Sitefinity 15.2: The Next Chapter in Content and Experience Delivery

Native Next.js support with integrated hosting, backend UI customizations in Sitefinity SaaS, expanded audience analysis and targeting in Sitefinity Insight and usability improvements for both technical and business users sum up a robust update that we’re about to explore in detail.

If you want the short of it, Progress Sitefinity 15.2 is the one that introduced Next.js. Not a bad thing to be remembered for by any means. React support alone makes it more than your average decimal point release. New beginnings are always a great story.

The 15.2 release is basking in the spotlight but what it stands for in the long run is an equally important narrative. You know, the road behind, the journey ahead. The meaning between the lines, the message behind the headlines.

If you're reading this, you are probably familiar with the story so far. And if you’re a hands-on user, you may have directly or indirectly influenced the decisions leading up to this point.

Sitefinity 15.2 and the Bigger Picture: What’s in It for You

I know you’re all here for the new stuff but we need to remember that every new version builds on the strengths of its predecessors. So, before we cut to the chase, let’s weave in the backstory and put things into perspective. New always implies better but evolution is a process, not a state. In that sense, Sitefinity 15.2 another layer of improvement, the next step in a journey that promises to get even more exciting.

We won’t rewind all the way back to the beginning—believe it or not, Sitefinity will be 20 next year. Instead, let’s recap a quite eventful past 12 months between now and the release of Sitefinity 15 last November.

The Sitefinity 15 line introduced assisted content authoring based on Azure Open AI with one-click content creation, text summarization and personalization available in the visual WYSIWYG content editor. The AI toolset was later extended with AI-assisted content classification to improve content performance by enhancing discoverability, reusability and relevance.

The Sitefinity Integration Hub has taken connectivity and business automation to a whole new level, enabling business-friendly no-code integration with virtually any popular martech app and system.

We introduced Sitefinity SaaS to expand the managed hosting options and offer a scalable, up-to-date cloud-based content management platform tailored for marketing-driven organizations that need a future-proof and growth-oriented digital tech stack without the overhead of infrastructure setup and maintenance.

Sitefinity Insight, our multichannel data-collection, analytics and optimization layer, earned RealCDP certification from the leading authority in the field, the Customer Data Platform Institute. In Sitefinity, customer data and journey mapping, audience analysis, segmentation and decisioning are natively part of content management. What’s more, Sitefinity Insight is a personalization layer and data integration layer all at once, allowing you to sync multiple online and offline data sources and deliver personalized, impactful experiences to your audience.

Content Management as It’s Meant to Be

Now, that’s more than solid groundwork to build on, but also a tough act to follow. Oh, well—Sitefinity is never one to back down from a challenge.

Essentially, we did what we usually do between releases. We followed our roadmap, listened to your feedback and kept a keen eye on what’s going on around us. It’s pretty obvious that user behaviors are changing and user expectations are increasing. Digital experience solutions are rapidly advancing, and content management has moved way beyond the basics of drafting and publishing.

Sitefinity has evolved too, consistently introducing improvements across all aspects of modern content management. Content creation, content delivery and content personalization have all been polished and enriched with new tools, which usually get all the attention around release dates. Less obvious but equally important changes under the hood have fostered higher performance, faster deployment, easier maintenance and broader integrations.

But how do you add new tools and utilities without adding complexity? How’s that for an extra challenge?

You see, our vision for Sitefinity has always been driven by the quality of the experience for hands-on users. It all boils down to how quickly and easily practitioners can do their daily job, ultimately affecting how efficiently the entire organization can execute its business strategy.

So, every new release is a step ahead for a platform that has set out to arm practitioners with user-intuitive tools powered by a flexible mix of modern technologies to create relevant digital experiences at speed and scale.

And if you share some of the challenges below, we believe we can share the solution:

Usability
Manage complexity for practitioners and enable them to deliver results. Equip hands-on users to be successful in a dynamic and highly competitive digital landscape. Enable teams across the org to perform to the highest standard. Drive productivity and empower both business and technical users to get up to speed within hours.

Flexibility
Anticipate and proactively respond to diverse internal and external factors. Base your long-term digital strategy on a modern and future-proof technology stack that enables you to build and deliver compelling customer experiences and achieve business goals. Choose the tools to build your customer-facing experiences.

Relevance
Achieve and sustain quality customer service and experiences. Unify fragmented digital properties and siloed data sources. Personalize the end-user experiences. Connect with and serve customers on their preferred digital channels. Build consistent and data-rich customer journeys that convert.

Scalability
Scale at your own speed and be able to achieve business goals on time and within budget. Successfully transform and set your business up for digital success.

