Dear Sitefinity CMS customers and partners, we are excited to announce the  Sitefinity CMS 11.1 release. 

This version contains: Distributed cache support, Dashboard system widget, Support for ReadOnly database, Workflow improvements, Content hits and attribution tracking, Out-of-the-box support for Azure AD and enablement for Azure AD B2C, Bootstrap 4 support, Security Improvements

• Enhanced review and approval workflow. You can define workflows up to 3 levels deep for any set of pages or content types, tied to a specific site or language. An editor can add a summary note when submitting for review. Notifications are improved across the board (submissions, approvals, and rejections). Reviewers with skip privileges can now reject content as well.  Learn more...
• RTL Languages support in the new content editor
  When working with multilingual content that requires alternative text alignment, such as Arabic cultures, the content editor automatically aligns your content to the right of the content editing area. In addition, content editors can mix RTL and LTR languages in the same phrase or paragraph via custom alignment. Learn more...
• Parallel editing of multilingual content
  Editor teams can modify and work on translations of the same content simultaneously since content items are locked individually for each language. In addition, language editors can modify any text fields, including related content items and related media, in the language they are working in. Learn more...
• Personalization by query string uses URL parameters of the request to effectively deliver specific content to visitors, based on sources of page visits and campaigns. Learn more...
• Analyze the impact of your website content by tracking content touchpoints in Sitefinity CMS. Understand which content items have the biggest impact on conversion rates so you can optimize your marketing efforts. Learn more...
• Content location search in the new content editing experience
  In case content is displayed in more than one page or linked to from other content items, content editors can easily identify and locate where else specific content item is used or referenced on the site. Learn more... 
• Support for Bootstrap 4. All the goodies in Bootstrap 4 are now available to Sitefinity frontend developers. In addition, Bootstrap 4 resource package includes accessibility improvements, such as better keyboard and screen readers support. Frontend assets build infrastructure uses npm scripts instead of Grunt. Image sprites are replaced with Font Awesome solid SVG icon sprites. Bootstrap 3 will still be supported. Learn more...
• Out-of-the-box generation of Accelerated Mobile Pages (Google AMP) per content type. The AMP pages are based on templates, located on the file system, that could be easily extended and deployed. Sitefinity CMS provides preview and validation of AMP pages to ensure the generated markup complies with the AMP requirements. Learn more...
• Improvements in the search indexes enable you to modify an existing search index by adding newly created content types. You do not need to recreate search indexes or re-index anymore. Learn more...
• Get more relevant search results by utilizing the improved Azure search. Now the search results are ordered based on @score parameter.  
• Control whether content age is considered when Lucene search @score is calculated. Learn more...
• Improvements in OpenGraph and SEO properties.
  Out-of-the-box custom field types for OpenGraph properties. OpenGraph support for pages. Learn more...
  Out-of-the-box custom field types for SEO properties. Learn more...
• Ability to enable and disable OpenGraph properties on widget level, enabling control over the order of loading OpenGraph properties. Learn more...
• Ability to enable and disable SEO meta title and meta description on widget level, thus enabling control over the order, in which SEO properties are loaded. Learn more...
• Provide out-of-the-box open redirects protection. Out-of-the-box mechanism for preventing non-validated redirects and forwards. You can now define a whitelist of trusted external locations that your Sitefinity CMS website is allowed to redirect to. Learn more... 
• Improved UI for managing security headers. Easily extend the list of trusted content sources (Content-Security-Policy). More user-friendly configuration for the referrer information (Referrer-Policy) and Strict-Transport-Security. Learn more... 
• Enhanced control of your website crawling process by search engines. Public user comments are now screened and a rel="nofollow"attribute is appended for specific outgoing links that are not part of the website domain. Learn more...
• Context specific new user help and tips for the new content editing experience.
  When working in the new content editing experience, users can now benefit from the onboarding and help tips, displayed in the context of the task they want to complete. Users are guided where and how to complete key activities, related to creating, editing, and managing content. Each user can dismiss onboarding tips or skip the onboarding sequences altogether. In addition, Help tips direct users to relevant and related content that can further advance them in their tasks in the specific context. Onboarding preferences are persisted per user. 
• Distributed Cache (using Redis, MemCached, SQL Server, AWS DynamoDB) significantly improves the performance of your Sitefinity CMS website in NLB configurations. Using distributed cache decreases startup time of any of the Sitefinity CMS servers. Thus, organizations can scale up faster with additional web servers decreasing the warm-up time. Learn more...
  All Sitefinity servers in Network load balancing (NLB) now share the same ETag. As a result, performance is optimized and content is served faster. Learn more...  
• The System status widget on Sitefinity dashboard displays critical system errors related to NLB setup and Site Sync, thus enabling IT Administrators (Admin roles) to quickly detect and troubleshoot issues. Learn more...
• The Open ID connect improvements enable IT Administrators to map external authentication provider claims such as email, first name, and last name to user profiles in Sitefinity. Learn more... 
  This enables support for Azure AD and Azure AD B2B, and in some scenarios - for Azure AD B2C. The email address can now be set as optional via the RequireEmailClaim property. The setting is applicable only for authentication with external providers, such as Facebook, Google, and Azure AD. Learn more...
• The geolocation database is updated to the latest version (GeoLite2 City). Developers can now leverage and customize the geolocation functionality. Learn more...

