Spooky Season in Sitefinity: 5 Useful Tricks and 5 Unexpected Treats

Some of the best CMS treats are practical ones: fewer repetitive tasks, more relevant experiences and useful AI assistance right where your team works. This Halloween, we’re taking a tour of five Progress Sitefinity CMS capabilities that can make everyday content work a little easier.

So, grab your virtual pumpkin bucket, and get ready to go trick-or-treating through Sitefinity.

Door 1: The Curse of the Never-Ending Content List

The Trick: Break the cycle with bulk content operations.

There’s a special kind of horror reserved for content editors. Fifty articles need publishing, an old campaign needs retiring, and somehow, you’ve become the person responsible. One item at a time. Open, edit, save, repeat.

But there is a way to break the curse. With bulk content operations, you can select multiple items from supported content lists and perform actions such as publishing or unpublishing them together.

The Treat: Less repetitive administration and more time for work that doesn’t involve endless clicking.

Door 2: One Page, Many Masks

The Trick: Show different visitors a different side of the same page.

Not everything is quite as it appears behind Door 2. Two visitors arrive at the same page, but what greets them could be entirely different.

Picture a technology event. Developers want technical sessions, while marketing leaders are more interested in customer experience and business outcomes. You could build separate landing pages for each audience or let one page wear more than one mask.

That’s where widget personalization comes in, allowing you to create different versions of supported widgets for configured visitor segments. Developers might see a technical workshop promoted, while marketing leaders see a strategy session in the same space.

The Treat: More relevant content for different audiences, without maintaining separate pages for every segment.

Door 3: The Secret Identity

The Trick: Unmask your content with structured data.

Every good Halloween disguise conceals an identity. Unfortunately, your website content can be just as mysterious to search engines and AI systems.

Enter Content Markup for AI, which helps authorized users lift the mask. By configuring Schema.org properties and mapping them to content fields, you can make details such as article titles, authors and publication dates easier for machines to understand, without having to manually add technical markup to every piece of content.

The Treat: More consistent structured data that helps search engines and AI retrieval systems understand your content. Mask off. Identity revealed.

Door 4: The Door That Opens Another Door

The Trick: Set other systems in motion with Sitefinity service hooks.

Imagine you’ve just published an article, but another system needs to know it’s live. Rather than relying on someone to pass the message along, Sitefinity service hooks can respond to supported events, such as publishing content, by sending information to a configured external endpoint.

That endpoint could trigger a notification workflow or alert another application that new content is available. The receiving system and integration need to be configured, secured and tested, but the handover can then happen automatically.

The Treat: One door opens. Another responds. Fewer manual handovers, less repetitive work and connected systems that can respond when something happens in Sitefinity.

Door 5: The Ghost in the Editor

The Trick: Summon an AI specialist for specific editorial tasks.

There’s something lurking inside the content editor. Thankfully, this particular presence is more helpful than haunting.

Now custom AI agents can be configured for specific editorial tasks, giving content teams access to AI assistance tailored to the work they’re doing. Rather than relying on a general purpose assistant, teams can create agents with instructions for particular content types, tasks and editorial requirements.

Imagine an agent keeping a watchful eye on product descriptions, suggesting improvements to clarity, consistency and tone without editors having to leave their work. An agent could also help review articles against editorial guidelines or suggest ways to make content easier to understand.

These suggestions can appear directly within configured content fields, allowing editors to review the recommendations and decide what to use before making changes. Administrators control access to agents and their tools, and DX Assistant asks users to approve proposed changes before creating, updating or deleting Sitefinity content.

The Treat: More consistent content, less time spent on routine editorial checks and AI assistance that appears where it’s needed, rather than mysteriously disappearing into another tool. A ghostwriter with boundaries. Just the sort of presence you want haunting your CMS.

One Last Treat

And here concludes our trick-or-treat trail through Sitefinity. Five doors, five tricks and a pumpkin bucket full of treats worth keeping long after Halloween.

Along the way, shortcuts have been discovered hiding in plain sight along with AI agents that can do considerably more than rattle a few chains.

And the sweetest treat of all: less time spent on repetitive tasks, more control over your content and a few clever ways to make everyday work easier.

Wondering where AI could make a difference for your team? Watch AI Your Way: The Path to a Standout Digital Experience to explore how you can use native AI, extend your CMS or integrate your preferred tools. You don’t have to go all in at once.

Happy Halloween! May your treats be plentiful, your tricks be useful and your CMS never come back to haunt you.

Fancy another round of trick-or-treating?

Request a demo of Progress Sitefinity and see what other tricks are waiting to be discovered.