Release History

What’s New

Persona Profiling

Allows marketeers to predefine personas, score contacts toward predefined profiles, and personalize content accordingly. Includes:

• Persona Profiling in Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud:  A complete tool-set for managing target personas, and persona scoring. It allows you to target key visitor types through personalization in Sitefinity and get reports on how different audiences interact with your website.
• Personalization by Persona in Sitefinity: Option to guide the customer journey and provide  personalized experience to key target segments and personas on a Sitefinity site

*Available in Online Marketing and Enterprise Editions. Activated per request.

Mobile-First Frontend Framework
Project Feather

(documentation)

Allows developers to build mobile-ready sites using their favorite frameworks and includes MVC stock widgets, an AngularJS widget designer framework, Boostrap and Gumby support, and more.

*Note that Feather is not shipped with Sitefinity and can be installed via the official Sitefinity Nuget Repository.

MVC Support

• Ability to place custom MVC widgets in external assemblies (link)
• Ability to group resources like layout files, CSS and JavaScript files in frontend packages. (link)
• Ability to base page templates on a layout files (supported only for templates in “Pure MVC” mode). (link)
• Ability to add custom commands for editing a MVC widget. (link)
• Built-in support of Master/Detail functionality for MVC widgets. (link)
• Built-in support of filtering by taxonomies for MVC widgets. (link)
• Helper methods for registering scripts inside a MVC View. (link)
• Helper methods for enabling the Inline Editing feature. (link)
• Helper methods for getting localized data. (link)      
• A new set of customizable grid controls based on simple HTML and Bootstrap. (link)
• Built-in integration with Ninject that makes resolving the model dependencies in a MVC Controller easy.

Packages

You can package your CSS, images, widget templates, layout templates and a master template, all in one package. The great benefit of using frontend packages is the ability to reuse the packages across different Sitefinity projects which results in a faster frontend development.

• Bootstrap package based on the Bootstrap framework. (link)
• Foundation package based on the Foundation framework. (link)
• SemanticUI package based on the Semantic UI framework. (link)

Widgets

• MVC Content Block widget that has custom designer, supports Inline editing and is highly customizable. (link)
• MVC Navigation widget that supports responsive transformations, has custom designer and is highly customizable. (link)
• MVC News widget that is integrated with the ContentLocationService to enable searching, supports the Inline editing, has custom designer and could be easily integrated with the related data functionality. (link)

Widget Designers

• MVC Widget designer that enables Front-end Developers to customize it by only creating/modifying a MVC View following convention. (link)
• Ability to pass server data to the MVC Widget designer views. (link)
• Ability to open a MVC Widget Designer in a custom window. (link)
• Ability to override the default buttons of the MVC Widget designer. (link)
• Ability to customize the properties displayed inside the property editor of an MVC Widget designer. (link)

Reusable Sitefinity content selectors

The new content selectors can be used in Feather based widget designers or any angular based User Interface in Sitefinity.

• Taxon selector built with AngularJS. (link)
• News selector built with AngularJS. (link)

Performance Diagnostics Module

(documentation)

The Diagnostic module allows administrators to profile DataAccess queries and diagnose performance problems in  certain operations, such as HTTP request, background tasks, etc.

The module can be used to identify slow page loading times caused by database queries and includes reports to:

• Get information on all operations and queries
• Help identify N+1 problems in the data base requests
• Enable in depth data analysis

Pages

• Ability to copy page from one language to another (Single / Multisite)

Forms

(documentation)

• Added ability to edit form responses on the front end
• Added option to set a form field as hidden or read only to users editing a form response

Dev Tools

• RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX upgraded to v. 2014.2.724, Q2 2014 SP1
• Telerik Data Access upgraded to v. 2014.2.918.1, Q2 2014 SP2
• Service Stack upgraded to v. 4.0.30
• Newtonsoft.Json upgraded to v. 6.0.2

Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud
Preview Release (See more)

(documentation) 

Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud  is a Big Data Analytics solution that combines customer data across different digital and non-digital channels in order to analyze and optimize the customer journey.

