Customizing the SearchBox in Sitefinity 4.4
2/4/2012 Posted by: Rich Winslow

The search box control has a fieldset around it that can get in the way, so we wanted to customize the search box control. However, specifying a Layout Template in the Search Box toolbox didn't work and substituting an external Search Box ASCX template in the Control Type loses the backend fields ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags searchbox customization Sitefinity 4 ViewMaps
Customize a Sitefinity 4.x Control or Widget
11/16/2011 Posted by: Rich Winslow

If you want to use a Sitefinity control or Widget, but you don't like the format or style, you can get a copy of the Sitefinity internal widget template, modify it, and then reference the modified version (ex. the Search Box).

If you want to know what classes Sitefinity uses ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Customize a widget template in Sitefinity 4 Customate a Sitefinity control template
Generic Content Editor Fails to Render Correctly
3/26/2011 Posted by: Rich Winslow

In a Sitefinity v3.7 website, editing of a Generic Content block failed to render the editor correctly. Instead only colored letters appeared:

The error ended up being the default ASP.Net website theme that was set in the web.config file.

<pages theme="ARTheme">

The problem was fixed by deleting the theme attribute in ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Generic Content Editor rendering Cannot edit Sitefinity Generic Content Generic Content Editor
Migration of Sitefinity 3.7 to 4.0
2/13/2011 Posted by: Rich Winslow

Migration Key Learnings

We've successfully created two new production websites using Sitefinity 4.0, so now it is time for us to focus on migrating our existing production Sitefinity 3.7 websites to Sitefinity 4.0.

I spent the last 2 days with the Sitefinity Migration Tool, but for our customized Sitefinity implementations ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Sitefinity Migration Tool Upgrading to Sitefinity 4.0 Sitefinity 4.0 Sitefinity Migration Migrating Sitefinity 3.7 to Sitefinity 4.0 Dealing with Multiple Host Headers in Sitefinity 3.7 website when migrating
Designing Website Templates for Content Management Systems
11/22/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow
Here is a great article on how to design templates for CMS systems like Sitefinity.

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Category Sitefinity Tags CMS template design designing templates for CMS website template design
Sitefinity Page Load Speed: Improve your performance
11/7/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

The Sudden Realization... My Web Site Takes Forever To Load!

Well maybe not forever, but slower than Google's recommended 2 seconds or faster.

Automated Results has been adding more interactive and dynamic functionality to our customer's Sitefinity implementations and page load speed has suffered for it... sometimes with horrific results ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags page load speed static content compression page load performance dynamic content compression web content text compression Sitefinity page load speed IIS7 compression settings Google page speed ranking script resource caching sitefinity implementation guide Sitefinity page loads balancing load speed vs. ease of maintainence
Extensionless Page Reference: Have your cake and eat it too!
11/7/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

I have implemented a good number of Sitefinity sites with the standard .ASPX file extension. However, when I analyze how spiders and visitors might access my sites, there are extensionless requests. I was hoping that I could have both.

The Sitefinity 3.7 User Manual (page 186) describes how to get extensionless web ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags extensionless page references Sitefinity web pages without a page file extension extensionless pages extensionless page configuration
Canonical Redirect using IIS 7.0
11/2/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow
The Problem

Today, a significant number of web users will seek a website by just typing in the domain name without the 'http://' and without the 'www.' The following links all point to the same web page:
This is convenient for the user, but from a Search ...
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Category Sitefinity Tags root domain 301 redirect canonical redirect root domain redirect to www
Tracking Google Image Referrals in Google Analytics
10/11/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

If you've been using Google Analytics for the last year and you've been creating good optimized Alt Text attributes for ALL of your images, you have probably seen increased traffic from Google images (especially for a photographer's website). However, we've not had any insight into what search terms the ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Track Google Image search terms in Google Analytics
Get Google Analytics to Track Sitefinity Searches
10/11/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

Curious whether website visitors are using your internal Sitefinity search engine to navigate through your website?

Have you setup a Sitefinity Search box? If not, go to: http://www.sitefinitywatch.com/blog/09-06-25/Working_with_Sitefinity_Search.aspx

Once you have setup Sitefinity Site Search, then it can be useful to track it with Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides a ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Google Analytics Site Search Feature Using Google Analytics to track Sitefinity Search
ListView: Limit the Items Displayed
10/10/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

I was interested in displaying a list of testimonials on the bottom of a home page, but I didn't want all the testimonials, only a few with a link to see more.

I discovered that the ListView control doesn't have a property in the Basic or Advanced to allow this. ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags ExpandedListView control Sitefinity ListView Customizing Sitefinity default user controls Limiting the number of items in a Sitefinity List
Can Telerik's Sitefinity replace Microsoft's SharePoint?
10/1/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

Introduction

Of course the answer is... it depends! Although the two products have similarities and Telerik is addressing more and more SharePoint functionality with each new release, in our opinion there are still two distinct purposes:

Sitefinity is geared for content management of a public website

SharePoint is geared for enterprise-wide ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Sitefinity vs. SharePoint Can Sitefinity replace SharePoint?
Programmatically access a Sitefinity List Control
9/25/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

Would you like to be able to find a Sitefinity List and access the Headline and Content?

