Launch the new Sitefinity_3_0_RC2_trial.exe to get started!
The Sitefinity installer has not changed much from pervious betas.
The step the lawyers require. Accept it and move on.
After the installer finishes putting the Sitefinity files on your system, you can choose to launch a demo site and finish. NOTE: My demo site did not open after completing installation, but I was able to easy find the solution in ProgamFiles > Telerik > Sitefinity 3.0 and launch it from Visual Studio.
One of the demo sites that comes with Sitefinity is for the esteemed Telerik International University (or TIU). Here we see the home page for the demo site, which features news items, generic content, a poll, rotating images, and some navigation.
If you vote in the poll (or click View Results) you can see how others have responded to the poll. You can configure all poll options in the admin side of Sitefintiy, which we'll look at later.
This is one of the sections in the TIU site. It reveals some helpful breadcrumb navigation and a new 2-column template that has been applied to interior pages. Remember, all of this is visually configured in the admin section.
Oops. A little layout error in the demo. Nonetheless, another interior page on the TIU site.
This page shows off the New Items from the News Module. News items can be given a date to display on the site and a date to expire. Notice the calendar control on the left that allows you to select news items by date.
Another small problem with the demo's top navigation. PostBacks seem to create multiple copies of the header navigation control. Expect this to be addressed before the final release in 3 weeks (or so).
The gallery page shows off a photo viewer control. A scrolling list of photos can be clicked to display the larger version. The control is Ajax-enabled, too, so no page refreshes are required to show the new photos.
Another section in the TIU site. Here we see some tabluar data in a ScheduleGrid custom control. Data is loaded from an XML file for easy maintenance. Implementing this custom control is as easy as creating a "normal" ASP.NET User Control (.ascx file).
On this page we see the List Module, one of the built-in Sitefinity modules. It displays list items and allows users to easily expand and collapse the items. Client-side code is used to do the opening and closing so no PostBacks are required.
This composite screenshot shows the FAQ page. This page also uses a List Module, but unlike the previous page this implementation shows all items with links to jump to the top of the page.
The diversity page shows some charts that summarize data. Both are implemented as custom user controls with RadChart elements to render the charts.
The blogs section has a different template applied than the rest of the site. It could have easily used the same template, but this page illustrates how you can apply different templates to pages. This is also the display end of the built-in Blogs Module.
When viewing a post from the Blogs Module (with comments enabled) users will be able to post comments using a simple form at the bottom of the page. An enhanced blog module should probably include some CAPTCHA support. An future Sitefinity module developers listening?
The last section in the TIU site is the SiteMap section. It uses a TreeViewSiteMap custom user control to render the sitemap links on the page.
At the bottom of each page in this template are WC3 validator icons. They aren't "live" validators in this site, but they are true. Sitefinity is fully compliant with WC3 XHTML 1.0 and WAI-AA.
Now for the Sitefinity admin. To get to the Sitefinity admin for TIU we have two choices: launch the admin from a project management page (convenient if you manage many Sitefinity sites) or simply navigate to the Sitefinity sub-directory of our TIU site.
When you launch the admin for the TIU, you must log-in. The default username and password for this demo are "admin" and "admin".
Once you log-in to the admin, you'll be presented with the Dashboard overview page. From here you can easily jump to any of the Sitefinity admin tasks and see a list of recent admin activities on the site (helpful if you have multiple site administrators). Let's look at each admin section in turn.
The Pages section allows you to manage (read: add, edit, remove, etc.) all pages and templates in your Sitefinity site. On this screen we see all of the pages in TIU.
Clicking on a page in the left had tree of pages loads a preview of the page. From here we can easily click a button to edit the page, edit its properties, permissions, and history. You can use the tools on the lower left side of the page to set any page as the site's home page.
We've clicked the edit button for our home page. Now we see the edit view, with available controls that we can add to the page on the right and controls already on the page boxed with convenient edit buttons.
Controls can be easily (and visually) dragged and dropped from the toolbox to the page as illustrated here. Controls can be dropped in zones defined by page your template. Here we've added a Generic Content control to the page.
Once we add our Generic Content control, we need to give it some content. We'll add some simple text content. Notice the powerful Word-like editor we get for editing our content (a RadEditor for those familiar with RadControls).
We can also define properties for our Generic Content, such as border color, back color, size, and so on. All controls have a property configurator like this. In future versions of Sitefinity, these property builders will be replaced with even easier to use visual configuration tools.
I've saved our new Generic Content on our home page and previewed the page. Oops! That doesn't look right. Let's fix it.
Sure enough. I can see the same layout problem conveyed in the edit page view. This illustrates how the preview in the edit mode translates to the live site. Instead of putting our Generic Content in the "Upper Right" zone, we'll move it (by dragging and dropping) into the same zone as the NewsList below it.
There we go. That looks beter. Now our content displays just as we want it to. I've now modified this page without writing any code (HTML or otherwise).
