What's new in Sitefinity 7.0?

At the end of last week, Sitefinity released Sitefinity 7, the first major release of Sitefinity IMO since the launch of the 4. Sitefinity 7.0 was made with the developer in mind and there are some amazing new key features to explore. This blog looks into the new qualities and the benefits of each.

HTML5 Video

As of this release, Sitefinity has fully switched to the RadMedia Player that will support and use HTML5 Video, ensuring further mobile and responsive capabilities. Having multimedia content on your website is an important way to engage your visitors and Sitefinity 7.0 makes it even easier for you to do this.

Ability to add page properties

Aside from the usual suspects like title, keywords and descriptions they will now support any kind of custom properties/fields for their Sitefinity pages. This feature helps editors and developers to quickly add Facebook tags, Twitter Card info or, for instance, use Google Tag Manager. It also makes it easier to include thumbnail images, PDF documents that contain a print version of that page and so on. Overall, developers will b able to have further control over how the pages of a site are rendered.

Ecommerce will be enhanced with product ratings and reviews

Combined with some technical SEO enhancements (which Prototype provides) products can now get Google results like these:

Customers can review and rate products that are on the site.

Migration & multi-lingual enhancements

More interestingly for the tech folks, they've updated the CMS so users can now simply grow from a single site to a multi-site instance. Also in multi-lingual scenario's, Sitefinity now has full flexibility in terms of canonical and language-alternative pages. Don't worry if you already have separate sites, as Sitefinity can migrate all those sites into one multisite installation.

Global ability for related data

The biggest thing, in an architectural sense, is the ability to relate any kind of data. You can now relate a news item to a product and or a page or an image or any kind of custom developed module by using Sitefinity 7.0.

Real life example

Imagine your company is hosting an event with venues, speakers and sessions. Before, you'd have to code relationships between those elements yourself and develop all the logic to sort and filter and so on. Now, out of the box we can 'assign' speakers to sessions and sessions in a certain venues. It's a big win for developers.

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