Sitefinity for the Great CMS Challenge

Are you a Sitefinity expert looking for a fun project? Are you new to Sitefinity looking for a learning experience before embarking on a large solution? Perhaps you simply like a coding challenge.

Metric Marketing wants to determine the best CMS, and they’re doing it with The Great CMS Challenge of 2013. Of course, if you look over the rules, you’ll find that the contest is really about creating a compelling solution rather than the platform support behind it.

If this sounds interesting, you’re going to build an image gallery “module/system/plugin/component/thingy.”

Jonathan Dart, the judge for this challenge, leaves the backend details to you, but your solution must meet certain requirements:

• Galleries can belong to many categories
• Categories can be arranged in a tree structure or nested set
• Galleries can have many images
• Galleries can have a description (html/wysiwyg)
• Images can be sorted within their respective gallery
• Images can have a caption
• An index page to show all categories
• A category page that shows all its galleries
• A gallery page to show its images

Benefits of Using Sitefinity

Sitefinity includes everything you need to meet this challenge. In fact, Sitefinity has image galleries, the requisite fields, and categories built in.

I don’t want to impede your creativity by providing a solution before the end of the challenge. That would take the fun out of it, and I’m interested in what you create. The obvious path may not lead to the most elegant solution. You have RESTful web services, a fluent API, and many other extensibility options at your fingertips. You also have beautiful controls with Kendo UI and RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX to help you create powerful, interactive galleries.

Get Started

You’re still reading this instead of coding. Okay. I won’t create your entry, but I will give you a few resources to get started.

If you’re brand new, visit the documentation for a series of videos and articles that provides foundational knowledge.

Read up on the image gallery widget.

Learn how to use Module Builder and jQuery with images to create a dynamic experience.

Jonathan mentions you can use modified solutions, but it won’t impress him. That doesn’t mean you can’t be inspired. Personally, I want to make my solution as awesome as the Nivo Slider for Sitefinity.