What's new

Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud (DEC)

Sitefinity DEC allows you to track, analyze and shape the experience of users on your sites. In Sitefinity 8.0, all editions include DEC connector out of the box.

DEC Cloud Connector

(documentation)
Once enabled on a Sitefinity site, the DEC Cloud Connector starts sending to DEC info on page visits, file downloads, user registrations, and other events. In Sitefinity, users can see reports on DEC data such as: personas, lead scoring types, best performing touch points and conversations.

DEC Data in Personalization

(documentation)
In Sitefinity, personas segments can be created for users in DEC personas and campaigns.

DEC JavaScript SDK from CDN

(documentation)
The DEC JavaScript SDK is available as Sitefinity references and can be loaded from CDN.

Performance

Pages Precompilation Tool

(documentation)
Enables the precompilation of frontend and backend pages before deploying a site to production. Helps optimizes or eliminate the need for warm-up phase. Reduces processor load. 

Multisite Improvements

Taxonomies per Site

(documentation)
Added option for applying different Taxonomies (Categories, Tags, etc.) for the different sites in Multisite projects. Depending on the site where users edit content, they see options to classify content with the Taxonomies available for this site only.

Workflows per Site and Language

(documentation)
Added ability to specify site and language when creating a workflow on a Multisite/Multilingual project. Thus, the resulting workflow applies only to the selected sites or languages, and not to all. 

Site Sync per Site

(documentation)
Added functionality to select one or a few sites and perform Site Sync of their content only. Also, added ability to create a site on the target server during sync.

Feather MVC Framework

(documentation on GitHub)
Feather Modules can be installed in Sitefinity, and includes MVC stock widgets, AngularJS widget designer framework and Boostrap support. 

Added new widgets:

• Social Share 
• Search box
• Search results
• Image widget
• Image Gallery widget
• Login form widget 
• Login/Logout button widget
• Change password widget
• Registration widget
• Profile widget
• Account activation widget

Enhanced ​existing widgets:

• Dynamic widget: Sorting options, API for hierarchical types
• Content block: Image Manager, Hyperlink Manager, HTML view, Full screen mode
• Navigation widget: page selection options, external URLs
• News widget: Sorting options, API improvements

Added selectors:

• Image selector
• Link selector
• Site selector
• Language selector
• Multisite page selector
• Role selector
• Library selector

Enhanced ​existing selectors:

• Page selector: indicate page status, select external URLs

Added client components:

• Collection
• Tree
• Search box
• Sort box
• Infinite scroll
• Drag and drop

Widget designers:

• Ability to refer scripts by using components' aliases

Other

Dev Tools 

• UI for ASP.NET AJAX  - Q1 2015 (version 2015.1.225)
• Telerik Data Access - Q1 2015
• jQuery  - v 1.11.2
• Service Stack - v4.0.36​​

Custom Membership Provider Simplified

Implemented a simple LINQ translation and an interface to optimize the loading of users when using Custom Membership Provider. Available sample on GitHub. 

Authentication

• Introduced an option to configure server session timeout. It could be configured from Settings > Advanced > Security > Server session token lifetime

• Introduced an option to turn on/off password autocomplete. It could be configured from Settings > Advanced > Login > Disable browser autocomplete

Content Modules

• Added permission "View backend link" for content modules, which grants access to the backend section of a given content type. Users with view/modify permission for an individual item, are granted the "View backend link" permission automatically (doc)

Pages

• Page selector: Added a label to page selector that shows page status - unpublished/draft. Added support for Pages Selector lazy loading.
• Redirect page expiration: By default the page redirect cache will expire after one day (86400 secs.) Administrators will be able to change that in section "Settings -> Advanced -> Pages", in the field “Expiration time for permanent redirect”.

What's fixed

Sitefinity

Pages

• Fluent API: Filter pages returns deleted pages
• Group pages: Clicking on “Titles&Properties” throws an exception (FP)
• Backend preview: Increased expiration time of preview link to 2,400 hours
• Backend pages: Unable to create a page when selecting option "Under parent page" (FP)
• Pager not working properly when "UrlKeyPrefix" or "pageKey" is used (FP)

Page Templates

• Pure MVC template always loads personalization script (FP)
• Layout control cannot be modified when it contains Navigation Widget with "Treeview" or "Horizontal with Dropdowns menus"  template (FP)
• Editing a property in an editable widget reverts all properties to their initial values