This is the properties tab for our home page. You can see there are a number of properties you can configure for a page, such as menu label, show in navigation, title, keywords, and so on.
If you scroll down the properties page, you'll see there are some more options available. You can require SSL for a page, control access, and even control caching.
On the permissions tab you can control which roles can perform which actions on the page.
Here is a fun tab. The History tab shows all revisions that have been made and saved to the page. You can at any time rollback a page to a previous state if you want to undo a change.
Clicking "Preview" on a past version of the page on the History tab reveals a preview of that page version along with an overlay that contains details about the version. Notice that our Generic Content created in this demo is not on this older version of the page.
Next we look at the Template sub-section of the Pages section. Here we see all templates defined in our site. Any template can be applied to a page to control how the page is layed out. You also see a handy "Pages assigned" column that quickly reveals how many pages are using each template.
Clicking on the "Pages assigned" column for a template is even cooler! It shows a handy little window with a list of the pages that use the template. Clicking on a page in this list takes you straight to the page for any editing you may need to do. Very handy.
Working with templates is much like working with pages. Clicking on a template loads a preview with no page content.
If we edit the template, we see a view similar to the page edit view. Notice the "Left Navigation" and "MainPageContent" areas on the page. This is where we can add controls on page that uses this template.
In case you missed it, there are some extra tools on the main template screen. One tool allows you to quickly duplicate an existing template so that you can easily create a new template without starting from scratch. The other tool allows you to easily upload an ASP.NET MasterPage for use as a template in your site.
Moving right along. This is the Modules section. In it we have several sub-sections: Generic Content, News, Blogs, Lists, and Polls. Each represents a module that ships with Sitefinity and click on the module gives you options to manage its content. This is the Generic Content section where you can view and edit any shared content item.
This is the "View" tab for our single Generic Content item in this list. Editing it is similar to working with the Generic Content control we saw earlier.
The News sub-section shows all news items defined in the News Module.
Editing a news item should look familiar. It uses the same powerful text editor as all other content items in Sitefinity.
Among the properties available for news items are Publication and Expiration date. This is what makes news items unique. You can publish and expire them on your site automatically based on these dates.
The Blogs sub-section allows you to control blogs, blog posts, and comments. Here we see the only blog defined for our site. This is -not- a view of the blog's posts. Notice under the "Posts" column we see 4 posts have been posted to this blog.
On the settings page for the blog we see some of our control options. We can enable/disable comments and comment moderation and we can give the blog a name and description.
Here are all of the posts for our blog. Editing blog posts is just like editing news items and generic content. The "Status" column tells us if the post is already posted.
This is the Lists sub-section. Lists are collections of items that should be displayed in list format, such as FAQs and links. The power of lists is the way the data is displayed, which we looked at earlier in this demo.
If we edit the "Accomodation" list, we see that we can edit an individual item, delete an item, or change the order of the item in the list. Pretty straight forward.
Finally the Polls sub-section. Here we can create and manage polls that run on the site. There are two polls defined for TIU, one with 5 votes already collected.
On the edit poll page we can change the question, answers, colors of the results bars, type of response, and see the number of votes for each answer for polls already running. Also notice we can reset the vote count and release "blocked IPs" from users that have already voted.
The Files section gives you direct (in browser) control over the files in your Sitefinity site. You can upload files, rename files, move them, and so on. It is finally Ajax-enabled in RC2, so the experience is very smooth.
Right-clicking on a file pops-up a context menu like this to provide quick access to Rename, Delete, and Copy functions.
The Administration section gives you control over users and permissions for your site. So far we have one user defined.
If we edit the Admin user's profile we can see the default options available for managing users. Additional options can be easily added view Sitefinity's Profile provider (similar to ASP.NET's Profile provider).
Finally, the Live section gives you quick access from the admin section to the live version of your site. This enables you to easily see what your users see without leaving the admin.
One feature we didn't cover in the Pages section is Sitefinity's unique Workflow features. By default, TIU comes with Workflow turned off. That means a saved page is isn't published to the live site. When Workflow is on, a page must pass through a defined workflow before it's live. This image shows the default workflow stages (they can be customized).
With workflow on, the "Publish" button now becomes "Save changes" when editing a page.
After clicking "Save changes", we get a message confirming the page has been saved as a Draft. Now we see a button to send the changes for approval. In a real site, different users would have different permissions/roles to control the page through the lifecycle.
After clicking the "Send for approval" button, we see a confirmation that the page is now in "For Approval" status. The user with proper permissions can now either "Approve" or "Decline" the page changes.
If the changes are "Approved", we see the "Approved" confirmation message. The last step is to "Publish" the page, which will finally make the page live on the site.
Huray! Our changes our now live and we can start the process all over again by clicking "Edit this page". That about covers it for RC2. Hope you enjoyed the photo preview.
