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.
Sitefinity’s administration layout supports style sheets to assist web developers in separating web structure from presentation. Style sheets lets you store only structure in generated HTML markup, while keeping presentation in a separate style sheet file. This streamlines layout formatting and maintenance for consistent page look. Same styles can be applied to different pages for reduced turnaround time.
Sitefinity uses an embedded version of Nolics.Net mapping tool for managing multiple databases. It ensures compatibility with SQL 2000/2005/Express, Oracle and MySQL.
When a single web server is not enough to handle the traffic on your web site, it is time to consider building a web farm and use multiple servers on a network that act as a single server. Sitefinity supports Webfarm and Webgarden environments and helps you manage synchronization processes of a load balancing cluster.