Frequently Asked Questions

Licensing

• What is the difference between Sitefinity editions?

  Sitefinity comes in the following editions:

  • Community
    For personal, hobby websites or blogs
  • Small Business
    For small business and start-up websites as well as brochure-type and microsites
  • Standard
    For growing online businesses, which need interactive, full-featured websites
  • Professional
    For comprehensive websites and portals of large organizations
  • Enterprise
    For enterprises with large web content and editing needs

  For more information about the pricing and the difference between Sitefinity’s editions, see http://www.sitefinity.com/purchase/license-comparison.aspx

• Can I have a staging Sitefinity environment and do I need another license for it?

  Yes, you do. Since Sitefinity is licensed per domain name and not per server, an unlimited number of subdomains are allowed with your Sitefinity license. Thus, you can create testing and development environments on subdomains of the purchased domain (e.g. test.domain.com). You can also use the Sitefinity domain licenses on developer machines to develop on localhost.
  
  For more information, see Utilizing your Sitefinity CMS license on various work environments.

• Why after upgrading my website I am getting invalid product version message?

  You get this error when using a license for a different sitefinity version than the version of your project. If you have SF4.2 project and you are using SF4.1 license you will get this message.

• Can I upgrade from one Sitefinity edition to another?

  Yes, any edition can be upgraded. You need to upgrade your license, your project, and then apply the new license key in that order. You will not lose any work or content created with your previous edition when upgrading to higher edition.
  
  Sitefinity has a migration tool that makes it straightforward and easy to migrate your Sitefinity 3.7 project to the latest version. Sitefinity Project Manager has also a single click update procedure for all 4.x projects.

• Do developers need a separate license to work with Sitefinity on their local machines?

  
  No, they do not. The Sitefinity license allows for all developers working on a project to be assigned as licensed users, which will allow them to obtain a copy of the license key and install Sitefinity on their local machines. Moreover, being licensed users will allow developers to submit support tickets form their own Sitefinity.com accounts.
  
  Licensed users can also share tickets between each other for better knowledge management and collaboration in a globally distributed team. In case you have more than one Sitefinity license, you should assign developers as licensed users only to the license used for the Sitefinity website they are working on.
  
  For more information, see License management.

Installation, upgrade, deployment

• How can I install Sitefinity on my server?

  You can install your project on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) version 6.0+.
  
  To do this follow procedure Creating and running projects on IIS.
  
  You can also deploy your project to shared hosting or Windows Azure.

• Why I can't upload images, documents, and files in Sitefinity?

  The Silverlight upload is managed by the .xap files, located in your site root in folder client bin. These files may not get upgraded. To fix the problem, you must manually replace the folder.  Also browser caches .xap files, so you must clear the browser’s cache and then test again with the new .xap files.

• Why I can't upload documents after upgrade?

  When you upgrade your Sitefinity website, Sitefinity sometimes will upgrade the Silverlight Upload application used for uploading images, documents, and videos. Check the Silverlight files in ~/ClientBin folder of your website. Make sure that they have been upgraded and clean the cache of your browser.

• I cannot publish items in Sitefinity?

  After you have installed and configured IIS to host Sitefinity and have created your website pages cannot be published. When trying to save the following error is thrown:
  
  There was no endpoint listening at http://mydomain.com/DefaultWorkflows/PagesApprovalWorkflow.xamlx that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more details.
  
  The error is concerning the workflow operations of the website. The problem with it is that the request from outside may come for one location but internally it is forwarded to another and Sitefinity does not know where exactly the default workflows are.
  
  For more information, see Pages cannot be published after installation.

• How can I make sure that the upgrade process is completed successfully?

  Before upgrade clean the error log files in ~/App_Data/Sitefinity/Logs.
  
  

  • Make sure that all relevant files have been copied to your project. Verify the files’ modified date with the modified data of the same files in _EmptyProject directory of your Sitefinity installation
  • Open the error logs directory (~/App_Data/Sitefinity/Logs) and look for UpgradeTraceLog file. Check if all upgrade scripts have passed. There must be no Failed scripts. There must be no other errors logged in Error.log file.

