Telerik, a leading vendor of developer tools and components for .NET, is excited to unveil the latest milestone of Sitefinity CMS, the perfect tool for construction and management of websites. Coming hot on the heels of Sitefinity 3.0, which delivered unmatched development capabilities and scalability, Sitefinity v3.1 provides integrated search engine, forums module, updated RSS service and a number of UI improvements designed to enhance and refine the end user-experience.

“Ever since the birth of the Sitefinity project we are sticking to our main goal to deliver a product to encompass the needs of a wide range of customers – from the hobbyist to the enterprise customer” says Vassil Terziev, Telerik CEO. “With the launch of version 3.1 we have hit our target to enhance the end-user experience through extended functionality combined with best usability practices. With the introduction of several out-of-the box features, new services and modules, the framework is now capable of supporting a next generation of more efficient, more interactive, highly personalized web applications”. 

One of the focal points of Sitefinity v3.1 is the availability of the highly demanded search engine. Based on the extremely fast and efficient Lucene.net engine, Sitefinity’s Search service delivers unlimited capabilities in various internal (admin area) and external (website) search scenarios. Users are allowed to customize their search properties according to their own criteria in order to streamline fast and effective search process. For example, when initiating a search, users are able to create multiple indexes and later aggregate them in larger index. All this is easily accomplished through Sitefinity’s admin area. The same functionality is available for all content-related modules – Blogs, News, and Generic Content.

The pluggable modules list is also enriched with a new addition – Forums module. Forums administrators can swiftly create forums, start threads of questions and responses, edit and delete individual messages, categorize forums as well as assign permissions to different users – all possible through Sitefinity’s intuitive admin area. On the public-end users can easily set up their forums through a single, easy to configure public control.

The new version brings also several benefits for end-users. When creating a new project, users have the option to choose from predefined website templates, each coming with few ready-to-use themes. To jumpstart their projects users can just pick up the one they like and start adding content to the pages. Following the same idea of delivering ultimate end-user experience, Sitefinity 3.1 provides simple and user friendly custom control designers for the most popular public controls: Image, News, Blogs and Lists. Added to that is a new slick page edit mode, allowing users to differentiate the page editable area from the template area and thus focus on the part of the page they are working on.

In addition to the out-of-the box features, the new version brings several major improvements in the existing functionality. The RSS feed service, for example, now allows users to syndicate Sitefinity Blogs and News. In order to syndicate content, all feeds can be visually configured through the public RSS control. Another significant innovation is the ability to create Tags and Categories for existing content, similarly to the way content is tagged in Blogs. Additionally, users can choose whether to display tags as simple lists or ‘Tag Clouds’ in which the most used are rendered in a larger size. All Generic Content based modules (Generic Content, News, Blogs) now take advantage of Tags and Categories.

Other valuable updates include several new controls in the page designer, such as login controls. These controls can be used for creating web pages that, for example, require a membership service. Added to this is the support for multiple membership providers, within a single application.
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