May 14, 2020
Dear Sitefinity CMS customers and partners! We are excited to announce the release of Sitefinity CMS 13.0. Below you will find the details about what is included in this release.
We also want to note that Sitefinity DEC has been rebranded to Sitefinity Insight. To learn more, please visit the Sitefinity Insight main page. The release notes for Sitefinity Insight are published separately.
We redesigned the Images module, and it now uses the new interface. The Images module retains most of its previous functionality and also includes a number of new features and improvements such as:
We redesigned the Classification module, and it now uses the new interface. The redesigned module retains all existing capabilities that you are already familiar with, and adds a variety of new options. With the new interface, you will benefit from a simplified UI for managing a large number of tagged items, and the new merge and move capabilities. Working with a large number of taxonomies is much easier now with the ability to sort by most or least used, as well as by filtering tags by letters.
Personalization in Sitefinity allows you to segment your audience and deliver personalized content or experience to each user depending on their matching segment.
In this version, we improved and streamlined the dialogs to create user segments. All characteristics (criteria) are now grouped in categories in a single drop down. A mapping of a criterion to a category is defined in the Advanced settings, Administration > Settings > Advanced > Personalization section and can be customized there. If you have custom personalization criteria, they will be displayed in category Other by default, and then you can specify a desired category name for them using Advanced Settings.
Session based personalization logic based on Visited pages, Landing URL, and Visit duration has been reimplemented for better accuracy and performance.
The Search characteristic is now deprecated as we can no longer get the necessary data from the public search engines.
You can now create user segments in Sitefinity CMS that are based on contact properties stored in Sitefinity Insight. These may include demographic data (e.g. data provided by contacts via forms) as well as added properties, such as campaign labels and other contact data imported into Sitefinity Insight.
We have been putting effort to extend and enhance SiteSync to enable more flexible use by content editors. In previous releases, we introduced a new capability for content editors to sync content directly from the page/content edit screen. A missing piece that has been requested by our customers is the "evidence" ! How to make sure that the content has been promoted?
With this release, we are introducing an additional column for revision histories of pages and content items that shows whether a particular page or content has been promoted, when, and to what sites.
We simplified the setup to connect a Sitefinity CMS site to Sitefinity Insight for tracking. The specifics of the connection are now baked into the Sitefinity Insight Access key generated from your Sitefinity Insight account, and Sitefinity CMS automatically selects the correct hosting location of Sitefinity Insight. This will prevent possible errors connecting to the wrong hosting location.
We simplified the way you authorize your custom code to use Sitefinity Insight API. We simplified the API, and the Sitefinity Insight connector now automatically takes care of token expiration, renewal, and caching.
You can now create connections and configure synchronization between Sitefinity CMS and SharePoint sites on SharePoint 2019 Server.
Previously, goals for your AB tests could only be defined as conversions with single conversion events, i.e. [visit /purchase] or [download trial /aspnet-ajax]. After recent enhancements in Sitefinity Insight, you can use conversions with complex events, such as [visit /purchase AND visit /thank-you], in your A/B tests.
This enhancement is available for all Sitefinity Editions and versions that support the A/B test functionality.
Note: Conversions with client/segment filters are not supported for A/B tests.
We enhanced the UX for Duplicate Site and Search re-index. These long running operations previously executed in a single request are now performed as scheduled tasks and have notifications showing when the operation is in progress, completes, or fails.
To help you prevent unintended changes on a Sitefinity CMS production environment, we changed the UX in the following scenarios:
In keeping with our long term plans to rely on e-commerce partners for implementations, the Sitefinity CMS native Ecommerce module is now deactivated by default for new projects.
With the help of the CLI developers will rely on a stable upgrade process which will help them to automatically solve underlying issues. No matter whether your project is using the Project Manager or NuGets, the best practices will be applied and possible technical problems like .NET version, reference and breaking changes (through building errors) will be taken into consideration. Projects using the ProjectManager will be automatically migrated to use NuGets. Developers will be able to choose which version to upgrade the solution to. A trace log will be kept with a summary of all executed actions and steps.
Sitefinity ASP.NET Core Renderer is a standalone application that is deployed separately from Sitefinity CMS to offload the task of rendering pages as HTML for improved scalability and performance, and reduce the CPU load for the main CMS node. This new decoupled architecture is quick to setup and deploy.
The Renderer has a New page editor that, among many benefits, provides an enhanced WYSIWYG experience and new styling functionality.
New content editing experience
Cache
Sitefinity Ecommerce
Forms
Multilingual
MVC/Feather
Page management
Performance
Personalization
Sitemap
SiteSync
Other
API Changes
Database Changes
Regards,
Progress Sitefinity Team