Administration

• How to globally disable caching?

  You can globally disable caching via Sitefinity’s advanced settings.
  
  For more information, see Configuring caching.

• Do I need to apply Load Balancing settings, if I am using hardware load balancer?

  Yes, you must complete procedure Configuring Sitefinity for load balancing for all types of load balancing solution, including software and hardware.

• Can I have a failover environment with Sitefinity?

  Yes, with the load balancing feature of Sitefinity you have two levels of failover protection.
  
  You can back-up the SQL database servers, you can back-up the Sitefinity application servers or you can do both. In this case, if there is a failover of one of your server, your website load will be automatically transferred to one of the running servers so that there is no interruption of your service
  
  You may also want to create failover protection for your load balancer by having a redundant load balancer. One load balancer will always be standing by to become active should the other fail. If this happens, the backup load balancer will become active and the other will become the backup once it is responding again. 

• Can I have a Sitefinity database in a cluster of SQL Servers?

  Yes, Sitefinity has a full support for working with mirrored SQL servers in a cluster environment.  The database layer Open Access ORM supports failover connection string that will redirect all SQL CRUD tasks to the back-up server in the cases when the main server fails to respond.

• Can I provide for a geographical failover of Sitefinity webservers? What about a geographical failover for the SQL database?

  Sitefinity comes with options for Load balancing or running on SQL Azure. Both methods provide you with geographical failover protection. With the Load Balanced environment employed, if one server fails, other servers take over the load and your users never experience any problems. This can also be accomplished for the Sitefinity’s SQL database.

• Can I use Sitefinity in a load balanced environment?

  Yes. Sitefinity can run in a load balanced environment. You use a load balanced environment to increase scalability and improve performance.
  
  For more information, see Load balancing. 

• How to speed up my website?

  There are actions you can take to speed up your website
  
  For more information, see Tips for optimizing performance. 

• Can I use source control tools with Sitefinity?

  Yes, you can have the Sitefinity Web Application in a source control system in the same way as with any standard ASP.NET application. You can put all the code in a source control system, if you need to do custom development for your Sitefinity application. In your development process, you also have the option to share the database or to employ local copies for each developer.
  
  Best practices advice to exclude the configuration files from the project source control, so they will not need to be checked out. Anyway, if you want to put the configuration files in source control system, a better approach for each developer is to check out all configuration files before start working with the project.

• I have added additional url /additionalUrl.html to a page, why is it not working when the extension is html but it is working when the extension is .aspx?

  In Sitefinity all page extensions are forbidden. To use page extensions, you must use URL rewriter.

• Why am I experiencing LoaderExceptions? Why are assemblies disappearing from my bin folder?

  When you create a new project or upgrade an old one to Sitefinity 4.x and edit it in Visual Studio, in order to add custom modules or widgets you may get the following error:
  
  Could not load file or assembly ‘Telerik.Sitefinity.MigrationContracts’ or one of its dependencies
  
  The error is thrown because of a missing reference to Telerik.Sitefinity.MigrationContracts.dll. This assembly is removed from your project references when you Clean or Rebuild a project containing Telerik.Sitefinity.MigrationContracts.dll or the entire solution.
  
  To fix the problem add a reference to the missing assembly Telerik.Sitefinity.MigrationContracts from a blank Sitefinity 4.x project or from _EmptyProject located in the folder where Sitefinity 4.x project manager is placed.
  
  In order to avoid getting this error again, make sure not to clean or rebuild the projects that reference this assembly. You can use Build project option instead.
  
  Other occasions in which you may see this error are, if you have third party assemblies referencing Sitefinity dlls. After an upgrade, you must rebuild your third party assemblies to reference the new Sitefinity dlls.

• Why is search returning wrong URLs in the results?

  The reason can be one of the following:
  
  

  • Reindexing is not automatic. If you do not manually reindex the search index, it will not reflect new content. When you move your website from development to staging or staging to production environment, go to Administration >> Search and Indexes and from the Actions menu, on each index in the list, click Reindex.
  • If you have not configured search index correctly (selected the page where the content is published), a wrong page will be included in the URL and you will get no results.

