The release of Sitefinity 7.0 brought with it a ton of improvements and new functionality. That means awesome new features for your sites! After some feedback from you and a bit of brainstorming on our end, we’ve managed to come up with a pretty impressive list of practical uses for some of those new features.
Let’s continue on from the last post.
Media Fields as Custom Fields to Built-in Modules
In the past, related media fields were only available for use with data types created in Module Builder. That’s been changed as of Sitefinity 7.0. Now, we’re able to create even more relationships between out-of-the-box modules and images, videos, and documents.
Alternative Video Files for HTML5 & Mobile Browsers
There was a bit of a browser war even when it comes to video formats. To summarize it – there is no video format supported by all mobile and desktop browsers. There will be versions of Android that will skip on MP4 where other versions will not support Ogg. The reasons for this are political, but the developer implications are that you cannot just get away with one format. Well add the fallback as a custom field, and let the template handle the rest.
Specify Alternate Hover Images
Relating images to other images can be used to get creative with alternate hover images without needing to build additional widgets or editing the HTML of a content block.
Heading and Thumbnail Images
At last! You can now use out of the box selectors to choose images then use those images as thumbnails or special headers.
HTML5 Video Player
Flash had a good run…Silverlight too, but if you want your video content to be viewable by the widest possible audience then it’s time to switch over to HTML5 video players. The improvements to Telerik Sitefinity video libraries, along with the HTML5 video player, make the following things available out-of-the-box.
Custom Video Thumbnails
Thumbnails can have a big impact on whether or not someone watches your videos, really. Use a still image taken directly from your videos or create and upload custom ones then watch your view counts rise!
YouTube Videos and Playlists
If you use YouTube to host your video content, you can still use the improved video widget to display them on your site. (Hint: Look in the Advanced widget properties.)
Control the Video Element via JavaScript and CSS
You can style the HTML5 video player to match the look and feel of your site. Even cooler still, their behavior can be controlled from custom JavaScript.
Related Content
You may remember “web rings”; groups of websites that linked to each other in order to help increase traffic and help visitors find other content they might be interested in. Related content helps websites retain visitors by doing the same type of thing...only they stay on your website as opposed to being flung half way across the Internet. Here are a few ideas.
Related Blogs and Other Contextual Links
Don’t force your visitors to dig through pages of links returned from search results. Relating content lets you deliberately display contextually relevant content offerings to your audience.
Associate Events with any Content Type
Writing blog posts about events you’re hosting? Create relationships between the two and help drive visitors from your blog to information about those events…or the other way around.
Associate Sessions and Speakers with Events
Here’s another example of using related content to create meaningful relationships between previously isolated items.
Ratings and Reviews
Ratings and reviews are a great way to gather feedback about the content on your site. Content can be anything like products, blog posts, news items, and even pages.
Collaboration on Internal Content for Intranet
Using ratings and reviews is a simple way for teams to collaborate on content.
Ratings on Blog Posts to Improve Engagement
Ratings, along with analytics, help you to gain a clearer picture about what content your visitors enjoy the most.
Ratings on Other Content Types
"Other content types" could be anything! Real Estate Properties, Recipes, Tutorials, KB Articles, Etc.
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In the next (and final) post of this series, we’ll look at personalization by role and a few other miscellaneous enhancements that you may not have heard about yet.
Have you done something awesome with Sitefinity 7.0? Let us know in the comments below. If you haven’t already checked out the new release, what are you waiting for? Try it out for free and let us know about your experience.
Cheers!