Developer Extensions (Sitefinity Cloud PaaS)

In a default Sitefinity Cloud setup, Sitefinity CMS is provided as a service that is fully managed by Progress Software (SaaS setup).

In case customizations of the Sitefinity CMS core product are needed, enabling a Developer Extensions toggle will allow for that. This option is available with an alternative PaaS setup, where Sitefinity CMS is provided as a customizable application and is managed by the customer.

The following changes are applied to the Sitefinity Cloud setup when the Developer Extensions toggle is enabled:

• A Sitefinity CMS source code repository is provisioned in the Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal (based on Azure DevOps). This repository contains the source code for the Sitefinity CMS application that is used for your project.
• You can use MVC pages, templates, and widgets.
  

  NOTE: In contrast, you cannot use any MVC capabilities in the default setup where the Developer Extensions toggle is disabled. In the default Sitefinity Cloud setup, frontend development is done using a decoupled ASP.NET Core Renderer or Next.js Renderer.

• The following capabilities become available in the Sitefinity backend UI:
  • Modules & Services
  • Add-ons
  • Labels & Messages
  • Backend pages
  • Email campaigns
  • Comments
• Runtime changes to Dynamic modules from the Sitefinity backend UI are not allowed due to potential conflicts between runtime changes and changes deployed from the source code. Following Continuous Delivery best practices, database schema changes should have a single source of truth. By enabling Developer Extensions toggle, Sitefinity CMS source code becomes the source of truth.
• To ensure consistency across environments and align with Continuous Delivery best practices, Sitefinity configurations are set to read-only file system mode. This means that changes to the file system configuration must be made on the local development environment and then promoted across Sitefinity Cloud environments through the CI.CD pipeline. Starting with version Sitefinity 14.3.8022, customers can specify which configurations, sections, or properties should be editable directly on Sitefinity Cloud environments. The changes are applied at runtime, stored in the database, and can be persisted even if the database is replaced.
  For more information about managing configurations in Sitefinity Cloud, see Manage the configurations.
• Sitefinity CMS application is no longer in evergreen mode where upgrades are handled automatically. Instead, an Automated upgrade feature is available, where NuGet packages and Sitefinity CMS runtime upgrade are handled under the hood, but the resulting changes are submitted as a pull request that the customer must review and approve. Furthermore, any breaking changes due to implementing custom code in Sitefinity CMS should be resolved by the customer.
  For more information, see Automated upgrade. 
• CI.CD pipeline is added to deploy the Sitefinity CMS application to the Sitefinity Cloud environments that are configured for the project.
• Application.Restart pipeline is added to allow for self-service restarts of the Sitefinity CMS application.
• DB.Export pipeline is added to allow for exporting Sitefinity CMS database for a particular Sitefinity Cloud environment to a BACPAC file. 
• DB.Import pipeline is added to allow for importing a BACPAC file into Sitefinity CMS database for a particular Sitefinity Cloud environment.