What's New in Sitefinity Thunder 1.1.3.0

We last looked at the new features in Sitefinity Thunder 1.1.1.0 and since then, the Thunder team has made some fantastic updates and additions to the extension. Let's take a look at what you can do with the latest version of Sitefinity Thunder.

Improved Widget Designers

When creating a Widget Designer for an existing widget, Sitefinity Thunder now detects the data type of each field to better assist you when building your control's designer.

The generated code for the Image/Video/Document selectors have also seen some improvements.

Dynamic Content Selector

In addition, Thunder now allows you to choose a new Dynamic Content selector when creating a widget control designer. This allows you to select individual content items from your custom modules built with the Module Builder.

You simply need to pass in the full dynamic type of your module.

In this example, I've recreated the Press Release module from the Creating a Press Release Getting Started Guide to demonstrate how you can select a Press Release in your control designer.

Just as with the Page, Image, and other selectors, the Guid for the content item is persisted to your control, allowing you to do whatever processing is needed with the item with that ID.

Form Field Control Item Template

Similar to the last release's ability to create Custom Fields for your Sitefinity Modules, the latest Thunder now allows you to create Custom Form Fields for the Sitefinity Forms Module. This allows you to accept custom input values to your Sitefinity forms.

For a walkthrough the process of creating a custom form control, see the getting started guide Creating Custom Form Field Controls or take a look at the video below.

Custom Module Item Template

There is also a new item template for generating a custom Sitefinity module.

Thunder will generate a simple module as well as a sample configuration class to get you started. The module class includes all the code necessary to register and install your custom module, and also takes care of registering the module in Sitefinity so it is immediately available for use.

Sitefinity Configuration Item Template

Speaking of configuration, there is also a new Sitefinity Configuration item template. This allows you to save custom settings in your own configuration class using the existing Sitefinity Administration Advanced Settings manager.

Be sure to register the configuration either in your custom module's initialization, or in Global.asax (as described in the Reading and modifying configuration section) to make it available to Sitefinity.

Download Thunder

Sitefinity Thunder continues to be a must-have tool for any Sitefinity developer, with each release packing on the features to make developing with Sitefinity a breeze. Be sure to grab the latest version of Thunder and as always, be sure to share your feedback with us!