March 14, 2022
Dear Sitefinity CMS customers and partners! We are excited to announce the release of Sitefinity CMS 14.1. Below, you can find details about what is included in this release.
.NET Core is officially supported and ready for production use
Next Generation Cross-Platform Development overdelivers in terms of development speed, performance, ease of upgrades, and frontend scalability. Plus, it plays along with your IDE of choice.
The new integrations now available in Sitefinity DX enable seamless connection to Cloudinary and Frontify DAM systems. They allow you to select media items (images, documents, videos) using an integrated media picker from a DAM provider and incorporate them in Sitefinity content via the rich text editor (MVC content block, .NET Core content block, long text fields), related media fields, and .NET Core Image widget. You can connect to Cloudinary or Frontify by simply configuring one of them as a storage provider in Sitefinity. The media items are served directly from the DAM, with their metadata stored in Sitefinity. The images selected from the DAM work with the thumbnail profiles available in Sitefinity and support contextual properties such as alt text and margins.
Custom integrations with other DAM providers can be simplified by leveraging the newly added extension points.
Scoring profiles for Azure Search Service
Boost search results by leveraging the Azure search scoring profiles. Use the Azure Portal to create and manage scoring profiles for your search indexes and then select the desired profile from the Search Box widget. Adding profiles allows you to deliver prioritized search results set for each profile. For instance, you can configure the search results with profiles to show newer or tagged content first.
Personalization for the Search widget
Set different properties to the search widget (scoring profile, scoring parameters, search index) for different user segments. Use personalization to reorder the search results for different segments of your audience.
Redesigned UI for creating search indexes
The user experience for creating search indexes has been significantly improved. Several new options are now available:
Exclude libraries from search indexing results
You can exclude top-level libraries from being indexed and their content from being shown in search results.
Enables in-app user notifications. Notifications included out-of-the-box:
The system notifications are on by default but can be turned on or off by Sitefinity users.
Notifications are managed/deleted by a scheduled task that can be configured by Sitefinity administrators.
Site Sync can now be configured for concurrent execution in addition to the already existing queue based approach. This option can be activated through SiteSync advanced settings.
All the goodies in Bootstrap 5 are now available to Sitefinity frontend developers. In addition, Bootstrap 5 resource package provides optimized RTL support and custom Sitefinity CSS. Bootstrap 4 will still be available in GitHub for download.
Additional robust Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF) protection for login forms and Sitefinity forms
Progress.Sitefinity.MOVEit is an optional package that implements ready integration with MOVEit, the Managed File Transfer solution by Progress. This integration enables you to securely upload and store documents with sensitive information in MOVEit, making sure your organization is compliant with GDPR and PCI regulations. You can easily configure Sitefinity CMS so whenever users upload documents that contain sensitive data in Forms, the files are automatically transferred and stored in the MOVEit storage provider.
NativeChat FAQ chatbots
You can now send your FAQs created in Sitefinity, directly to NativeChat and train your bots, without the need to manually recreate and manage FAQs in both places. You can then add variations of your questions and answers in the NativeChat portal to improve the bot's conversational responses. This integration is implemented using Sitefinity service hooks that allow automatic refresh of the bot FAQ content when it is published, unpublished, or deleted in Sitefinity.
Learn more...
NativeChat widget personalization
The NativeChat widget is now personalizable. This allows you to select a bot or different start of the conversation depending on the segment that the visitor belongs to.
Integration with Sitefinity Insight
Sitefinity reports the Sitefinity Insight context to NativeChat, which is later used to report user interactions with the bot (like starting a conversation, asking an FAQ, or a custom event) to Insight. You can also use information from Insight or other systems in NativeChat to personalize the conversation flow.
Progress Corticon Business Rules Management Engine Connector for Sitefinity CMS is a project in GitHub that showcases how forms enable users to connect their Sitefinity forms with a hosted Corticon decision service and leverage the powerful decision making capabilities of Corticon rules engine to build more interactive forms and get a quote based on form submission by their customers.
The website is targeted at Sitefinity clients , partners, and development agencies who want to know more about and understand the design and user experience concepts of Sitefinity Reinvented UI. Following the recommendations of the Design section of the website, it is easy to extend Sitefinity Reinvented UI and keep the same user experience. In the Components section, there is information about each visual component of Sitefinity Reinvented UI, its variations, and how it is combined with other components. Also, for each component variation, there is an example of how to use it via code - for example, from Sitefinity Component Framework or native HTML5. In the Utilities section, all utility CSS classes of Sitefinity Reinvented UI are listed, documented, and ready to use.
Two new segmentation criteria are available now in the Sitefinity Insight group - Conversion and Touchpoint. You can use any conversion or touchpoint from Sitefinity Insight, with additional conditions of the time frame in which the event occurred, as well as apply negative operation.
The user experience for selecting stages when adding a lead scoring characteristic to a personalization segment has been improved. Now you can choose a specific stage or a set of stages up to the end of the customer journey.
File downloads are now tracked client-side, enabling Sitefinity CMS to support library storage providers different than the built-in database and file system.
Now, you can track interactions when a file is downloaded from cloud BLOB storage providers, such as Azure, Amazon (with or without CDN configured), or DAM-based providers like Cloudinary and Frontify.
To enhance the user experience when the User Groups feature is enabled, when the user is assigned to more than one user group, the user group is automatically detected on the login page based on the provided credentials. No drop-down for selection of User Group is presented on the login screen anymore in such a scenario.
Farewell to the old UI. The New UI is now the only interface available for all Sitefinity CMS users ("the content management UI"). It is no longer possible to switch between the New and the Classic interface.
The following feature set has been discontinued:
Web Forms widgets for front-end development;
Web Forms widget templates;
Hybrid page templates;
Responsive
&
Mobile
design
module (only used in relation to Web Forms).
For
new
projects on version 14.1, the listed features are not available.
For projects
upgraded to
version 14.1,
the features will be available so that the projects are not broken upon upgrade, and you have more time to plan and execute a migration.
However, w
e are sunsetting these capabilities, and therefore we
no longer
invest in
feature development or bug fixes.
Alternative options:
.NET Core widgets, pages, and templates; MVC widgets, pages, and templates.
Refer to Deprecated capabilities in Sitefinity CMS for a complete list of discontinued capabilities per product version.
New content editing experience
Authentication changes
The Default authentication protocol (introduced in Sitefinity 14.0) is now enabled by default for upgraded and new projects. The Default authentication protocol uses the same secure foundation as OpenID but does not offer internal identity provider application, IdentityServer3, which makes it more lightweight, simpler to configure and mange, and more extensible. The Default authentication mechanism improves the performance and maintainability, and speeds up login time. It is intended to obsolete SimpleWebToken (SWT) and OpenID, which rely on an internal identity provider shipped with Sitefinity.
Changed Telerik.Sitefinity.Modules.Pages.ServiceHooks. PagesServiceHookTriggerSettings - changes in PagesServiceHookTriggerSettings constructor, removed Type parameter. If you have used this method in your custom code, please rebuild the solution following the new signature public PagesServiceHookTriggerSettings(string key, string triggerTitle) : base(key, triggerTitle, typeof(PageEvent), PageManager.MODULE_NAME)
API Changes
Database Changes
Regards,
Progress Sitefinity Team