Bringing back the Blog Archive Dropdown

Posted by: on | Wednesday, May 08, 2013     Comments

If you are upgrading your blog site from 3.7 or if you have worked with that version of Sitefinity before, you must be missing the good old-fashioned blog archive control. Believe it or not it is still one of the poorly designed controls in Sitefinity 5.x or 6.x. Hopefully that will change in the future, but meanwhile I created an exact copy of the 3.7 version of that control and made it compatible with the latest Sitefinity 5 or 6
 


And of course, not to forget the (missing) control designer



The code might seem pretty straightforward to you, but ...

Working with configuration files in Sitefinity

Posted by: on | Friday, April 12, 2013     Comments

In this post I’ll explain how you can work with the Sitefinity Configuration classes to retrieve and modify settings. We also will see how we can build these configuration classes ourselves, to store specific settings for our projects and maintain those settings through the Sitefinity UI.

Default configuration classes
Sitefinity features a powerful GUI Configuration editor. Through the configuration files you can control the behavior and the look of your website.

You can configure almost all features programmatically in your code, by using the Configuration Managers that will access and modify the information inside the .config files. These config files ...

How to use the ImageResizer library within Sitefinity

Posted by: on | Thursday, April 11, 2013     Comments

Sometimes the built-in functionality of Sitefinity doesn't quite fit the needs of your projects. I recently was looking for a way to manipulate photos or images on my website.

These were my requirements:

  • Upload one image.
  • Scale it to different sizes using the query string.
  • If the image is too large for the container, crop the image

Sitefinity has the ability to add the ?size=x parameter inside your query string, so when you would request an image like this:

The image would 'scale' down to have a width of 100.

Problem
What if the image doesn't fit the placeholder?...

Caching and compression with web.config transformations (part two)

Posted by: on | Friday, April 05, 2013     Comments

In yesterday's post we looked at different web.config setting to help optimize a Sitefinity website in terms of caching and compression of static content. Naturally you don't want caching to get in the way while developing and constantly having to resort to app-recycles and clearing of the browser cache.

Enter web.config transformations 
a perhaps not-very-well-known feature yet it has been available for a few years.

Simply open your project in Visual Studio 2010 or 2012, right-click your web.config and click "Add Config Transforms".

Nested under your web.config, you'll find 3 new files called web.Debug.config, web.Release Pro.config and web.Release.config.

Web Config Transformations

Each of those ...

Falafel Adds Another Sitefinity Rock Star

Posted by: on | Friday, April 05, 2013     Comments

Capitola CA - 5th April, 2013 - Today Falafel Software is pleased to announce the expansion of its European presence with the addition of another Sitefinity rock star: Daniel Plomp. Daniel is both a Telerik MVP and a Sitefinity Certified Developer whose experience with Telerik products dates back to the original suite of RadControls. In 2008, Daniel founded Konstrui, a software consulting company in the Netherlands focused on delivering Sitefinity web applications. Over the past 5 years, Konstrui delivered more than 25 custom Sitefinity solutions to customers worldwide. Despite his long and successful history with Konstrui, Daniel was excited to ...

How to Create and Register a Theme in Sitefinity.

Posted by: on | Thursday, April 04, 2013     Comments

Here is a simple step by step tutorial on how to create and register a theme in Sitefinity. First go to: Administration > Settings



Then click on : Advanced



Next go to: Appearance > Frontend themes.



Then, name your new theme and enter the path.
If you don't know the path you can copy the path of another theme in your project and replace the last part:



Save Changes

Now you can create the theme, got to: Administration > File structure.
Next, navigate to your App_Themes folder:



Create a new folder, and name your theme.

Inside your new theme folder create ...

Caching and compression of static content with Sitefinity 5

Posted by: on | Thursday, April 04, 2013     Comments

In a perfect world you aim for everything to be cached, except the actual page content to minimize the download time and speed up a visitors user experience.

Some caching might take place on the server, or by the browser but ideally you want to end up with a picture that looks somewhat like this:

Cache optimized Yslow graph Sitefinity sample

And while you can control the caching of the page content itself from within Sitefinity (page>properties) there is no built in method to control static content like javascript, css or images.

