On Tuesday 17th April Telerik hosted Sitefinity & Beyond, their first conference for Sitefinity users, partners and developers. As Gold partners we eagerly signed up, and three of the team including myself went along for the ride.
Hosted in London’s stunning British Museum, we were surprised to see delegates from all over Europe: Germany, France, Italy, Finland and many more countries. It was very well attended and our hosts put on a varied show.
I’m going to go through the sessions and summarize my feelings on each one.
Sitefinity 5.1 Preview
Ivan Osmak took us through a comprehensive tour of what we can expect in the upcoming Sitefinity 5.1. Don’t expect mind-blowing bells and whistles, it’s all about performance and stability in the latest upgrade. There’s also a Syncfusion-style service that converts files to PDF on the fly and by extension allows full text searching of the content. There’s also some simplification in the cross-publishing services, but more on that later. Ivan also promised “zero known bugs” for release in the eCommerce module. There was also a suggestion that the entire Sitefinity back-end will be recreated in KendoUI instead of the current jQuery-flavoured interface, which should see a number of percetible performance gains. A very interesting presentation. As I tweeted at the time: “[Ivan] is no Steve Jobs but he is an honest developer who clearly loves the product.”
Reaching New Heights with Sitefinity Thunder
Thunder is an upcoming plug-in for Visual Studio that tightly integrates the IDE with Sitefinity. As a Microsoft house this is music to our ears. We’ve been around for a while and can remember the whole heap of files that need moving around to customise, deploy and maintain a Sitefinity website. In the leaner database-orientated approach this is much more versatile. Thunder extends this versatility by communicating directly with the live (or more likely in our case UAT) site via a web service call. The demo that Ivan showed was very impressive, and we’re keeping a close eye on this one. There’s a webinar for Thunder this week we will be paying attention to.
Migrating Your Website to the Latest Sitefinity Version
This was getting a little rushed so Ivan didn’t spend a great deal of time focusing on this, instead he spoke about how the safest migration path is from Sitefinity 3.7 SP4 upwards. Telerik are also knee-deep in a migration of their own site; in conversation with Sitefinity Partner Manager Oggy later he admitted the site is unrecognisably 3.7 anyway as almost all of it had been customised through the years. It’s a very complex undertaking.
Creating Feature-Rich Custom Modules
Businss Analyst Hristo Borisov took the stage here describing his own pain points in trying to encapsulate customer needs accurately and how Sitefinity module builder can get prototypes off the ground to iterate towards the ideal solution. He showed off a flashy module that allowed for banner ad placement with no HTML knowledge by the content manager that was impressive, but a little fast for me! It got my colleagues’ juices flowing however, and they almost wanted to turn back to the office and make a start!
Going Mobile With Responsive Design
Product Evangelist Gabe Sumner took to the stage for this one, with a confident and informative demo of the responsive templates within Sitefinity. Whilst we haven’t used this on a client project yet we have explored the features on a test site. It’s certainly an impressive and very easy to use feature that has a lot of possibilities. Gabe also went beyond the technical and asked us to consider that articles will be given different prominence and this will affect how they are perceived. However the room got a little tense when the pricing of this feature came up. Both sides raised good points but it’s clear the community is having a hard time trying to sell this proposition to clients.
Multi-Channel Campaigns: Where Marketing and Technical Meet
This one will get the digital marketers salivating: improvements have been made in Sitefinity 5.1 to help connect all the publication channels so 1 piece of content can be syndicated across RSS, Twitter, Facebook etc. A good feature and can't come soon enough for those of us looking to get more eyes on content. More details on the Telerik YouTube channel.
Sitefinity as an Enterprise Level CMS
This one intrigued me as we have had a few requests from customers to implement such a scenario, and whilst we have implemented it once I wasn’t completely happy with the elegance of the solution. Sitefinity partner Avaus put forward a case study that was certainly detailed, but perhaps a little dry for the majority of the room. That said if we get another similar proposal I’ll go back to Avaus for any tips they can offer for making TFS work better with the multiple config files required.
Beyond Development – Be A Hero
Boris of United Experts put forward essentially a “hints and tips” section with a few gems in there. By this point I think the delegates were burned out from excellent demos from Gabe, Ivan and Hristo, and Boris was up against the clock to get through his presentation. The GZIP sample code and taking a little time to customise the Content Editor were good ideas that we’ll look into.
Conclusion
In all the event was a well-attended and varied conference that served a number of different audiences. In the end that was also the negative – the room was a mixture of technical and non-technical people and it was difficult to satisfy everyone. Next time it would be good to have the conference diverge into these different audiences. The presentations by the Sitefinity staffers were by far the more engaging and encouraged the most feedback. I'd really like some time with builds of the product while we were there as you want to play with the features discussed. It was also very useful to meet the Sitefinity team face-to-face and put real faces to the forum posts.
Roll on Sitefinity & Beyond 2013!