October 26, 2022
Dear Sitefinity customers and partners! We are excited to announce the release of Sitefinity 14.3. Below, you can find details about what is included in this release.
The new Content recommender uses Sitefinity Insight’s AI algorithms to analyze the behavior patterns of your converting visitors and produce the next best step (a recommendation) for the current visitor’s journey to optimize the conversion rate.
We also included a new recommendation widget that you can configure to optimize a specific conversion and place on selected pages or templates of your Sitefinity sites to display the recommendations to your visitors at the critical junctions of their anticipated journeys. Custom recommendation widgets are also supported.
Section presets is a new concept that will make the life of Sitefinity page editors easier. Presets are small page chunks, based on a Section widget, that can be reused across multiple .NET Core pages.
Section presets will come in handy in the case when several pages are designed to contain the same group of widgets. Now it is not necessary to recreate the widgets on every single page.
Once the preset is applied to the page it will be rendered as a section widget containing the group of the underlying child widgets. All widget settings are preserved.
Introducing a single built-in widget for displaying flat and hierarchical taxonomies in Sitefinity .NET Core page builder.
You have the ability to filter Content list widget's items on the frontend. It can be customized to filter the taxa by selected items, selected parent taxon, or by content type. You can sort items by custom sort expression.
The breadcrumb widget enables you to specify a breadcrumb-style navigation based on configurable options for generating the links in the breadcrumb itself.
This widget is analogous to the existing MVC breadcrumb widget and has feature parity with it.
You can now configure custom error pages for .NET Core Renderer.
Facets enable easier navigation and drill down of search results. Visitors can use faceted navigation to filter the search results in Sitefinity CMS by properties such as categories, brands, authors, etc.
Facets can be configured for Azure Cognitive Search and Elastic search. Administrators can select which fields are facetable and how facets are ordered.
Some search services charge by the number of search indexes. Previously, if you wanted to create a search index for a specific content type (e.g. News) or a set of content types that only showed the content of the current site, you needed to create a separate search index for each site. So if you wanted site-specific news items search index, you needed to create an index per site. This may have resulted in higher costs.
Now, if you have multiple sites in an index, you can configure the index in advanced settings to show results from the currently used site only or all sites in the index. In this way, you can create an index to store data from multiple sites, but only show results from the current site.
The advanced settings configuration affects the whole project, but you can override this configuration via the search box widget, which allows you the flexibility to control the search results per project or per site.
NOTE: After upgrading, all indexes that existed in previous versions of Sitefinity must be deleted and recreated, not just reindexed, to have this feature available and working.
Certain content types can have a life span after which they become outdated (expired), and need to be revised. Content editors can now quickly locate and act on outdated content items through the new filtering options on Content types. The functionality is available for pages as of Sitefinity CMS 14.2 and now added for the following content types: News, Events, Blog posts, List items, Content blocks, and all dynamic content types.
Some of the new capabilities, on top of the already existing
Outdated pages filter and notifications, are:
The feature is OFF by default. Therefore, the
Outdated
filter and respective notification preferences are NOT available on the user interface unless the feature is enabled.
Learn more...
When building complex websites, you often need to use third-party JavaScript code to integrate services such as Google Tag Manager (GTM).
A new basic settings configuration called "Script manager" has been added, which enables you to effortlessly configure how such scripts are automatically inserted on pages. The scripts can be inserted in all sites or in a selection of sites. They are loaded on MVC and .NET Core pages.
The script manager can be used to insert the Google Analytics tracking codes via Google Tag Manager.
GraphQL is a high-performance query language for working with RESTful API services. The GraphQL protocol is integrated out of the box with the existing user interface for managing RESTful API services in Sitefinity CMS backend. When creating a GraphQL web service, you have to specify the respective protocol option. GraphQL integration is distributed via a NuGet package. It is automatically available if you use
Progress.Sitefinity.All
NuGet package
that installs Sitefinity CMS.
Introduced the ability to create A/B tests to target specific audience segments, using Sitefinity segments with criteria such as geographic location, visit duration, demographic and other parameters, Insight persona and lead scoring models, and others.
When you have configured and enabled a DAM provider, you can now use your media content directly in built-in MVC content widgets and in custom MVC widgets, which utilize
image field / media field
directives.
