On May 16 we conducted a webinar titled “Web Content Management with Sitefinity”. We pretty much had a full house on that day and we had a great show from Greg our Sitefinity Sales Engineer. We are thankful to one and all who attended the webinar and posted all your questions pertaining to Content Management System and Sitefinity in particular.

Slide deck from the webinar:

Greg did a great job in showing Sitefinity in action. So there was hardly any slides used. But if you would like to review the presentation, we have provided the same below:

Questions & Answers:

Many of you had questions regarding the Sitefinity as a product. Here is a quick recap of some of the major questions asked during the webinar:

Q: Could you provide some website url which are running using sitefinity
A:  You can go to SiteFinity.com and look at Showcase area http://www.sitefinity.com/customers/showcases .

Q: is it customization friendly?
A: If you know ASP.NET WebForms or MVC – you can customize it to your will and wish

Q: what is the cost of license?
A: Take a look at pricing here http://www.sitefinity.com/purchase

Q: What is Connector for SharePoint?
A: If you have already an investment with SharePoint you can do a two way sync from Sitefinity to SP and vice versa using the connectors. You can know more about this here: http://www.sitefinity.com/sharepoint-integration

Q: Can we add new Contents other than in built Contents?
A: Yes you can create your custom content.

Q: Can we host the website built on Sitefinity on cloud?
A: Yes we support Azure – http://www.sitefinity.com/benefits/for-it-managers/windows-azure

Q: Does Sitefinity provide any Template Designer?
A: You can always upload a ASP.NET Master Page and make it as a template for your page. We do have a online template creator which lets you design a template with complete drag and drop feature.

Q: Can we integrate external controls like payment gateway to the pages ?
A: Yes. We have a ecommerce module built it in. So integration with payment gateways is easy

Q: Can the content be Role based contents as per authentication?
A: Yes. Granular access to content is possible with Sitefinity.

Q:  Can we host MVC3 based pages?
A: Yes. we support hybrid mode of development. Meaning you can customize and have either a Web Form based User Control as a customized widget or MVC based widget.

Q: how can we control the page access rights?
A: The page themselves have access rights defined which can be controlled from the back end.

Q: Is Sitefinity limited to e-Commerce only?
A: – No. We have news/events/forums/blog etc. modules out of the box. Take a look at our showcase area to see how this is used for a real world examples.

Q: : Can I develop and apply themes on Sitefinity?
A: Yes. Sitefinity supports ASP.NET theming.

Q: Can we create CSS layout from own template?
A: Yes you can do that.

Q: Can i apply different CSS/Page modeling for different display size?
A: Yes you can. Sitefinity comes with Responsive Design Module out of the box which will let you create different rule based on where your content can be viewed. The rule will define how your content needs to be shown when rendered on those devices/screen widths and Sitefinity will automatically take care of that.

Q: Can you explain how we can add DLL reference?
A: Sitefinity source code is a ASP.NET solution. so you develop using the VS IDE and add reference like you do with any asp.net app.

Q: Other that .NET 4.0, does Sitefinity have dependency on any other third party libraries?
A: No – we use our own controls within Sitefinity for e.g. RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, Kendo UI, Open Access ORM.

Q: Can i create large web application using Sitefinity?
A: Yes you can. Take a look at our showcases area to see what people have built with Sitefinity: http://www.sitefinity.com/customers/showcases

Q: Can we develop application by Sitefinity for my android phone?
A: Yes. With Sitefinity 6 we have a mechanism where in you can create a custom module and with one click a Hybrid Mobile Application can be created for this custom module. The app will be able to perform full CRUD on your module and since it is hybrid, it can run on all platforms and provide you with native look and feel as we use Kendo UI Mobile controls.

Q: what are the features of Sitefinity?
A: Sitefinity features are listed here: – http://www.sitefinity.com/product/see-also/cms-features-list

Q: Is any Open Source version available of Sitefinity?
A: We do not have any Open Source version of Sitefinity. But we do have Community Edition which is completely free for personal site scenario. Here is more info on what does Community Edition contain: http://www.sitefinity.com/try-now/free-asp-net-cms

Q: Which version of ASP.Net does this belong to?
A: Currently Sitefinity supports Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0

Q: Does it support workflow functionality?
A: Absolutely. Custom and standard workflows, all based on Windows Workflow Foundation 4

Telerik .NET Ninja T-Shirt Giveaway:

We had promised that we will be giving away 2 .NET Ninja T-Shirts as a webinar give away. We normally pick 2 people randomly from the audience and raffle it out. So, as part of this webinar we are happy to say that the following 2 people are winners of our .NET Ninja T-Shirts:

• Pramod Gupta
• Ranjit Singh

Congratulations to the winners. We will be contacting you shortly as we need your postal address to ship your t-shirts. Rest of you folks, don’t worry you still have chance to win the t-shirt. Do attend our next webinar which is on May 30 titled – MVVM and Validation with Kendo UI Web.