It comes as an add-on service to Sitefinity Online Marketing and Enterprise Edition, and includes: 

• Customer Journey Database: All customer touch points across systems and channels collected in a central location on the Cloud
• Predictive Analytics: Ability to use data collected on past and current customer behavior in order to predict the future attainment of site goals per segment
• Customer Journey Optimizer: Option to identify dynamic segments of contacts which could have maximum impact on goal completion and recommend the best next step of a guided customer journey
• Campaigns: Ability to track and improve goal conversion for a target segment based on the predictive analytics and segmentation engine
• Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud Connector to Sitefinity:  A tool which logs how user on a Sitefinity web site interact with: Pages, Forms, Comments, Registrations, Searches, File Downloads, Videos and more.
• Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud SDKs: Allows for the collection of data from external systems such as CRMs, ERPs, Mobile and Desktop applications, etc, and includes: 
  • C# SDK: Allow developers to integrate Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud with 3^rd party applications.
  • JS SDK: Allow developers to integrate Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud with 3^rd party web sites

What’s Fixed

• MVC Support: Ability to return FileResult in a MVC Controller Action (FP).
• MVC Support: Ability to implement support for initializing Controllers that do not have empty constructor. (FP)
• MVC Support: Ability to use "complex" properties in a Controller and to manipulate them in design time.
• MVC Support: Browsing a frontend page, that is based on a page template in “Pure MVC” mode that has “no theme” setting applied, is resulting in an "Uncaught ReferenceError: StatsClient is not defined" JavaScript exception.
• MVC Support:Invalid URLs are resolved if you have a MVC widget on the page (FP). DISCLAIMER: As a result of this fix Sitefinity is now returning “Error 404”, therefore some of the links to your site might be broken. Note that you might revert the fix by overriding the InitializeRouteParameters method of the ControllerActionInvoker class and placing the RouteHelper.SetUrlParametersResolved(); after the invocation of the base InitializeRouteParameters method. 
• Pages: Fixed an issue where redirect page will show up in the sitemap for a language where it does not have a translation(FP)
• Performance: Added setting to disable second level cache for selected content types
• Backend Performance: Fixed issue with taxonomy services when editing an item that has many fields of type classification (tags, categories, custom classifications) (FP)
• Caching: Telerik.OpenAccess.Exceptions.OptimisticVerificationException with PageDraft in NLB when L2 data caching is ON (FP)
• Layout Editor: Deleting a control from the template might cause 2nd level nested layout controls placed in this control to become orphaned (FP)
• Editor>Image Upload:  Fixed problem which prevented a user with restricted access to the Default Library from uploading images in any library (FP)
• Users: Searching in User Management from LDAP provider is now case insensitive (FP)
• Users: Users in the User Selector control are now properly ordered alphabetically (FP)
• Search Widget: Enabled advanced mode settings of the Search widget
• Search: Removed the Content Blocks check box option when creating a new Search Index. Content under Content -> Content Blocks is no longer indexed,. Any Content Blocks and Shared Content items displayed on pages are indexed though the Static HTML on Pages option.
• Related Data: field not working with the default provider for the site if the ModuleName is composed of two words separated by a blank space (e.g. Press Releases)
• Forms> File Upload Widget: Fixed a problem which prevented users from uploading files with uppercase letters extension (e.g. JPG) (FP)
• Sitemap: Fixed an issue with widget filters (by tags, categories, etc.) not taken into consideration when creating Sitemap (FP)
• Dashboard:  Users in role Authors cannot see their own items in the recent items widget
• Recurring Events:  Start Date is not calculated correctly for Central Daylight Time (UTC  -5) and Central Standard Time (UTC -6). For recurring events that start in one Daylight saving time and continue during another Daylight saving time the start date and time is not calculated correctly after edit.
• Personalization: Changed how IP address is retrieved  in order to detect forwarded IP address and requests that come from servers hidden behind proxy
• Ecommerce>Products: Fixed an issue where using GetRelatedItems extension with Products throw exception on first load after application restart (FP)
• Sharepoint Connector: Fixed issue with uninstalling the module resulting in error
• Sitemap Generator: Pages with "Require SSL" should have "https" prefix. Sitemap Generator: When "Show in navigation" is not checked the page url is not included in the Sitemap file.
• Upgrade> Module Builder: Fixed problems with occasional upgrade failure when upgrading from Sitefinity 5.3 to 7.1
• Upgrade> DAM: Dynamic content items can be created after direct upgrade from Sitefinity 4.4
• Upgrade> Sitefinity Basic Theme: Fixed errors with RadControls styles after upgrade to 7.1

Known Issues

Project Feather

Note that these issues are being addressed and will be fixed in the following months.

• MVC widgets: Inline editing is not working when you place a MVC widget in a page template and then configure a frontend page to use this page template.
• MVC Navigation widget: Does not support cache invalidation.
• AngularJS News selector: In multilingual environment the search on the default language will return only items that have translations in at least one more language.
• Grid widgets: Grid widgets can be updated only via the file system and cannot be edited via the edit screen that is available from the Page Editor.