You can do that fairly easily as you'll see below. Unfortunately, there isn't a 'FindList()' function to get the single list you are looking for, however, a simple traversing of your full set ...

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Category Tags Sitefinity List Control
Programmatically access a Sitefinity List Control
9/25/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

Would you like to be able to find a Sitefinity List and access the Headline and Content?

You can do that fairly easily as you'll see below. Unfortunately, there isn't a 'FindList()' function to get the single list you are looking for, however, a simple traversing of your full set ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Sitefinity List Control
Limiting the Number of Words in the Sitefinity ControlView control
9/19/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

The Sitefinity ControlView allows you to display a list of Generic Content entries from the Generic Content module much like a Blog. One would use the ContentView control to fully customize the display of content on a web page (ex. A library of articles on a particular subject). You might ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Limiting the number of words Summary Settings ControlView control
Visual Studio 2010 Error: Unable to write to output file... pdb
8/15/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow
Unable to write to output file [FILENAME].pdb: Unspecified error

First try right-clicking on the project folder, selecting properties on the folder, and clearing the Readonly checkbox to mark all files in the project as writable. This isn't typically the problem but can be caused by checking all project files into ...

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Category Microsoft Tags Unable to write to output file Unable to write to output file [FILENAME].pdb: Unspecified error
Sampling of the Sitefinity Database Structure
7/24/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow
I haven't created a complete mapping, but wanted to capture what I have discovered with updates over time as more is discovered:
SELECT * FROM sf_PageContentBase pcb left outer join sf_PageBase pb on pb.ID = pcb.id left outer join sf_CmsPageContent pc on pc.ID = pcb.id left outer join sf_CmsCtrlLinks link ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Sitefinity content database joins
How to get images from a Sitefinity Library by Tag
7/24/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

It took a little searching to find the logic for filtering image libraries by a tag, so I thought I'd post it here:
Private Function GetLibraryImageList(ByRef strFileList() As String, ByRef strAuthorList() As String, ByRef strAltTextList() As String) As Boolean ' create sitefinity library manager Dim libManager As New LibraryManager("Libraries") Dim mgrContent ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Get images by tag filter Sitefinity Image Library by tag tag filtering with a Sitefinity Image Library
Related Telerik DLLs needing a project reference
7/11/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

If you get an initialization failure on your project and it says to go to the Sitefinity log file, you can look in the /App_Data/Sitefinity.log file off the root of your website.

There were errors during services initialization, check the error log for details.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Sitefinity DLL dependencies DLL dependencies
How to programmatically create a Sitefinity Library
7/10/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

If you'd like to create a Sitefinity CMS library in code, you reference the Telerik.Libraries DLL and work with the Telerik.Libraries.LibraryManager. In the example below, we check for the existence of the library and if it doesn't already exist, then we create a new library, apply property settings, then with ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Sitefinity Library Create Sitefinity Library in code VB.Net Sitefinity library creation
How to change 'Show in navigation' property of a page with an SQL command
7/6/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

We had a fixed html menu for a website and a hundred pages with the navigate attribute set true when we wanted to set 95% of them false.

The sf_CmsPageProps (Sitefinity page properties table) has a column called 'Navigable' that determines if a page shows in the Site Menu or ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Bulk removal of pages from the site menu Controlling the site menu Show in Menu attribute Sitefinity Page Properties table
How to configure an RSS feed in Sitefinity
5/22/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

Implementing RSS feed functionality inside of Sitefinity is quite simple, but initially I wasn't sure what settings mattered and what to expect from the RSS Feed control.... so now that I have pulled it together, let me pass it on for others to benefit from:

Concepts

There are two components to ...

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Category RSS Service

5/16/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

If you'd like to introduce your own code into every page, you can consider creating a page class that inherits from the Sitefnity INTERNALPAGE class, then referencing your code in the CMSENTRYPOINT.ASPX page.

        public class CustomAnalytics : InternalPage    
  {    
      protected override void OnPreInit(EventArgs e)    
      {    
          base.OnPreInit(e);    
          Your custom code here  
     
      } ...

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Category Sitefinity Tags Custom Page class in Sitefinity

Is your Website login secure?
5/15/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow
Login Methods

ASP.Net provides different ways to login and Sitefinity utilizes them:
- Forms login
- Windows Active Directory login
- SSL Forms login
- SSL Windows Active Directory login
When considering a login method, you need to consider the importance of the data you are protecting. However, you also need to consider the ...
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Category Computer Security Tags ssl logins secure website login
Sitefinity: Active Directory Membership Provider has not been initialized
5/13/2010 Posted by: Rich Winslow

If you are trying to enable login to sitefinity using the active directory, you may encounter the following error:

The Active Directory Membership Provider has not been initialized.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about ...

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Category Sitefinity

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Migration Key Learnings

The Sudden Realization... My Web Site Takes Forever To Load!

The Problem

Introduction

Would you like to be able to find a Sitefinity List and access the Headline and Content?

Would you like to be able to find a Sitefinity List and access the Headline and Content?

There were errors during services initialization, check the error log for details.

Concepts

Login Methods

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Why Give Our Secrets Away?