Sitefinity ASP.NET CMS - Content Management System

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.

The Generic Content Module allows you to create, store and manage content items most conveniently. The module incorporates the award winning RadEditor for ASP.NET, providing 100% WYSIWYG environment for creating and editing content. Users can easily 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. Some of the most prominent features the module includes are:

• Shared Content –allows you to reuse content items over multiple Web pages/sites
• New: Image Manager – upload images through user-friendly image manager
• New: Friendly Hyperlink Manager – You can easily link your content to a page within your project through a sitemap selector.
• Permissions – grant user permission
• Localization – enables you to create and manage localized content
• Dynamic metadata
• Tags & Categories
• Workflow
• History

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.

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.

Sitefinity features a pluggable forum module. It offers easy manipulation of multiple forums on your website from a single management interface. Forum administrators can swiftly create forums, start new threads, edit and delete individual messages and assign permissions to different users through the Sitefinity’s admin area. You can use categories to classify and organize different forums.

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.

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.

With Images & Documents Library, Sitefinity brings content publishing to new levels of simplicity by providing end-users with an easy-to-use option to create, edit and share content.

The benefits for web site administrators are also noteworthy: automatic handling of permissions and automatic storage and retrieval from/to the project database. When migrating a project, for example, it is much easier to transfer the whole project database, instead of transferring and managing the image and documents files separately. Moreover, you don’t have to take care of the image or documents paths when creating/migrating your site – it’s been all automated.

The Images & Documents Module provides two public controls that serve to display content on a public Sitefinity page:

The Download List displays a list of files uploaded in document or custom libraries. This control has two view modes: list and table.

The Image Gallery displays images from libraries. A typical scenario in which it may be used is creating a public picture gallery on a web site.

Another advantage of the new module is the easy way to select which item to include in a page through the rich text editor. The module provides its own implementations of dialogs, which retrieve items from the module and include them in the Generic Content. Based on the Generic Content module, the Images & Documents Module inherits most of its features such as panels for managing history, versioning, etc.

Sitefinity ships with an Events Module that makes it easy for users to schedule and announce events through their web site, displaying them on a calendar or a list. The module incorporates Telerik’s RadScheduler, providing the standard abilities to manipulate events (create, view, update, delete). Based on the Generic Content module, the Events Module inherits most of its features such as panels for managing tags, categories and comments, and to define module-specific permissions.

Additionally the Events Module introduces a new specific panel for working with geo-mapping settings. The module provides an ability to display maps of event's location from three leading map services: Google Maps; Yahoo! Maps; Live Maps.