In order to achieve this optimum setup, we need to turn to our web.config ...

Bootstrap layouts with Sitefinity 5.4

Posted by: on | Monday, March 18, 2013     Comments

Last week over on the Sitefinity forums a question was asked on whether or not the Twitter Bootstrap framework was (or could be made) compatible with Sitefinity. More specifically, would it work with Sitefinity's drag-n-drop layout editor, Mobile add-on and responsive design. 

Both use a grid system that at first glance seem not to work well together. Take for instance a 33%+67% layout in Sitefinity:

<div runat="server" class="sf_cols">
    <div runat="server" class="sf_colsOut sf_2cols_1_33">
        <div runat="server" class="sf_colsIn sf_2cols_1in_33">
             
        </div...

Announcing Falafel Tornado for Sitefinity

Posted by: on | Friday, March 08, 2013     Comments

Telerik’s Sitefinity CMS has been advancing at a tremendous pace. We’ve loved all the great new features, most notably the support for MVC, the inclusion of Kendo UI and the various client side features that come along with these technologies. After building several Sitefinity widgets that relied heavily on JavaScript, including the wildly successful Falafel Dashboard, a slick HTML5 replacement for Sitefinity’s default, we realized that we were relying on Visual Studio less and less. We eventually reached a point where we didn’t really need Visual Studio at all. So we decided to build Falafel Tornado and empower Sitefinity developers everywhere ...

How to avoid loading jQuery twice with RequireJS

Posted by: on | Thursday, February 28, 2013     Comments

When working with existing sites or content management systems, you have little say on where and when jQuery is loaded. To complicate matters, some pages may have jQuery auto-loaded, and others may not (yay for performance boosts, nay for client-side plugins). Do you bite the bullet and write unmanageable scripts? Or do you believe in RequireJS and dodge the bullet matrix-style? Let me show you how.

With RequireJS, you can asynchronously load JavaScript files when needed. For example, you can write a simple JavaScript module that depends on jQuery like this:

require([
   'jquery'
], function ($) {
   $('body').append(...

Telerik Tools Helped Deliver EventBoard on Time

Posted by: on | Wednesday, February 27, 2013     Comments

Building our EventBoard mobile solution for conferences was no easy task. The solution includes native applications for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8, Windows Azure cloud services, a web based administration portal, and a separate product website.

Thankfully, we were able to use the tools from Telerik in nearly every facet of development. The tools saved us time and money, and now Telerik has featured our development story in a detailed case study. You can read all about what it took to build EventBoard here.

A Widget Builder for Sitefinity (Preview)

Posted by: on | Tuesday, February 26, 2013     Comments

In a previous post, I showed how to create JavaScript widgets in Sitefinity using shared content blocks. This enabled you to create widgets like image carousels and blog rotators on-the-fly without having to compile or deploy. It was so useful in production and we received a lot of good feedback from the community. This is why we felt it deserved to evolve more and began creating a full-fledged Widget Builder for Sitefinity!

The idea is simple… when writing a web-based widget or control for a website, you need a mixture of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. A portion sometimes goes ...

Falafel Strengthens Sitefinity Team

Posted by: on | Sunday, February 17, 2013     Comments

Capitola CA - 18th February, 2013 - Today Falafel Software is pleased to announce that two additional Sitefinity experts are joining the team: Jochem Bökkers and Josh Morales. Jochem and Josh are two of the most respected names in the Sitefinity development community and each brings in-depth Sitefinity knowledge and their own unique technical expertise to the Falafel family.

“It is a pleasure and an honor to add two established software engineers to the Falafel family.” said Lino Tadros, Chairman & CEO of Falafel Software. “Josh and Jochem are hard core Sitefinity architects that will be a tremendous help to ...

