We were very excited last week with the release of Sitefinity 5.  It has been running fast and solid on several machines (servers) here at Falafel Software.

One blemish though was the major breaking change to the authentication of the REST APIs.  If you are upgrading from a 4.x site to 5.0, no worry that change will not affect you (not right away at least), but if you are setting up a brand new Sitefinity 5 Web Application, the default authentication has changed from FORMS authentication to CLAIMS authentication which will break any code previously written using the REST API ...

There has been many features released in Sitefinity within the last year, but one of my most favorite is Module Builder! If you have read my previous blog post about migrating modules from Sitefinity 3.7 to 4.0, you must have been overwhelmed with the 8000+ lines of code it took to create a module in Sitefinity 4. And most of the it was cookie-cutter code from module to module.

Now with Sitefinity 4 and 5's Module Builder, you can create modules without writing any code! If you have manually created modules for Sitefinity 4, you should be asking ...

It has been over a year now that our team has been working with Sitefinity 4.x, from the first release of 4.0 through the other 9 releases and patches through 2011.

To say the least it has been a very painful year for Falafel to work with Sitefinity 4 and I can add that it has been equally or even more painful for the Sitefinity team at Telerik to go through this painful year with numerous punches from customers, media and experts all the over the place, but most painful probably from their own partners.

From the pricing change ...

In this video, I wish to demonstrate the ability of changing the default workflow in Sitefinity using Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0.  The video is based on the code provided by the Sitefinity SDK here

In the following video, I will demonstrate the ability to do the same from a class library referenced from outside of the Sitefinity Project file system as well.

Please let us know if this video was useful to you and if you would like to see more information and demos on Custom Workflows in the future.

Capitola, CA December 21th, 2011 - Falafel Software and Iciniti today announced a partnership that will bundle Sitefinity training from Falafel with every sale of Iciniti’s eCommSuite 5 package.

For over 13 years, Iciniti Store has allowed customers to create customized shopping carts that are fully integrated with Sage Accpac ERP. Now, with the introduction of eCommSuite 5, customers can use Telerik’s Sitefinity CMS to manage all of their web content, not just their shopping cart. To ensure that every eCommSuite customer is comfortable working in Sitefinity, Iciniti turned to Telerik’s long time training partner, Falafel Software.

“Iciniti has created ...

The “Email Campaign” module of Sitefinity 4 is what you would use to create email campaigns, manage lists of subscribers, and test AB campaigns. If you haven’t used this module, you can get more information on the Sitefinity website by clicking this link:

http://www.sitefinity.com/40/help/developers-guide/sitefinity-essentials-modules-working-with-email-campaigns.html

While this is a very useful module in Sitefinity 4 out of the box, I’m going to show you how you could add some additional functionality to this module. For the purposes of this Blog, let’s assume you would like to be able to export your Mailing Lists to a csv file. The way we will ...

So disappointed in this web site www.amplicate.com.  They are dishonest and falsely represent people’s opinion without their permission or approval.

Few days ago after the release of Sitefinity 4.3, I shared my opinion on twitter about a feature that is still not implemented in 4.3  while using the hashtags #sitefinity and #fail to represent my opinion that it is a shame that these minimal features are still not fixed or implemented in 4.3.

I am a big supporter of Sitefinity, love the product and their team and have nothing but respect and appreciation for Telerik as a company and ...

In a previous blog I demonstrated how you can create custom profile fields and access them in code. When creating the custom profile field there is one common setting that seems to be missing from the properties of your new profile fields. That is a ‘read-only’ checkbox. While there is no checkbox available to make these read-only, it can be done. In fact, you have the ability to set your field to read-only differently in all the places this field shows up on your website (i.e. backend, frontend, creating and editing).

Here’s how you do it:

Assuming you have previously ...

In this Blog I’m going to talk about some of the settings that are available to you in the Sitefinity Administrator for controlling password strength requirements in Sitefinity 4.

Are you a Falafel or a Telerik fan? We need you…
 
If you are a Falafel or a Telerik fan, then do us a favor. Vote for Telerik in this year’s DevProConnections Awards: http://svy.mk/nDygA2
 
We are very proud to see that our partners from Telerik have been nominated in a staggering 20 categories in this year’s DevProConnections Community Awards, a testament to how comprehensive Telerik's approach to software development solutions has become. From Visual Studio add-ins like JustCode to our CMS of choice, Sitefintiy, Telerik’s  best-of-breed solutions have helped Falafel's team deliver better software, faster.
 