 

What's fixed and improved

SiteSync

• Unable to sync changes of existing dynamic module items from a monolingual site in a multisite project (FP)
• Scheduling an item for sync in only one culture syncs all of the cultures
• Unexpected behavior with overlapping scheduled syncs (FP)
• Sync of deleted Page template breaks the frontend (FP)
• Scheduled AB tests do not start on target server
• When a page template is set to "No template - start from scratch" the changes are not synced to the target (FP)
• Syncing a deletion of a page translation of a synced page deletes the entire page node (FP)
• Scheduled sync doesn`t run if the user who scheduled the sync is deleted (FP)

MVC framework

• MVC: ComponentsDependencyResolver.ExtractComponents parses Razor comments (FP)
• MVC Login widget: Login with external provider in NLB/SSL offloading leads to infinite redirect loop (FP)
• Multisite: MVC News widget returns news item from incorrect provider (FP)
• MVC Breadcrumb widget not rendering detail virtual nodes (FP)
• Incorrect MVC widget designer behavior after switching between sites in MSM, when the site is behind a CDN, which is configured to cache all .js files
• MVC document list widget does not trigger page cache invalidation (FP)
• Malfunctioning of redirect URL after logging in from front-end MVC login widget (FP)
• Video folder doesn't exist under Resource packages/Bootstrap/Mvc/Views (FP)
• MvcTemplateEditorRouteHandler Marked as Internal (FP)
• Mvc ajax.action link in a widget is not working (FP)
• The MVC Search Results widget does not always sort properly (FP)
• Theme tab should be hidden for MVC templates (FP)
• Cannot delete a custom MVC widget from the backend (FP)
• User with editor roles can't select users in Users list MVC widget (FP)
• The "Use limit" value in MVC dynamic module widget is reset to default value after upgrade to Sitefinity 10.1 (FP)
• Changes to CSS classes of nested MVC grid widgets are not persisted (FP)
• Custom MVC grid widget only renders in Design/Preview mode (FP)
• Feather Widgets: Several widgets are using hard-coded CDN's to load jQuery.Validate 
• Feather: Search Index with "Static HTML in pages" throws exception because Login status control is indexed (FP)
• Bootstrap dropdown does not work consistently in Feather designers (FP)
• Feather Navigation widget: Dropdown feature stops working after opening and saving the designer (FP)
• Add k-serialization option in Feather Content Block config
• Feather: RelativeRoute attribute does not work on home pages of non-default site (FP)
• Add loading icons to the feather image\doc selector designers (FP)
• Feather: Add a 'Based on' column in the page templates grid
• Failed to load/parse SourceMaps in Feather
• Unable to associate Feather comments widget to a content item(BlogPost) (FP)
• Improve Feather dynamic items selector (FP)
• Improve consistency in Feather designer field types (FP)
• Language Selector Widget Behavior (FP)

