This week, Telerik released a new version of its web and mobile CMS, Sitefinity 6.1. Significant to the new Sitefinity 6.1 release is a new desktop application and lightweight digital asset management (DAM) components. The new DAM functionality is geared toward the business user who is constantly updating, changing and manipulating rich digital media assets. In addition to new lightweight DAM functionality, Sitefinity 6.1 continues to deliver as a leading Mobile CMS now with responsive navigation widgets enabling touch-friendly navigation for mobile devices using predefined CSS.
“The Sitefinity 6.1 release is all about delivering a great experience for creating and editing digital assets,” said Martin Kirov, Executive Vice President, Sitefinity, Telerik. “The new lightweight DAM solution is complimented by a desktop app which enables content writers to quickly find and edit digital assets without the need to navigate to them in the WCM backend. The release also delivers a responsive navigation widget, selective sync of assets between multiple environments and a ton of developer goodies.”
According to Telerik, analysts are seeing a nearly 60 percent year-over-year increase in DAM-related client inquiries. These users require the ability to quickly and easily do their job, without having to jump through hoops for the most mundane tasks such as making minor edits to an image, creating and editing a document, searching for a video, or editing a news item or post. Sitefinity 6.1 introduces this lightweight DAM functionality in the form of a desktop application synced to the CMS to make digital assets more easy to discover, easily tagged and meta-tagged, lower re-creation costs and maintain brand consistency.
Besides digital asset management, Sitefinity 6.1 provides a host of new features and fixes since the previous version of Sitefinity. When looking at the change notice, some of the more significant new features and improvements that jump out of us include new developer-friendly features providing selective site syncing, mobile-friendly navigation, a geo-location API, and meta-tagging.
Web Publishing Without a Web Browser
Sitefinity’s new lightweight DAM functionality empowers users with a Desktop Publisher to make live changes to documents without the need to download and re-upload. Microsoft Word, Excel, plain text, and RTF file types that reside in Sitefinity Libraries or connected SharePoint instances, can be edited live on the desktop. Once published, saved changes go straight to the website or into the workflow approval process established by the Web Administrator. This lightweight DAM feature provides dramatic efficiency, as well as protection, since the change history is tracked with complete version control in the CMS. Additionally, with the desktop publisher, authors don’t need access to, or training in, the CMS backend. It's a fast, worry-free way to author content that still retains all Sitefinity workflow settings.
Using the image editor of Sitefinity’s Desktop Application, business users can execute basic image manipulation like resizing, cropping, inserting text, adjusting hue, inserting colors or sharpening. This powerful tool enables users to reduce the costs of using an agency to edit images and also saves them time. Sitefinity 6.1 also comes with a new Thumbnail Generator that optimizes the storage of images in the Sitefinity Media Library for faster performance and greater scalability.
Selective Sync For Development and Production
With Sitefinity 6.1, Web Administrators have complete control over the synchronization of development and production environments. The Selective Site Sync feature moves beyond content types down to specific content items. Customers have the ability to select precisely what they want synced whether specific pages or language versions. New widget templates and changes to existing ones can now be automatically synchronized.
Mobile-Friendly Navigation, Geo-location API, and Content Blocks
This new release of Sitefinity enables touch-friendly navigation using predefined CSS so developers can easily adapt or create new mobile-friendly templates. Sitefinity 6.1 also features an improved navigation widget that enables developers and designers to customize the look and behavior of Sitefinity Navigation. Because lighter markup allows for easier customized styling, developers are able to generate vertical, horizontal or hierarchical navigation based on a website’s site map.
The new Geo-location API makes it easy to create a store locator, or anything with an address. Also, developers have the ability to specify a wrapper element or none at all for Content Blocks. This enables search engines and other services reading the page to derive meaning from new types of semantic tags describing addresses, phone numbers, author and articles.