August 1, 2019
Dear Sitefinity CMS customers and partners! We are excited to announce the release of Sitefinity CMS 12.1. This version contains the following updates, enhancements and fixes:
Sitefinity CMS adds a visual email template editor that you can use to customize any email that Sitefinity CMS
sends. That includes form completion notifications and internal notifications.
The template editor provides options to edit email subject and body, as well as to define sender
name and sender email. You can compose templates with rich text with the familiar Sitefinity CMS WYSIWYG editor
and insert dynamic data in the email's subject and body.
The system email templates can be configures for all sites or for selected site only. Learn
more...
Email widget
With the new Email widget, it is now easier to design forms with email fields. You do not have to make additional configurations to the Textbox widget to get a respondent's email - you simply drag and drop the Email widget.
Confirmation emails
In addition to sending email notifications to a list of subscribers when someone submits a form response, you can now also send confirmation emails to the respondents upon successful form submission. You can also customize the content of the email messages sent to subscribers and respondents. You can insert all form fields as dynamic data in the email subject or body. Learn more...
Sitefinity CMS Web Security module enables IT Administrators to configure a centralized mechanism that helps secure the website cookies, thus preventing CSRF vulnerability. Website administrators can set a minimum security policy for all website cookies by configuring the SameSite, HttpOnly, and Secure attributes. Learn more…
Search for users and roles:
Search in Advanced settings:
Search in advanced settings by title, key, and description. That will make you more efficient when you are dealing with Sitefinity CMS settings. To leverage this search capability, you need to maintain a newly introduce search index. Learn more…
Improved logging provides more details regarding specific actions performed during library storage relocation. The process has been made more tolerant to failure, so when relocation of a media item fails, the process will continue. A listing of failed relocation steps is provided at the completion. Learn more…
As of this release, content editors, working with the new content editing experience, can create related media or related data items on the go from the related data selector. When adding related content, they can either select an item from a list with existing content or create a new item of the same type. By default, the new item is stored in the Default source for this site. Learn more…
Once you relate content via Related data and Related media fields, you can configure each field to work with different shared content provider. You can change the provider at any time. You can, for example, decide that you want to provide content editors with the flexibility to use related images from the content sources of all sites, not just one. This way, they can choose from which source to select related data or media. Learn more…
Set predefined values to widget properties
You can now configure how a specific widget behaves and looks and what content it displays by pre-filling the values for a wide range of widget properties. Such properties range from simple ones, such as configuring which news items to display, to more complex, such as a CSS class and canonical URL tags. Properties can also be defined on different levels of the widget properties hierarchy. You can set default values for properties of all Sitefinity CMS widgets, as well as of dynamic content widgets and custom widgets.
This way, you provide consistency in behavior and appearance of a specific widget and make it easier
for users to work with widgets by avoiding the need to look for specific properties throughout the widget
designer or having to know their exact property values.
Once the property values are set, they are not read-only and can be edited at any time. That is, you can still
edit and override any of these predefined properties per widget in the widget designer. Learn
more…
User-friendly routing
The out-of-the-box Sitefinity CMS MVC widgets enable you filter the displayed content or change the paging via user-friendly routing options. For example, if you have a news widget on your page, you can directly type a category name, appending it to the page URL in the browser. Sitefinity CMS filters the list of news and display only the ones marked with the specified taxonomy. Learn more...
Optimize the size of loaded client-side scripts
As of this version, by default, Sitefinity CMS serves a minified version of all built-in scripts that are referenced in the out-of-the-box widgets. To make debugging easier, a source map is included alongside each minified script. Developers can provide a minified version of the script files, referenced in their custom widgets, and Sitefinity CMS will load it automatically. Learn more...
To assist in situations where distributed output cache must be invalidated on-demand, Sitefinity CMS now exposes
a suitable web service. By calling the /restapi/cache/clear
endpoint, website
administrators or authorized users can effectively purge the distributed output cache. Learn more...
Enables website administrators to add an automated check whether the the website search service is operational. The check covers external search services and can proactively identify connectivity problems. Learn more...
Now you can automatically configure a connector to a translation service using an assembly attribute. When the website initializes, Sitefinity CMS looks in the /bin folder for assemblies that contain connector implementations and are marked with this attribute. In case it finds such assemblies, Sitefinity CMS automatically adds the translation connector’s configurations that are specified in the assembly attribute. Learn more...
Connector access keys
Digital Experience Cloud changed the way you connect your sites with DEC. To secure the connection between Sitefinity CMS and data centers, DEC now uses access keys as the authentication mechanism. Each access key is a JSON Web token which uniquely identifies each connection to Sitefinity CMS, or any specific site or instance. An access key is perpetually valid, however, an admin can deactivate it manually. Thus, you no longer need to enter user credentials when configuring the DEC connector settings. Learn more...
Read only DEC configuration to discard site traffic
With the new read-only DEC connector configuration setting, you can stop all server-side and client-side tracking and data collection for all sites on a particular Sitefinity CMS instance, while still using DEC data to customize content. This option is particularly useful in scenarios with multiple instances serving different purposes, such as content staging and production. In this scenario, a DEC read-only configuration should be set on the staging instance to avoid recording all test traffic on staging sites, and a full read-write configuration on the production instance (default).
Personas: Enhancements in persona scoring rules
To make audience segmentation more multi-dimensional, in addition to persona scoring rules based on visitor behavior, you can now define rules based on any defined or automatically detected contact profile property and its string value. To define personalization segments with greater accuracy, you can also create rules with a combination of contact properties. Personalizing your visitors’ experiences based on such criteria helps you account for personal characteristics, demographics, or even specific marketing campaigns. Learn more...
Support for longer conversion windows
When defining or editing conversions, you can now specify conversion windows up to 18 months, so that longer transactions are properly captured. To do this, you use the two extra options for 12 and 18 months, added to the Conversion window section. Learn more…
Contacts: Enhancements in searching, filtering, and exporting contacts
You can now search, filter, and export contacts based on the date, on which their last interaction with
your website was reported to DEC. This may include visitors' web journey interactions or
interactions, imported from other systems.
To filter contacts based on the last interaction date, you use the Last Visit On criterion and
filter further via the predefined time periods or custom ones you define. You can combine filtering criteria for
a more through search in the contacts' list and more focused result. Learn
more…
Machine translation connector for Microsoft Translator
When working with the Sitefinity CMS Translations module, you can benefit from a number of translation connectors that you use out-of-the-box with minimum setup. This repo contains a translation connector to work with the Microsoft Translator Text V3 API service. Learn more...
DB diagnostics module
API Changes
Database Changes
Regards,
Progress Sitefinity Team