Navigation widget

• Group page doesn’t show in navigation if all child pages are redirect pages (FP)
• Redirect page which redirects to another redirect page throws an exception (FP)
• Custom selection of pages does not show child group pages (FP)
• Multilingual: Drop-Down  shows pages which have a translation in the current culture (FP)
• Multilingual: Page redirecting to an external URL shows in navigation no matter the translation

Widgets

• Error when using minified version of RequireJS (FP)
• Property Id for Legacy Control Property Implementation is not loaded, which results in missing Id for a custom user controls
• JavaScript and CSS Widgets set incorrect relative URLs to files (FP)
• Users: Cannot set string property with a value which containing quotation mark (FP)
• Search: Problem with rendering Html from a styled long text field in a dynamic content type

Libraries (Images, Videos, Documents & Files)

• Libraries cannot be deleted from edit properties view (FP)
• Implemented load on demand population of Libraries lists in Images, Documents and Video libraries widget and in Backend sections
• Relocating library to different provider doesn’t work properly if it has been relocated previously

Related Data Fields

• Related items ordering doesn’t persist correctly when the content item is edited
• Media: Issue with new tables in the database and data not properly retrieved
• Pages: When related data field is added to Pages, Page duplication stops working
• Products: Exception on first load when using the field (FP)
• Products: Filtering, sorting and searching for products doesn’t work correctly (FP)
• Products: Items are not filtered by the field selected type in the related data selector

Permissions/Authentication

• Wrong exception when anonymous users access content items restricted to authenticated users only (FP)
• User authenticated with SecurityManager.AuthenticateUser(..), cause duplicate cookies in response headers (FP)
• Libraries: Added XSS support
• Multisite: If the user doesn't have view permissions for at least one of the websites then "need permissions" dialog shows
• Dynamic Content: Create button is not visible for child type when its parent item does not have 'Create' permissions
• Module Builder: When setting permissions on Module Builder, there is an error shown and they are not correctly propagated on inheriting DynamicModules, DynamicTypes and Dynamic Content items
• Recycle Bin: Cannot restore content item from Recycle Bin when it has broken permission inheritance

Events

• Moving and resizing all day event in calendar makes it no longer all day event
• All day events are not placed in All day events section of Day and Week view of Calendar
• All day events time is not properly calculated in the Events widget

Email Campaigns

• Mailing list chart height problem
• Responsive design problem with the <DOCTYPE> tag not appended to the email template

Forms

• API: Cannot create a form with FormMultipleChoice, FormDropDownList  or FormCheckboxes (FP)
• Missing alpha-numeric format validator for text field

Site Sync

• MVC Control properties are not persisted after sync on page live version (FP)
• Syncing image file causes target servers to display "System is restarting" message"

Multilingual

• Wrong content resolved in detail view, when items with the same URL exist on the different languages
• Filtering by Culture breaks for custom cultures with numeric values in the culture code (Ex. en-111)

• Verify email uniqueness when editing user details
• Error occurs when deleting a field from a profile type

Other

• Azure: Multilingual issue when using split tables (FP)
• Design: LayoutsBasics.css cannot be removed on demand
• Ecommerce: Filter products by custom classification doesn't work in some cases (FP)​
• Forum: Opening a forum post for reply using a query string parameter doesn’t require authentication​
• Images: Thumbnails are broken when custom crop size, images dynamic resizing is enabled (AllowDynamicResizing) and image URL signature (EnableImageUrlSignature) is set to true. (KB)
• Language selector: Improved HTML markup to make it XHTML compliant
• Personalization: Rules for USA locations are not properly applied
• Workflow: Emails for "Reject", "Awaiting publishing" and "Rejected publishing" status are the same as for "Waiting for approval" (FP)
• MVC: Returning a pdf as file result from MVC controller action in Classic mode renders a blank pdf file (FP)
• MVC:  Control properties are not persisted after sync on Page live version (FP)
• Site Map Generator: Issue with scheduled tasks when using the "Weekly" schedule option, the task is sometimes scheduled for a wrong day
• Site Map Generator: Browsing and editing in the backend breaks the sitemap generation
• Taxonomies: Fixed flat selector suggestion box issue
• Taxonomies: Meta fields are not filtered by Application Name when they are cached, which could break categories and tags association with content in specific cases 

Feather MVC Framework

• General: Prevent Personalization script from loading if the Personalization module is disabled
• News: Provider selector styles are broken
• Content block: Provider selector styles are broken
• Fixed issue with @Html.BeginFormSitefinity which gives bad action URL​

Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud (DEC)

DEC Connector

DEC JavaScript SDK

Known issues

• Feather: Inline editing is not working for MVC widgets