Sitefinity Administration

Online Administration

The CMS can be completely managed through a web browser - end-users can upload files as well as manage page content and organization online.

User Friendly Interface

Sitefinity provides an intuitive role-based user interface that offers quick access to all functions of the CMS and is easy to navigate. A context-help system has been integrated into the UI, so that users can quickly reference help topics, depending on the page they are currently viewing.

Workflow Engine

In Sitefinity you can define the workflow process and ensure that new or modified content passes through a process of approval before going live. It can be easily enabled or disabled and can be applied on a content and page level.

Versioning

Sitefinity supports different versions of the same content and allows for rollback and comparison to previous versions. Every time a user modifies content, a copy is created in the Database – the old version is not deleted, but stored together with the newer versions. Versioning provides a more powerful alternative to keeping backup files. It can be applied to pages, page templates and any content.

Content Sharing and Branching

Sitefinity facilitates native content reuse model to distribute your writing items across multiple web pages within projects, as well as among multiple projects. Whenever one instance of shared content is updated, all pages where the same item appears are updated simultaneously. This feature is especially convenient when there are users responsible for content editing only and others responsible for adding the content to the Web pages.

Drag-N-Drop Content Editing

Sitefinity provides an extremely convenient drag and drop interface for visual construction of web pages. Business users can move different page elements and quickly organize the page structure – drag an element from the control toolbar, replace or move it around and easily fill the page cells with content.

For example, they can create a textbox area, add a picture or even implement a forum or news module. Additionally the “editing” interface is almost identical to the live page allowing content managers to see how the page will look when published.

Website Templates

Sitefinity offers the following templates:

• Website templates – they allow predefinition of the whole website
• Page templates – they allow predefinition of a page
• Control templates – they allow predefinition of a control
• Designer templates – they allow predefinition of control templates settings

WYSIWYG Editor with Spellchecker

Sitefinity ships with the Telerik RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX, the leading WYSIWYG rich-text editor, winner of a number of prestigious industry awards. RadEditor is equipped with a powerful toolbar that could be fully customized, out-of-the-box XHTML output, full keyboard accessibility, integrated inline spellchecker and industry-best cross-browser support. To explore the Telerik RadEditor features, please review the following page.

Control Designers

Sitefinity offers a number of Custom Control Designers that empower CMS users to easily configure News, Lists and Blogs controls. Control properties are separated in two sections, ‘Basic’ and ‘Advanced’. Business users can configure the ‘Basic’ section of the designer and implement the control without seeking help from developers.

Control Templates

Control templates are a great aid in managing 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.

Themes / Skins

Sitefinity is shipped with a collection of themes and skins samples that can be reused in different projects. Users can also create their own custom themes and skins.

Content Tagging

Sitefinity allows CMS users to tag the content they create in Blogs and News, and Generic content based modules. You can use tags to categorize texts, pictures, videos, and articles. The tags will then allow both content authors and website visitors to easily navigate to the information they are looking for and instantly access content items tagged with the same keyword. Additionally, users can choose whether to display tags as simple lists or ‘Tag Clouds’ in which the most frequently used ones are rendered in a larger size.

File Manager

Sitefinity incorporates its own manager to streamline an easy and effective file upload. It displays a hierarchical structure of folders and files in a project. Users can delete, copy, move any kind of files necessary for website construction and organize them into folders. The File Manager helps users manage sites easily through Sitefinity’s interface.

Upload of Multiple Items and Zip Archives

The Sitefinity Document and Images module allows users to make batch uploads and upload many images and files at once to save time. In addition to this, Images & Documents module support upload of zip files which can contain hundreds of images and will be unzipped automatically by Sitefinity, once uploaded.

Image Resizing

Using the powerful WYSIWYG editor inbuilt in Sitefinity business users can resize images quickly and easily.

Geo Mapping

Sitefinity’s Events module provides a geo-mapping feature for the location of events. The module provides the ability to display maps of an event's location from three leading map services:

• Google Maps
• Yahoo! Maps
• Live Maps

The geo-mapping feature provides in-built functionality for location geo-coding (retrieving geo-latitude and geo-longitude values) based on the street, city, country and state (only for the United States of America).

Microsoft Visual Studio Support

Sitefinity offers deep integration with Visual Studio .NET. Side-by-side development and result testing in the working project has never been easier. In VS users can write new user controls for Sitefinity, modify the functionality of existing ones, or reuse readily-available code. At the end, all users need to do is build the project and refresh the browser window.

Export Site as Template

The Sitefinity Export Tool allows users to export an existing site as a template which can be reused for a new project. All data and files will be transferred to the new project that adopts the exported template.