portfolio, send us a message and one of our project managers will reach out to you quickly.