generic-page

Sitefinity Release Notes

Sitefinity CMS 11.1.6750 (BETA)

September 17, 2018

Sitefinity CMS 11.1 Beta Instructions 

Dear Sitefinity CMS customers and partners! We are excited to announce the first Beta release of Sitefinity CMS 11.1. We plan to have one more Beta release prior to GA, due to the timing of availability of new features. The Beta program is expected to continue from Sept 17 through Oct 20. Below you will find the details about what is included in the planned Beta releases, how to obtain the releases, and how to communicate with us in case you encounter any issues or have  any recommendations. 

What is new in the Beta1 release (Sept 17 2018): 

  • Expanded and improved review and approval workflow. With the new options, you can define workflows up to 3 levels deep for an arbitrary set of pages or content types, tied to a specific site or language. An editor can add a summary note when submitting for a review, which is provided both in a notification email to approvers and in a sidebar, based on the history of the item. Notifications are improved across the board (submissions, approvals, and rejections). Reviewers with skip privileges can now reject content as well.  Learn more...

  • Improvements in the concurrent editing of multilingual content enable editor teams to work on translations of the same content simultaneously, as now Sitefinity locks the content items individually for each language. Additionally, related content items can also be translated concurrently, directly from the content editor. Learn more... 

  • The new content creation UI now fully supports RTL languages (Arabic and others), automatically adjusts the alignment, and even allows mixing RTL and LTR languages in the same phrase, with custom alignment. Learn more... 

  • The new content UI now supports content location search, to help analyze where on a site a specific content item is used or referenced. Learn more... 

  • Distributed Cache (using Redis, MemCache, SQL Server, AWS DyanoDB) significantly improves the performance of your Sitefinity website in NLB configurations. The cached content will decrease startup time of any of the Sitefinity servers and will enable organizations to scale up faster with additional web servers decreasing the warm-up time. Learn more... 

  • All Sitefinity servers in Network load balancing (NLB) will now share the same ETag, to improve the performance of content delivery. Learn more... 

  • Support for Bootstrap 4. All the goodies in Bootstrap 4 are now available to Sitefinity frontend developers. In addition, Bootstrap 4 resource package includes accessibility improvements, like better keyboard and screen readers support. Frontend assets build infrastructure uses npm scripts instead of Grunt. Image sprites are replaced with Font Awesome solid SVG icon sprites. We will continue to support Bootstrap 3. Learn more...   

  • The System Status Widget on the Sitefinity dashboard displays critical system errors related to NLB setup and Site Sync , thus enabling IT Administrators (Admin roles) to quickly detect and troubleshoot issues. Learn more... 

  • The Open ID connector improvements enable IT Administrators to map external authentication provider claims such as email, first name, and last name to Sitefinity users. Learn more... 
    This enables support for Azure AD and Azure AD B2B, and in some scenarios - for Azure AD B2C. The email address can now be set as optional via the mandatory email address setting. The setting is applicable only for authentication with external providers, such as Facebook, Google, and Azure AD. Learn more... 

  • The geolocation database is updated to the latest version (GeoLite2 City), which ensures continuous service as the vendor updated their databases. Learn more... 

  • Personalization by query string uses URL parameters of the request to effectively deliver specific content to visitors, based on sources of page visits and campaigns. Learn more... 

  • Analyze the impact of your website content by tracking content touchpoints in Sitefinity CMS. Understand which content items have the biggest impact on conversion rates and focus and optimize your marketing efforts. Learn more... 

  • Get more relevant search result utilizing the improved Azure search. Now the search results are ordered based on @score parameter.  

  • Control whether content age is considered when Lucene search @score is calculated. Learn more... 

  • Enhanced control of your website crawling process by search engines. Public user comments are now screened and a rel="nofollow" attribute is appended for specific outgoing links that are not part of the website domain. Learn more...

  • Ability to enable and disable OpenGraph properties on widget level, enabling control over the order of loading OpenGraph properties. Learn more...

    Ability to enable and disable SEO meta title and meta description on widget level, enabling control over the order of loading SEO properties. Learn more...

How do I get the Beta release? 

Only current Sitefinity CMS customers with active maintenance are eligible to participate in the Beta program. Sitefinity CMS 11.1 Beta is provided to customers via their customer accounts. To obtain the Beta installation, login to Your Account and switch to the Beta tab page, where you can find the download link to the Sitefinity CMS installer and the Beta license file, valid for 30 days.  

When you install the Beta version, as usual, you need to accept the Terms and Conditions for the Beta program as a click-through agreement. It will be wise for us to emphasize that we do not recommend updating your production environment to the Beta release, nor will we support upgrades from the Beta versions. However, you can certainly use our Export/Import option to recreate a version of your site for working with the Beta version. 

If you are using NuGet, Nuget packages are available on http://nuget.sitefinity.com/ (use pre-release tag) 11.1.6750.0. For this case, please contact us for a Beta license at sitefinity11.1beta@progress.com

How do I communicate with the Sitefinity CMS team regarding Beta? 

We have set up a dedicated email alias, sitefinity11.1beta@progress.com, for all Beta users to directly contact the Sitefinity CMS product team regarding Sitefinity CMS 11.1 Beta topics. We will respond to every single email.  Also, please feel free to initiate threads in the Sitefinity CMS Google+ group for broader discussions concerning the Beta program, which we will also monitor but keep in mind that response to these  threads is more or less ad-hoc. 

What do we expect from Beta participants? 

The Sitefinity CMS team is very grateful to all participants who will dedicate their time to help us validate our new release. This is a feature-rich release, and it will be impossible for Beta users to examine all the new features and updates. Therefore, we recommend that you focus on those (few) that are most applicable to your current or anticipated usage of Sitefinity CMS. We have been in contact with a good number of customers and partners to review the features in the design phase, and we expect these users to focus on the features that we have discussed, as that fits their context best. 

It would be ideal if you, as a Beta user, prepare a Beta report at the end of the Beta period. This will inform us which new features you evaluated, whether everything worked in accordance with your expectations, and whether you have any further suggestions regarding the features. In any case, should you need to communicate anything to us as the Beta program goes on, please use the Beta program email. 

We will also be sending a Beta survey at the completion of this Beta program to all of you who downloaded the Beta. Thus, you can provide us with any valuable feedback, comments, and suggestions about the Beta features. 


Regards,
Progress Sitefinity Team

CTA-banner
Progress Sitefinity

Meaningful engagement, elevated experiences delivered with ease.
Set your sites on Sitefinity.