Welcome to my articles on Sitefinity and the and experiences I have had. I do love helping others out and it gives me a real thrill when people approach me for help and second when I actually help them out. So here I not only hope to help others out but also hope that others take the time to help me out. I don't mind being wrong but I do hate being wrong for a long time. So call me out if you can, help me to avoid writing another Doh story.
I love the release progress of Sitefinity. Regular internal builds if you are looking for a fix before the next release and a steady march of new features. Sitefinity 8 is in beta and due out soon with all the 'What's new webinars' scheduled. A previous release, 7.2, had me impressed and ho-umm'd at the same time. When the 8.0 feature list came out I was interested to see if it would have me rushing to upgrade.
Sitefinity is secure platform. It is PCI and FIPS compliant in all areas where user credentials are stored but there are some things still left in your hands to ensure it is secure. Password policy is one area that you are in charge of. Passwords are pain. If we use something we can remember it is weak. If we use something secure its hard to remember. And what some sites require for a strong password are often not that strong.
Sitefinity uses a In Memory cache. It is an implementation of the Enterprise Library Caching Application Block. This works fine but its a bit slack when in a multi server environment. You are effectively caching the same data on every server and thus, I think, a bit redundant. But you can create your own implementation of the CacheManger using the ICacheManager interface. I have done this and used the Azure Redis Cache, a leader in distributed cache systems.
Without doubt you should be using the built in cache features of Sitefinity. The difference is significant if you don't. One of the first tweaks is to extend the time in cache for objects. But there are a few more improvements I have found from browsing the web and I have put them together here.
I recently had a requirement for Sitefinity Ecommerce to supply free shipping for orders over a certain amount. Along with that, it needed to be turned on and off for promotions. This feature isn't supplied out of the box with Sitefinity so I had to write an extension.
Sitefinity has released 7.2 in the last few days. I found this release to be quite secretive. There was never any Road Map posted for it and as I write this the Road Map is still talking about 7.1. There is some very cool features in this release. Yet, to be honest, I am at the same time wowed and ho-humm'd about the release.
Sitefinity has good security out of the box but the one thing they can't do and you should do is secure the log on page. Even for a simple site you can get a free SSL cert or very cheap ones. They aren't high quality but they are far superior to the open plain text you are sending without them. There are also a few other steps you can take to make your site more secure.
Since forever Sitefinity had a little secret that search did not work on Microsoft Azure. For two years I have kept thinking they'll sort it eventually. Then recently I found out that the new site map generator didn't work either.
Its great to cache static files such as images, CSS and JavaScript on the client. Its a huge performance improvement. But what happens when we need to invalidate that file as we have new ones. The way to get the client to retrieve a newer version is to use a different URL or ask the client to hit F5. Or follow Mads idea.
Earlier in the month I did a post on using CSS in Sitefinity. This is a short follow up on a few more things you may not know about that may help you out to create a better performing Sitefinity site.
Without any attention, errors in Sitefinity will throw the 'Yellow Screen of Death'. Helpful if your a developer wanting to know what is wrong with the page but terrible for visitors and business owners. In this post I will walk through some of the steps I put in place at the start of creating a Sitefinity site.
Ultimately we want to deliver as small and as few files as we can for sites. But we also need to be able to maintain and manage these files which usually leads to the opposite result. But today we have excellent pre-processors to help us and I will look at how I use SCSS in Sitefinity.
This is the third part of a three part series looking at setting up a WCF service in Sitefinity. In part one I looked at creating the service and the request and response models. The second part dealt with validation. Part three I will go through using jQuery to call our new WCF service.
This is part two of a three part series on implementing a WCF service in Sitefinity and calling it via jQuery. The first part looked at setting up the service. This post looks at the validation which we always do! The final post goes through calling the service from the client.