Taming Sitefinity's Navigation Control

Posted by: on | Tuesday, February 12, 2013     Comments

Navigation is one of the most important functions in any CMS. It is the doors you scatter throughout your site so your visitors can get around. It is no wonder there is an entire eco-system of menus... drop downs, horizontals, verticals, responsive design, tabs, panelbar, tree-view, content slide-outs, and the list keeps growing. This is one the most common requests for any web designer or developer. Just search the Sitefinity forums and you will see :)

The problem with using the Sitefinity navigation widget is that you have little control over the HTML that is rendered for the menu. ...

Falafel Strong Start To An Exciting 2013

Posted by: on | Friday, February 01, 2013     Comments

Wow, I can't believe 2012 is gone already, not only that, but January of 2013 is over.  January has been a tremendous month for the company, the best January ever in the 10 years history of Falafel Software Inc.

We started the year very strong with multiple new accounts in the USA, Europe, Far East and Australia.

FalafelCON2013Sitefinity continues to be a very strong business for Falafel and we continue to assemble the best Engineering team in the industry to meet the consulting and architecture demands for our Sitefinity Business.  Great announcements coming soon!

SmartBear's relationship continues to flourish ...

Falafel Software Announces FalafelCon

Posted by: on | Tuesday, January 29, 2013     Comments

Falafel Software is pleased to announce FalafelCon 2013, the new annual training conference for software developers.

Capitola CA - 29th January, 2013 - Falafel Software’s new annual training conference, FalafelCon, will take place at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus on June 10 and 11th, offering software developers four co-located events and 40 technical sessions to choose from.

FalafelCon’s four co-located events include Web and Mobile specific events that explore cutting edge software development techniques with Microsoft development tools. Advanced development topics include Azure tips and tricks, cross platform mobile development, NFC with Windows Phone, Windows 8 sensor integration and ...

Falafel Launches New Sitefinity 5.3 Website

Posted by: on | Wednesday, January 02, 2013     Comments

Its 2013, so out with the old and in with the new! Over the holidays, the Falafel team was hard at work preparing our new Sitefinity 5.3 website for launch. The new site is a complete redesign inspired by Windows 8 that features a tile-based, color-coded theme to make navigating the site and finding the exact Falafel Software content you were looking for easier than ever before.

Under the hood, the Sitefinity 5.3 engine and MVC based widgets have given the site a huge performance boost over past incarnations. Fans of Sitefinity will also recognize and appreciate that the Falafel ...

A Big Dose of Sitefinity from Falafel

Posted by: on | Thursday, October 18, 2012     Comments

**Update - To get Lino's slides from the Sitefinity and Beyond performance session go here.

Today, Falafel Software CEO Lino Tadros is speaking at the Sitefinity and Beyond Conference in Boston, but that is only a part of our big Sitefinity news.

Customers tend to approach Falafel for the hard stuff. Performance problems, integrations, custom modules, often much more than just a pretty user interface. Having consulted on over 100 of these complex Sitefinity solutions, Lino is well suited to deliver the talk on “Deploying High Performing and Scalable Web Solutions”, but it’s his energy and comedic style that ...

Modular JavaScript Design with Sitefinity and RequireJS

Posted by: on | Wednesday, October 03, 2012     Comments

What if I were to tell you that you can build modular client-side applications in Sitefinity and also not worry about JavaScript dependencies or conflicts? This should be music to your ears if you do any JavaScript development in Sitefinity.

First thing is you need to have solid understanding of what the Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) is. Essentially, it is a standard for defining self-contained modules that loads dependencies asynchronously on demand. I suggest you take 10 minutes to read my blog post about this with examples. This will permanently change the way you think about JavaScript development. Once ...

Sitefinity ShadowNav Widget Updated

Posted by: on | Friday, September 21, 2012     Comments

Falafel’s popular Sitefinity ShadowNav Widget has been updated with a few new features and enhancements.

 

Internationalization Support.

If a user with comes to your site and has a matching language code for a page in your ShadowNav, the menu will display in that language. If all your pages are not translated then there’s a possibility to get mixed languages in the ShadowNav.

 

Here is a sample of how it works and looks.

 

Pages in the system and their translations

image

Note that the default language is English and some pages have been translated into Spanish.

 

This is ...