Developer Extensions (Sitefinity Cloud PaaS)

By default, Sitefinity CMS is provided as a fully managed service in Sitefinity Cloud (SaaS setup).

In cases where complex customizations of the core Sitefinity CMS product are needed, enabling a Developer Extensions toggle will allow for that. In those cases, Sitefinity CMS can be provided as a customizable application that is managed by the customer (PaaS setup).

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

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

  NOTE: In contrast, with the default setup where the Developer Extensions toggle is disabled, MVC capabilities cannot be used and frontend implementation 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, this source of truth becomes the Sitefinity CMS source code.
• To ensure consistency across environments and in line with the best practices for Continuous Delivery, the Sitefinity configurations are in 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 Upgrades feature is provided, 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. 
• 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.