New content editing experience

• Right to left support for input fields
• Expose new config.json file to control the options for the KendoEditor.
• Item cannot be created when paste formatted text in Item's title (FP)
• Selecting "Show all taxonomy" in the new UI does not load all categories if they are more than 500 (FP)
• New Content section menu
• Negative Number with decimal places not validating correctly (FP)
• Backend views for Dynamic Modules have no error messages in the Admin App UI (FP)
• Child categories cannot be expanded after search
• Performance issue with content sections menu when compare translations sidebar is opened
• When last section is small previous section is marked as selected on click
• Show all categories link is shown only after there are more than 5 categories on root level
• Show all categories link is shown only after there are more than 5 categories on root level
• Performance issue with content sections menu when compare translations sidebar is opened
• When last section is small previous section is marked as selected on click
• Child categories can not be expanded after search
• Revision history: Mismatch (Sitefinity and New Content Editing Experience) in the text of the back link when revision history is opened from edit item
• Browsing breadcrumb in library tab in Image/Video selectors clears searched term but the search results remain
• Error is thrown in show all tags when searching for non-existing tags
• Set minimum display time for any loader in the New Content Editing Experience
• Search field in all selectors misses "X" to clear the searched text
• CTRL+K in Rich editor opens a broken modal for insert link
• Html field -> Monaco convert text to e special symbols
• Support for multilingual concurrent editing
• Cannot edit embeded tweet
• Don't hide the search filter from Insert link dialog when there are no items in a module
• FF: Rich text editor placeholder text doesn't disappear when table or hr is added
• Title edited on Upload document screen is not saved
• Preventing the images from being pasted in the editor
• Unify workflow icons in SF and new content editing
• Clearing search in folder in libraries hides all images
• Search in media selectors should show scoped results within folders
• Notification for bulk delete takes too long to hide
• Adding all existing tags to an item removes "Show all tags" link from the recent drop-down
• Clear filter is not displayed after search in the grid and bulk delete of items
• Missing validation message for required fields after the selector is opened and no item is selected
• AdminApp UI: MultipleChoice field does not work properly with more than 32 items (FP)
• AdminApp UI: Field length validation for built-in fields does not change along with the field (FP)
• AdminApp not working in single-site with non-default urls scenario (FP)
• Address field not showing State dropdown in AdminApp (FP)
• Hyperlink to pages in the site takes absolute url (FP)
• Authentication with SecurityManager not working with AdminApp (FP)

Multilingual

• Some arab cultures are not presented in RTL
• Inline editing is presented in RTL for RTL cultures
• RTL: Brackets not correct in Document list and Document link widgets
• Changes to the Title field reflects the changes to the English translation's URL field value (FP)
• Concurrent editing of multilingual versions of an item
• When translating a page template widgets are copied with incorrect culture (FP)

Search

• Search, Permissions: Media and dynamic items from non-default providers are not shown in the results after reindex
• Search index creation fails with error  Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed (FP)
• Search for single site finds results from other sites when shared providers are used

Pages

• Updating content locations service is getting failed when page data object is having invalid PageNode id (FP)
• Dropping new widget in Page results in exception when the Page is created in Monolingual and site is switched to Multilingual
• Multiple page URL lost Query string after redirecting to the default URL (FP)
• Child page URL cannot be resolved after changing the parent Group page URL (FP)
• "Query execution found more than one element" error for pages when there are multiple drafts

Page Templates

• The content placeholder of the default backend page template cannot be used with Light theme (FP)
• Exception is thrown in Page template when Detailed item is selected (FP)

Widgets

• Card widget does not resolve the links correctly in multisite with sites as subfolders (FP)
• Insert hyperlink in ContentBlock widget, does not resolve URL of page if domain is as subfolder (FP)

Custom Fields

• Long Text (Text Area) Custom field incorrectly trims special characters. (FP)
• Custom fields properties cannot be edited (FP)

Preview

• DynamicContent preview not working when the detail view is on a different page (FP)
• Preview of item fails when switching between translations (FP)

Approval Workflow

• Workflow notification emails incorrect user which sent an item for approval is added to the email (FP)
• A wrong dialog that the item is read only is shown in the New Content Editing Experience when an item in status awaiting approval and awaiting publishing is open by an user

A/B Tests

• Page variations of an A/B test cannot be edited when Personalization module is disabled (FP)
• Null reference exception while ending a test with 3+ variations (FP)
• ABTesting Date conversion issue (FP)

Media

• Custom size option in Image Selectors (Image widget, Gallery widget, Content block) should not be available for providers that do not support it (FP)
• Fix large image in grid
• Detail view for content items with image/video/embedded media is broken on hybrid pages
• MediaFileAdditionalUrls are not deleted when removed from media items (FP)
• Azure Storage provider regenerate thumbnails is case sensitive

Authentication

• "Authentication required" popup after failed authentication
• Updating configurations in Edge throws invalid secret resolver name.Parameter name: secretResolverName (FP)
• Frontend login widgets disrespect SSL Offloading for the RedirectUri (FP)
• Unauthorised users can access Documents which are larger than the Max size of the Output cache (FP)

Permissions

• Create library button is visible for users that don't have the required permissions
• URL of the related data is not populated in href if the page hosting the data is having restricted permissions (FP)
• Error when custom role is permitted to view select pages (FP)
• Permissions are not applied to redirect pages
• Incorrect label in Roles Permission view: Widget templates

Personalization

• Personalization doesn't work correctly for draft pages (FP)
• Personalization segment for Republic of Korea does not work (FP)

Amazon S3

• Media content items stored in Amazon S3 storage provider are requested under http when ssl offloading is enabled (FP)
• Media content items stored in Amazon S3 storage provider are requested under http when Sitefinity requires ssl (FP)
• Amazon S3 provider does not generate URLs properly if Cloudfront is used (FP)