• Why am I getting "Invalid root node configured for pages. No root node with the name of "FrontendSiteMap"" error on my production server?

  If after you migrate your Sitefinity project to a web server and when browsing the frontend you get the error and your user credentials are not accepted when trying to log in the backend, perform the procedure described in When Sitefinity project is deployed to production server an Invalid root node configured for pages. No root node with the name of "FrontendSiteMap" error is thrown.

• How to upload flash files trough HTML field?

  The HTML field control is set to look for Files folder on your website project. To be able to upload flash files to the website through the rich text editor you must:
  
  

  • Make sure that the website has a folder called Files.
  • The application pool identity has sufficient permissions to write/read in this folder.

• How can I redirect anonymous users to login page when they request restricted resource?

  Enable ASP.NET custom errors and add a redirect for 403 error status code:
  
  Modify the web.config to add custom error redirect on 403 error status code:
  
      <customErrors mode="On">
          <error statusCode="403" redirect="~/login"/>
      </customErrors>

Design

• How can I style the navigation widget?

  You can style your website menu by applying a CSS to it.
  
  To do this, follow procedure Style the navigation widget.

• Can I create my own website templates for Sitefinity?

  Yes. In Sitefinity, you create layout templates either by using Sitefinity Layout editor or by using master pages.
  
  For more information, see Page templates.

• How to extend widget templates by adding new fields?

  If you have added custom field to a content type and you want to display this field in the frontend, you must add it to the widget template that the widget is using.
  
  To do this, perform procedure Adding new fields to widget templates.

• I have images in /images folder of my website. Why I cannot see any of the images on my site?

  If you have Images or Videos directories on the file system, but files from them are not served - an error 404 is generated.
  
  To avoid this, perform the procedure described in Static Files are not served from Images or Videos folders.

• Why are my theme CSS files not loading?

  If the CSS files are located in a theme registered in the appearance configuration Administration >> Settings >> Advanced >> Appearance, you must make sure that you have used application relative path to point to your theme folder, use ~/ to start the path and forward slashes.
  
  Make sure that you have added the wildcard script handler mapping. For more information, see Configuring the IIS to host Sitefinity projects. 

Analytics

• Why the Analytics module doesn't load after upgrade?

  1. Make sure that the upgrade has updated your telerik.sitefinity.analytics.xap file in the Clientbin folder.
  2. Delete your AnalysticsConfiguration.config and  dashboardPermissions.config files if they have previously existed
  3. Make sure the network service has write permissions to the app_data/sitefinity/configuration folder.

• Why the Analytics application doesn't accept my username and password?

  One possible reason maybe that you have enabled two steps verification. If this is the case, you must sign in using your application specific password. To do this, follow the procedure described in Signing in using application-specific passwords.

Advanced

• How to create a designer for my widget?

  The widget (control) designer allows you to specify the UI for the configuration of the widget. This way you can provide fields only for the most important properties. In Sitefinity you can create simple widget designers and multi view widget designers.
  
  For more information see Working with control designers and its sub-topics. 

• Why do I get "MyNewlyMadeWidget cannot be resolved" when I add it to a page?

  You must build the project when adding new widgets.
  
  When adding new widget to Sitefinity project trough Visual Studio the solution must be built. Because Sitefinity is a web application, making changes like adding new files or editing existing requires you to build (F6) in order for those files to be referenced. When you add a widget to your project, register it, but forgot to build, you get error MyNewlyMadeWidget cannot be resolved. This error also appears when the widget has not been register properly.

• Why is the RadAjaxPanel and UpdatePanel not working in Sitefinity?

  The RadAjaxPanel and UpdatePanel controls need a ScriptManager on your pages. However they are looking for the ScriptManager too early in the page life cycle, before even Sitefinity can add a ScriptManager control to the page. To resolve this issue you can create a custom control that wraps the RadAjaxPanel or UpdatePanel classes and change the event in which it looks for the ScriptManager. Note that your pages must be set to include RadScriptManager. For reference, please check this blog post: Using Update Panel in sitefinity.