Sitefinity ASP.NET CMS Now Faster, More AJAX-y

By Irina Guseva | Published Oct 10, 2008

Economy is sluggish, but .NET-based CMS vendors are thriving. Telerik with its Sitefinity CMS is not an exception.

The company released a new product version — v3.5 — aimed to enhance the overall performance of the CMS, as well as to introduce some new features. The beefed-up version boasts optimized performance and AJAXified controls, among other enhancements.

So, let’s take a closer look at what’s new in 3.5:

Optimizations in Caching Capabilities

CacheDependency was implemented for CMS pages. Updating a page or Generic Content Item will now remove from the cache only the affected page, but will not invalidate the entire cache.

A new CachingManager is implemented to support providers’ model. Along with using the built-in Sitefinity caching providers, customers can create custom ones as well.

Enhancements in Permissions

Hierarchical applications permissions can now be defined for multiple membership providers with the new 3.5 version. Page permissions can be defined for multiple membership providers at the same time.

Localization Tools

Persistence modes “DomainName” and “DomainExtension” were implemented for localization purposes. Now, a certain domain name or extension can be mapped to specific language version of the Web site.

CmsSiteMapProvider Performance Optimizations

All RadControls in the Administrative panel and in the user controls from the toolbox were updated to use the newest RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q2 version. All ContentView-based controls are partially AJAXified for a better performance.

Present and Future

While a slew of bugs were fixed in this release, there are still some “known issues” — especially, in regards to search, Images&Documents Module, Mozilla Firefox 3 compatibility and RadEditor.

According to the Teleric’s public roadmap, the upcoming v4.0 will bring even more enhancements to the Web CMS. Integration with Windows Workflow Foundation, Automator Service, Silverlight support and Browse-and-edit feature are just some of the examples what’s in store for the next release.

In the meantime, read more about Sitefinity CMS v3.5. The new release is available for download from customers’ client.net accounts.