Web Forms widgets

Overview

Apart from MVC widgets, in Sitefinity CMS you can work with Web Forms widgets, which technically speaking are ASP.NET controls

Web Forms widgets are controls which you drop on the page (in page content editing mode) and configure them to display already existing content. You can configure the widgets to display different parts of the content by combining widgets and by tagging and classifying content.

There are special types of widgets that serve specific purposes. For example, field controls are used to read and write value from a single field. Utility widgets, on the other hand, are not part of a specific module and do not display content from the CMS in the frontend. They help administrators, designers, or developers to perform their jobs. For example, the ResourceLinks widget enables you to add resources like JavaScript file or CSS file.

For more information, see Widgets: Add content and functionality to pages.

Set widget properties

Widgets have properties that you set per widget and that modify the functionality of the particular widget. If you want to display blog posts using the Blog posts widget, you need to tell the widget which blog to use, how many posts to display on one page, and how to display them. You configure a widget through its widget designer, that is, in the Edit mode of widgets. For more information, see Web Forms: Create widget designers.

Change the appearance

With widget templates you can change the look of the build-in Sitefinity CMS widgets – Blog postsNewsEventsGeneric contentImagesVideos, etc. For more information, see Web Forms: Widget templates.

Customize and create

Apart from Sitefinity CMS built-in Web Forms widgets, you can also create your own widgets and use them side by side with the default ones. That is, implement new widget to specifically serve your business case needs and functionality requirements by implementing your own custom logic. You can create new custom and user widgets.

You can customize the following types of widgets:

  • Built-in Sitefinity CMS widgets, such as Blog posts and News, Field widgets, and Sitefinity CMS specific widgets
  • ASP.NET standard widgets, such as HyperLink, GridView, XmlDataSource
  • User widgets
  • Custom widgets
  • Custom module widgets, such as user or custom widgets, which are registered in Sitefinity CMS by the module to provide frontend functionality for the module.
  • Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
  • Telerik RadControls for Silverlight
  • Telerik RadControls for Silverlight by properly wrapping them in an ASP.NET widget

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