As it is with any software suite with traction, Sitefinity CMS releases new versions from time-to-time, co-opting the latest upgrades technology has to offer. True to form, the latest Sitefinity 11.1 comes with a host of new features and functionality.
Improved Content Creation Capabilities
The central focus of the improvements in Sitefinity 11.1 is enhancing content creation capabilities.
Site developers get the convenience of picking from several easy to deploy and extend templates, facilitating a smoother, more engaging experience across devices and distribution platforms.
Sitefinity 11.1 now supports RTL languages, which includes Arabic among others, making it more broad-based and seamless. Editorial teams can now collaborate on multilingual content, such as working on translations from content editor directly.
The new SEO and Open Graph meta-tags controls empower marketers to craft compelling titles and descriptions, giving search engine results and social media engagements a big boost.
Another significant improvement is the ability to define custom workflows up to three levels deep.
Improved search capabilities allow marketers and other users locate content items easier than before.
New Content Editing Experience
Sitefinity always made it easy for marketers to create and manage events and calendars in the content editing interface, and the new version ups this ease. Defining events and event-specific properties is now easier and more straightforward. There is an emphasis on a clean and simple design as well.
The updated suite offers built-in support for Bootstrap 4, allowing frontend developers to deliver consistent web experiences across all screens and devices.
Superior Form Handling Capabilities
Sitefinity 11 offers advanced form handling capabilities.
Site admins now get the ability to control access to form responses, with permissions applied either site-wide or per specific form. Separating the form builder from the submission data facilitates better content governance, cutting across organizations.
Another significant update in Sitefinity 11 is a new HubSpot connector, allowing marketers to not just create and configure forms easily, but also send data to HubSpot and trigger automated workflows. Sitefinity CMS gives marketers full control over field mappings, allowing them to reuse the same form across multiple campaigns and thereby save valuable time and effort.
Improved Personalization and Customization
The new, improved personalization engine allows marketers to deliver personalized content seamlessly, based on URL parameters. Marketers can now tag and personalize inbound links effortlessly, curbing bounce rates, and boosting engagement in the process.
The updated geo-location DB makes location-based personalization highly accurate, a marked improvement from the previous versions.
It is now also possible to localize the Date and Time custom field and have different values in different translations.
These advanced personalization capabilities cater to today’s highly pampered customers who prefer to be engaged on their terms.
Related: Maximize marketing impact with Sitefinity’s Content Personalization
Sitefinity 11 offers advanced customization capabilities as well, along with personalization. It is now possible to create customized backend themes, button colors, secondary text, placeholder texts, and other assets by modifying specific components of the user interface.
Advanced Management Capabilities
The intuitive and powerful content and experience management toolset on offer, overlaid by the easy-to-use visual interface makes marketers more productive and effective.
Users can now log in using custom authentication, though Sitefinity CMS Security API. Through this approach, they can skip authentication and directly login a user. It is also now possible for users in non-administrative roles to unlock content items and pages locked by other users.
There is improved visibility on content items having the biggest impact on conversion rates. The easy ways to track content touchpoints allow marketers to make data-driven decisions and channel their marketing efforts on areas offering the scope of maximum ROI.
Improved Performance
Speed is the name of the game for success. A website which takes longer than three seconds to load runs the risk of losing half of its visitors.
Sitefinity 11.1 introduces out-of-the-box support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), allowing for not just faster load times, but also lower bounce rates and better UX.
Sitefinity 11.1 introduces distributed cache, powered by MemCached, Redis, AWS DynamoDB or SQL Server. This new capability brings to the table easy scalability of Sitefinity CMS deployment.
AMP pages, supported by Sitefinity’s dynamic content types further the cause of flexibility and control, while reducing complexity at the same time.
Sitefinity now also offers one-click deployment and a set of developer tools, speeding time-to-market for web initiatives.
Read more: All you need to know about Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud
Control Over Revision History Versions
While the need for preserving old versions of the database to revert in case of need is expedient, such backups can quickly add to the file size, creating unnecessary bloat with all its ills. Sitefinity 11.1 empowers site admins to limit the number of versions stored in the revision history, through Revision History Settings. This new functionality, added after receiving customer feedback in this direction, is handy to keep database size in check.
Improved Security and Site Management
Concerns of privacy are at an all-time high in today’s age of heightened security risks.
Platform security has always been integral to Sitefinity. Sitefinity 11.1 takes security to a new level, through an out-of-the-box open redirect protection and by offering an easy configuration of security policies and HTTP response headers.
There are considerable improvements in site management as well. The improved System Errors widget offers insights and makes it easy to monitor SiteSync, Load Balancing and Module and Services. Admins can thereby detect potential issues in double-quick time and troubleshoot proactively.
The Health Check service for API custom modules offers a centralized mechanism to verify the vital functions of core Sitefinity CMS functionality and custom module components. Integrating custom Health checks in your module code extend the scope of the Health Check service.
Sitefinity 11.1 also comes with a host of routine updates, such as updates to developer tools, API changes, database changes, and resolving known bugs. Some 20+ bugs have been fixed in SiteSync, and more in SiteMap, events and calendars, authentication, search, and other areas. There is a significant improvement to documentation as well.
Sitefinity has established a reputation for enabling marketers, developers and IT administrators to keep promises and meet deadlines, all while delivering improved performance and user engagement. The new Sitefinity 11.1 continues in that direction and offers much more.
Connect with our Sitefinity Experts to know more on Sitefinity 11.1.
