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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A couple of months ago I wrote a column on how to use jQuery and other JavaScript libraries in Sitefinity. It was elegant and fairly simple. The sad news is, it's no longer valid for Sitefinity 5.3. The good news is, there is always a better way !

Here's how I managed to modify my base master page class to include the JavaScript libraries as well as the built-in jQuery that comes with Sitefinity without having to worry about the fully qualified name of the resource.

Every year, October kicks off a very busy season at Falafel : “Conference Season”. Multiple members of the team travel across the country and around world to share their expertise on a number of technologies. All Falafel Software team members spend their days, and often their nights, helping design and build cutting edge solutions for our customers. Their technical presentations draw from these real world experiences and are assembled, practiced, and presented in what little spare time they have. That’s why we call them “Rock Stars”.

This weekend at Silicon Valley Code Camp, Falafel’s entire team from around the ...

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 ...

Falafel just released a video explaining how the Dashboard works, how to install it, configure it and display it instead of the built in Sitefinity Dashboard.  The video is embedded below or you are welcome to view it on YouTube.

Get the Falafel DashBoard for Sitefinity MVC.

It is with great pleasure that we, at Falafel Software, introduce to you the Falafel Dashboard. 

With the latest release of Sitefinity 5.1, we were all treated to a great feature and a major change in the ability of the framework by introducing MVC in Sitefinity.

It was a clean and robust implementation that Falafel Software jumped on the opportunity and started to think about add-ons and plug-ins that will add value and benefit all Sitefinity content shareholders everywhere.

The current Dashboard in Sitefinity 4, 5 and 5.1 is pretty much a placeholder in our opinion.  It can show a ...

Another teaser to show where we are going with all the possibilities with the new Falafel Dashboard for Sitefinity 5.1

Please feel free to comment here to request more features, input, must haves, etc…

 

We continue to be very excited about the new release of 5.1 and the world of possibilities it opened to build robust widgets and modules in MVC with the razor syntax

 

JavaScript has been turning up everywhere. With nearly every desktop and mobile web browser on the planet coming equipped with a JavaScript engine, the language has become the de facto standard for client side code. There is just no better way to guarantee your audience can access the full feature set of your application.

Although JavaScript has typically been regarded as a client side technology, in-roads have been made in other areas in recent years. Frameworks like node.js are powering major server side applications and JavaScript can even be found querying some of the major NoSQL databases.

Here at Falafel ...

Sitefinity leaves a lot to be desired with the REST services. For example, take a look at the returned data from Sitefinity's news service out-of-the-box:

Ever since Sitefinity 4 was released, developers were coming up with new approaches to include JQuery libraries and plugins in their Sitefinity websites.  The unpleasant fact is that their JavaScript code did not work under all circumstances.

To make your plugins or libraries load in good order, your JavaScript code has to work when:

• You are anonymously browsing the Sitefinity website.
• You are editing your website in the back-end.
• You are browsing the website in Edit mode.

Sitefinity makes heavy use of JQuery and other Javascript libraries in its own administrative UI. Sitefinity loads jQuery when you are working inside ...

Today, Falafel Software, the premier Consulting & Training company for Sitefinity worldwide, released a new version of its book “Sitefinity 5 Nuts & Bolts”.

 

The book is released for FREE for ALL of our current Sitefinity 4 Nuts & Bolts’ customers.  Just log into your account and download the new 5.0 book. For all new customers purchasing the new Sitefinity 5.0 book, you will receive the 4.0 book as well plus all the source code for all the samples, modules and widgets. Get your copy today and start enjoying the new Sitefinity 5 product while discovering many many new ...

Today, we are proud to announce that the final bits of the conversion of blog.falafel.com are finally in place and the blog site is better and faster than ever.  The final issue that stumped us for the last 10 days was the inability to use LiveWriter to publish blog posts to Sitefinity 5.  After serious GUID debugging, Fiddler and Wireshark sessions, we were able to pin point that the conversion from Sitefinity 3.7 to 5.0 caused a problem regarding the assignment of ONE of the Blogs (MINE ) as far as owner assignment between the OpenAccess37MembershipProvider and the Default one ...

Using Claims Authentication with Sitefinity 5, you no longer "hit the wall" when integrating your site within a larger security context. Prior to version 5.x, Sitefinity used Forms Authentication for verification of user credentials to allow access to Sitefinity applications. Forms Authentication retrieved the user's name/password and checked it against data stored in the the database for that particular Sitefinity application. That works well enough for a single web site but comes up short in scenarios required by many organizations:

• "Single Sign On" (SSO) where you have several Sitefinity sites that should have only one login for the user. SSO allows you to show a ...

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 ...