Early this month, Progress announced the latest release of its leading content management platform, Progress® Sitefinity® 12 which was also validated by our team. In the previous blog post, we introduced you to the Page UI improvements and the new Rule-Based Forms. In the second part of the features review, our team walks you through another two of their favorite enhancements.  

Sitefinity Single page SiteSync

Since it has been introduced in version 8.0 SiteSync has been one of the very handy features of Sitefinity that allows you to keep your content in sync among your different environments – from the one where you are creating your content to your production environment. Besides your content, you can also sync the following items

• Templates and widgets
• Site properties
• Permissions
• CMS Settings

In the latest version of Sitefinity this feature became even better, allowing you to sync a single page or a content item with all the dependencies that it has. This allows users to more easily control what they are syncing and immediately check the availability and the accuracy of the pushed update, without the need to wait for scheduled automatic sync or manual sync from administrators.

In the previous versions of Sitefinity, if you wanted to push your updated content, you would have had to wait for it to be synced to your production server. For example, if you have permissions to go to the site sync module and manually sync the content that you want, then you have to separately sync all its dependencies. This, in some cases, could be very time-consuming and not as straightforward as you would like it to be. Especially when there is a lot of content waiting to be synced. For example, you are migrating one of your old sites to Sitefinity, or there are a lot of people creating/updating content at the same time

This added functionality to the Sitefinity’s SiteSync module gives editors, authors and publishers easier option to publish and sync their content and the ability to check the update on the live site right away. This is very convenient for small changes, fixing typos etc. and it frees you from waiting for the entire modules or sites to sync or filtering the items that you need.

More detailed information about this module, read here.

Sitefinity Revision History

Since it has been introduced in version 10.0 Revision History has been a very convenient and valuable feature of Sitefinity. It allows you to view, compare, and fully revert to previous versions of different type of items.  In the new release, Sitefinity CMS stores the full revision history for media items (images, documents, videos) as well. Thus, content editors can view, compare, and entirely revert to previous versions of pages, including media items when necessary. Additionally, enhanced preview of media items versions, as well as side-by-side comparison between versions, enable content editors to avoid any missteps when using earlier versions.

Yet, to view the history, you can perform one of the following actions:

• Click the Actions link of the respective item and click Revision History.
• Open the item for editing – in the right corner of the page click Revision History.

The Revision History page opens with a list of all versions of the item and the currently published one is marked with a green checkbox.

However, you can use this feature to view and compare different versions of a content or media items. Every time you edit a content item, a version of that one is saved by the system.

On a Revision History page, you can do the following actions:

• You can view a previous version of the item by clicking on the version.
  A preview opens. You can see the text and the properties of the item. If it is a media item, you can see the image or play the video. You can revert to a previous version of the page by clicking Revert to this version button. The system makes the selected version of the item the current one.
• You can compare two versions of an item, by selecting them and clicking Compare.
  The system displays both the content and the properties of the two versions side-by-side and all the differences between them. If it is a media item, the system displays the image, a video player, or the file version.
• You can delete versions of the item, by selecting them and clicking Delete.
• You can add а note to each version, by clicking the Write note link of the respective version. An input field where you enter and save the note appears. The note is displayed in the Revision History page. You can edit and delete the note.

When it comes to permissions, you cannot set specific permissions for Revision history – you cannot allow or deny specific users or roles to use the Revision history of an item or page. All users that can modify and item or page, are also allowed to use the Revision history of this item or page. To allow a user to use the Revision history of an item, you must also grant modify permissions for the specific item. This is because, using the Revision history, you can revert an item to a previous version, which is effectively modifying an item.

Revision History is a very useful and important feature of Sitefinity. The improvements after the latest release provide the content editor with better control of all previous versions of the items and a more detailed comparison.

Sitefinity is one of the world’s most productive CMS platforms, and with its latest release it is now even easier to deliver engaging content that drives conversions. The new version developers to easily address business demands and the use of popular third-party frameworks for quicker time-to-market for mobile-first web projects. For more information on our experience with Sitefinity, click here.