Meet Sitefinity Lightning project

Sitefinity team has been very busy this month. Following the release of the new sitefinity.com web site, the successful Sitefinity and Beyond Conference in Boston last week, the major Sitefinity 5.2 release bringing the multi-site management and personalization features, we have another cool thing for you.

We are excited to present you yet another tool that will streamline your work with the CMS. This time, the tool is intended to be used by the CMS end users – all the authors, all the people that deal with content.

Sitefinity Lightning is a desktop application helping users to create and publish Sitefinity content straight from the desktop. With this first version - the Community Technology Preview, Sitefinity Lightning is able to publish news articles and blog posts. In the future versions, we are looking forward to support all types of content and dynamic types as well. We have big plans for the application, and the possibilities that connecting the desktop to the web can bring are endless. We are definitely looking forward to explore these possibilities and make them work for you. Therefore … we need your help :)

We have opened a forum in the Sitefinity forums, dedicated to the Lightning project. Feel free to share your stories and contact us over the channel which you prefer – forums, social networks or e-mail. As with anything else that we do, the development of this application will be driven by your requests. Just like with the Sitefinity Thunder, the infrastructure allows easy and automatic updates, so expect bi-weekly or even daily updates, if such are needed.

Now, I know that if you are here then you’d like to learn more about the technical side of the project. In short, Sitefinity Lightning consists of two parts – server side module and client WPF application. The server side module is just like any other Sitefinity module, and as us such, when installed, it can be seen in the Modules list. It allows you to turn it on or off. The module itself exposes a service to which the client connects to exchange data. Within the CTP days, we will be distributing the module as a zip file, and you will find the installation instructions inside the zip. With one of the next major releases, we’ll either make the server installation automatic by using Thunder (yeah… Lightning and Thunder are nice couple ;) ) or we’ll built it in the CMS itself.  As for the client – it’s built on WPF and uses .NET 4.5, so this is prerequisite.  It uses ClickOnce and some custom logic for automatic upgrades, and it supports rollback on all files in case of an upgrade gone wrong. Both the client and the server can be downloaded from the this page -http://www.sitefinity.com/resources/tools/lightning/

I guess that’s all for now. We’ll let you explore, play, create and publish. For more details on what’s supported, please visit this thread – http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/lightning-/changelog

p.s. I should be more active in our blogs :)

Georgi
@georgichokov