Here's what ...

There are times when you need to dynamically create filters for displaying content items in Sitefinity 4. You may be determining the filter from the URL query string parameters or session. So how do you pass in your filter? We will work with the NewsView control, but this should work for any content-based item.

There is a FilterExpression property on the content:

The question remains - what expressions are valid and what kind of syntax to use? Instead of giving you a single example of what works, here is a list of filter expressions that you can use. ENJOY!

You can access Sitefinity Form entries using GetValue(), but you may want to chug through new form columns without knowing what they are named. In the blog How to access Sitefinity Form Response Data Programmatically, Gary Campbell explores syntax that looks something like this:

You need to know "MyFormColumnName" to get the form entry value. Telerik hasn't surfaced methods to snag these easily, but using LINQ we can spelunk into a form's description and rip out what we want.

Get All Form Columns

To get all form columns including ...

In Sitefinity 4.1 there are some new features for helping to manage the fields for your website users in the Administrator. There are also new page controls available in the “Users” section of the Page widgets that you can drop on your pages to collect and view the user data (see below). For this blog I will show you the steps for adding a custom field to your user profile data in case you need to store some additional data for each of the users in your site.

To start with this process, from the Sitefinity Administrator, choose "Administration" ...

The task at hand is more complicated than it sounds. Normally you would just generate a button in Paypal and paste the form code to your website. If it were only that easy. Try doing this in any ASP.NET website and you will run into a big problem... no nested forms allowed!

The issue here is that ASP.NET websites are wrapped in a single form by architectural design. This is what the folks at Microsoft came up with when dreaming of ASP.NET. This sounds like a good idea - wrap the website in a form so EVERYTHING gets posted back... ...

In my last Blog, I provided some code to get the response data from a form and show it in a list box. I know at least one person had the question, "Where do I put this code?". That's actually a very good question and made me take a step back and think about website developers just getting started with Sitefinity 4.0. Sitefinity is quite powerful and using only the Sitefinity Administrator you can do many things. However, if you need to do custom coding that requires using the Sitefinity API, I'll provide detailed steps to show you how ...

In this tutorial, I’ll show how to build a custom form control for Sitefinity 4.0 from scratch, while showing each step of the process and explaining some of the main gotchas you may encounter on the way. You can download the final project source code here. The tutorial is fairly long and is broken up into 7 parts in order to make it more digestible:

Part 1: Intro to the Form Module

Part 2: Setting up the Project

Part 3: Populate the Control Template (NamedTextBox.ascx)

Part 4: Populate the Client Script File (NamedTextBox.js)

Part 5: Populate the Class File ...

If you've started working with Form's in Sitefinity 4.0, you probably already know that your response data is persisted for you in your Sitefinity database in a table the Sitefinity engine created for you automatically. Let's suppose you'd like to get access to that data in your code-behind to use it somewhere else in your website.

The first step in this process is to determine the form name and your form widget's underlying fieldname. For more information on setting the names of the columns or finding the table in your database where the form's response data is stored, you should ...

In this video, building a new Template in Sitefinity 4.0 SP1 is demonstrated using a sample template from FreeCssTemplates.org, using Visual Studio 2010.

I demonstrated the reason behind the new location of “WebSiteTemplates” under App_Data and the easiest way to perform the transfer of an existing non-Sitefinity template to Sitefinity 4.0

 Hope you enjoy!

This blog will show you how to setup your Textboxes on a Sitefinity form with input validation. If you've been working with previous versions of Sitefinithy the first question you may have is "wait a minute, Sitefinity has built-in forms?". Yes, Sitefinity 4.0 includes a new Form Builder, which allows you to create form modules that can be shared in multiple pages of your website.  They are very simple to setup and once you have created a form, you just drop a form control on a page and point it to your form. In addition, Sitefinity will automatically persist ...

It has been a month since Sitefinity 4.0 hit the streets. Many miss the features and marketplace extensions for 3.7 that took years to ripen. That’s why today I am going to show you how to migrate your custom modules from Sitefinity 3.7 to 4.0.

For our 3.7 custom module, I will use the Contacts Module sample Ivan built. We should have a Contacts Module for Sitefinity 4.0 by the end of this article. Let us first look at the 3.7 graphic interface and project structure that we will start from:

Notice in the sample there is a completely separate project for ...