The following MVC content widgets support out-of-the-box integration with a DAM provider: Image widget, Video widget, Document link widget, and Card widget.
The newly introduced Backend interface settings page allows administrators to determine how the backend interface looks and what options it offers to users from the backend UI. The screen can be opened by navigating to Administration » Basic Settings » Backend interface.
The configurations available in the settings can be applied to all sites or to selected sites only.
Important: Previously, users were able to create a config.json
file in the AdminApp folder in SitefinityWebApp. There they could specify these exact same settings in a JSON format. Now, this file is entirely deprecated and is not taken into account (all previously set settings in config
are migrated automatically). All supported settings are available in the Backend interface settings screen.
The overall Site shield experience has been improved by introducing the following configurations:
New HTTP security headers
You can make your Sitefinity website cross-origin isolated with the added support of the Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy, Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy, Cross-Opener-Resource-Policy and Permissions-Policy headers. These headers aim to give you control over where resources can be loaded from in the browser.
Web Security Module public API for response headers white list
You can programmatically add domains to the Content-Security-Policy and Permissions-Policy and alter the value of the Cross-Origin headers while developing modules. This API works with any Sitefinity custom modules and static blob storage providers.
The redesigned backend menu ensures faster navigation between backend pages and better utilization of the available screen space. When the items of a submenu exceed the height of the screen, they will be distributed in another column next to the previous one so no-scrolling will be needed to locate a submenu link.
Note: If you have customized the backend menu, you might need to remove or adjust your customizations as they might not be fully compatible with the new backend menu behavior.
An easy way to apply style to links without HTML knowledge has been introduced, so that you can make them look like CTAs and make them consistent throughout the website. You can do this with a single configuration Link styles via the Backend interface settings.
This feature is turned off by default. To enable it, navigate to Sitefinity CMS backend » Administration » Settings » Advanced » Libraries » ChunkedUpload and enable " EnableChunkedUploads" setting (does not require restart). Note that currently chunked uploads can only be used for libraries which blob storage provider is the database. To avoid slow uploads or making a lot of requests to the server, we recommend that "The size of a chunk in bytes when upload media data" setting (accessible via Sitefinity CMS backend » Administration » Settings » Advanced » Libraries) is increased from the default 81920 bytes to a value of at least 5000000 (~5MB). Note: This value may not be supported by MySQL database.
Аnother test framework for integration testing is now available - MSTest V2, which is the open source and cross-platform evolution of MSTest framework.
Note: Going forward, we recommend using MSTest V2 framework as best practice for testing, although Sitefinity CMS web test runner tool will continue to work.
Learn more...
Special thanks to:
for identifying and disclosing the "Deserialization of Unvalidated Data by JavaScriptSerializer entered in the administrative part of the site."
With this release you have ability to configure Sitefinity connectors such as SalesForce or Marketo directly on production (live) when read-only mode is enabled without redeploying configurations from staging or development environment.
Pages:
Content:
Forms:
Sitemap:
SiteSync:
Search:
Connectors:
Configurations:
WebServices:
Translations:
New content editing experience:
.NET Core frontend:
Other:
Develop on your preferred frontend technology. Now you can develop with an alternative framework and utilize the WYSIWYG page editor. There are 2 samples available for alternative frontend Renderers using JavaScript frameworks:
API Changes
Database Changes
Sunsetting of Universal Analytics and migration to Google Analytics v4
Google is sunsetting its current Analytics solution – Universal Analytics (UA) on July 1, 2023. They offer a replacement solution - Google Analytics 4. Sitefinity CMS Analytics dashboard relies on UA and therefore, it will stop working when UA stops working. To make sure that you continue using uninterrupted analytics for your sites, we have prepared recommendations how to migrate to Google Analytics 4 in Sitefinity CMS. Learn more in this blog post.
Refer to Deprecated capabilities in Sitefinity CMS for a complete list of discontinued capabilities per product version.
backColor
tool is configured in your Rich text editor configuration and you try to apply background color to a rich-text field in your content item, the change is not persisted in the database. serialization.semantic
Toolset option to true
.
Regards,
Progress Sitefinity Team