If nothing else, we can share a dream. Imagine a CMS that does more than just manage content. A next-generation platform that isn’t just your publishing tool, but a growth engine that transforms the customer experience and unlocks new ways to engage and serve users. And in a world where speed is everything, a CMS that empowers your team to build faster, personalize deeper and adapt instantly.

Sitefinity 15.2: Let’s Unpack the Key New Features

While extending the core functionality is clearly the immediate objective of every Sitefinity release, version 15.2 stand out for the depth of the upgrades threading through every layer of the platform from the frontend, though the publishing and editorial toolset, the backend UI and workflows, to audience analysis and targeting.

First and foremost, Next.js support is a major step forward for the platform, which still has the .NET stack deeply ingrained in its DNA. However, probably the most popular frontend framework for DX opens up a world of possibilities in building highly optimized customer-facing experiences at speed and scale.

Sitefinity SaaS has been enhanced with microapps that can extend and customize the backend UI to improve and simplify editorial and development workflows without creating any upgrade dependencies.

Sitefinity Insight also received a number of upgrades to further enhance audience analysis and targeting.

Next.js / React Support

Next.js support is available across all hosting options: on-prem, PaaS and SaaS. More importantly, Next.js has complete feature parity with the ASP.NET Core renderer in terms of widget design and templating, while business users enjoy a seamless visual content management experience in the patented technology-agnostic editor.

With expanded frontend technology support, organizations get to choose their preferred development framework. This allows teams outside the traditional .NET space to work with Sitefinity, making it easier for businesses to integrate with their existing tech stack and streamline their development processes.

Use what you’re used to for building your presentation. Play to your dev team’s strengths knowing that for authors and editors it doesn’t matter which frontend framework you choose. The content editing experience is the same.

SaaS Backend UI Customizations

Backend UI customizations provide a higher level of flexibility for the developers working in the SaaS environment. Microapps hosted in SaaS allow them to streamline and enhance workflows without creating upgrade dependencies. The level of customizability makes Sitefinity SaaS better than your average black-box SaaS, letting adopters tailor it to their specific needs and business model.

The Next.js renderer is hosted out-of-the-box in Sitefinity SaaS making it the industry’s first SaaS CMS with integrated multi-frontend hosting. The platform’s decoupled architecture and API-first approach to content management put Sitefinity SaaS in a class of its own. It can be anything you need it to be: from your traditional user-friendly, always up-to-date CMS to a hybrid headless powerhouse for multichannel content and experience delivery.

UI Customizations and Other Usability Enhancements

Sitefinity 15.2 brings notable usability improvements and customization options to enhance both developer and editor workflows. The ability to customize the rich text editor and field presentations in Sitefinity SaaS adds flexibility for users who need to personalize the content-editing UI without complex configurations.

Enhanced UX for hierarchical content: Navigating and managing hierarchical composite content types is now more intuitive, making it easier to handle complex structures.

Improved widget designer experience: A more user-friendly grid view simplifies the process of entering composite content items directly within the widget designer.

Custom icons for custom widgets: Adding support for custom icons improves visual organization, particularly when working with custom widgets.

SiteSync enhancements: Improved performance and control during the SiteSync process, especially with handling dependency items, streamlines the synchronization of content between environments.

These updates reduce friction for both content creators and developers, offering a frictionless experience and efficient collaboration.

Expanded and Refined Audience Analysis

The latest updates to Sitefinity Insight are designed to make audience targeting more precise and intuitive:

Redesigned persona definition and rule management: The complete overhaul of persona definition dialogs and rule management makes for a smoother, more intuitive user experience, simplifying complex processes like what-if analysis.

Native support for numerical data: By allowing native numerical data support in contact properties and rules, this update enhances audience modeling capabilities in scenarios where such data is critical.

Improved AI-powered propensity scoring: The enhanced presentation of AI-driven propensity scoring makes the insights clearer and more actionable for users, helping them better understand audience behavior and preferences.

These enhancements add a higher level of precision to audience analysis, making it easier for marketers to refine targeting and optimize engagement strategies.

Wrap-up

So, the latest Sitefinity version is ready for primetime. It’s an upgrade that brings productivity without adding complexity. It’s gained that extra muscle without putting on weight. It’s got that extra kick but won’t put a dent in your mileage.

Sitefinity has always been about choice and the latest update is no different. It’s the choice of creators who don’t want to be weighed down by clunky tools. For smart brands that want to keep their options open in designing and delivering digital experiences across audiences and use cases. From web CMS to multichannel DXP, from native personalization to advanced martech connectivity, from traditional to headless, from .NET to React.

By the way, all the exciting novelties are ready to be experienced first-hand in our updated free trials. They’re hosted in Sitefinity SaaS and let you pick your frontend of choice.