Site Metadata

• Additional URLs don't work from a custom provider after a name change (FP)
• Additional urls with extensions for images and documents do not redirect to the default one (FP)
• MediaFileAdditionalUrls error is thrown when additional url is duplicated

Sitemap 

• Sitemap generation doesn't take in account Home page redirection in Advanced Settings->Pages (FP) 
• Sitemap.cs SubmitToBing is sending to Google and not Bing (FP)
• Not correctly generated sitemap after page has been unpublished (FP) and (FP)

Export/Import

• Export/import of images from Azure blob provider fails 
• Export/Import: Exporting pages in ZIP file does not work consistently in multisite with different languages

API

• OData service does not work in ML & MS where sites have different languages (FP)
• Order of Related Media items is not consistent with API Edit (FP)
• Performance issues with OData Dynamic Items and Audit Trail Module (FP)
• OData related dynamic content performance issue with multiple providers (FP)
• OData filter by custom field (FP)
• CompositeRoute breaks GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Services.GetApiExplorer().ApiDescriptions (FP)

Forms

• Audio does not work in Forms captcha
• Paragraph Textbox Form Field is not showing proper validation error message (FP)
• The apostrophe is encoded in form response (FP)
• Email notification "Submitted an updated form entry" sent when form created (FP)

Classifications

• Taxonomies: Clicking "Back to <your custom classifications>" does not navigate back to the list of your custom classification items (FP)
• Taxonomies: "Back to <your-custom-classifications>" Link text shows custom classification's URL name instead of Title
• Classification is not mapped to Users (FP)

Other

• Opening content item for edit invalidates output cache of the pages that display a list of that content items in sites
• Providing more information about "Unable to load config section '<config name>'"(FP)
• Undescriptive error shown when importing resources that have an empty field (FP)
• Unable to create RSS feed for the first time when there are multiple custom classifications in Sitefinity 11 (FP)
• Optimize Sitefinity startup time
• No validation for existing url when publishing news item
• Normalize jQuery references in the Bootstrap templates (FP)
• RelatedData and filterqueriesbyviewpermissions causes slow query execution 
• RadEditor: Right click on a link is showing ResourceNotFound#:RadEditor.Tools:OpenLink
• Choices config items multiply when trying to delete a Choices item - “When RenderChoiceAs is set to SingleCheckBox, there should be only one ChoiceItem in the collection” (FP) 
• Advanced configuration changes break insert and edit views of modules (FP)
• Notification service job is never executed
• Few pdf files do not open on IE 11 (FP)
• Links under the Learn more with video tutorials section in Backend UI do not work (FP)
• Scheduled Publish Blog Post gets Published|Scheduled UnPublish after Upgrade (FP)
• Scheduled blog post taking created date as publication date (FP)
• Error when switching different translations from Edit screen for Events and News items in AWS (FP)
• Grid widgets in Bootstrap should be flipped on a RTL page
• Performance: Slow media content upload(FP)
• On the Dashboard: Media content last modified property changes to the user who opens to view the content (FP)
• Security Improvements
• Unable to access all membership providers on Users administration page when there are more than 20 providers (FP)
• Make taxa filter AND\OR dynamic, not hardcoded (FP)
• styles.min.css is loaded twice in page edit, which leads to problems with the css
• Error is thrown when Sync with SharePoint (FP)
• Upgrade from 10.2 to 11.0 doesn't let the profile image to be clicked and hence, users can't logout from back-end on IE 11 (FP)
• "+" sign input changing the write direction in Short text field (FP)
• Preview of items not working with claims to roles mappings (FP)

Developer Tools updates

• Progress Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX 2018 R3 - v.2018.3.910
• Progress Telerik UI for WPF 2018 R3 - v.2018.3.911
• Progress Kendo UI 2018 R3 - v.2018.3.911
• Progress Data Access - v.2018.0.911.1
• Service Stack - v.5.1.0
• GeoLite - Sitefinity V11.1 uses “GeoLite2 City” due to discontinuing our GeoLite Legacy databases by MaxMind
• Roslyn compiler v.2.9.0
• Microsoft.AspNet.OData (Microsoft ASP.NET Web API 2.2 for OData v4.0) - v.6.1.0

API Changes 

Full list of API changes changes is available here: API Changes in Sitefinity CMS

Database Changes 

Full list of database changes is available here: Database Changes in Sitefinity CMS

Known issues

• WebForms widgets: Page Meta Description is not replaced by widget MetaDescription
  
• Recurrent search is not always called
• In libraries with more than 50 folders media items are hidden after the search is cleared
• Upload library selector shows a maximum of 100 subfolders

Discontinued and deprecated

• Social media widgets