Meet the New Sitefinity “Light” Backend Theme

Many of today’s web design trends have their roots in minimalism. The emergence of responsive web design in 2010 marked the first big shift towards simple design, devoid of graphical elements. In 2011, Microsoft joined the trend with Windows 8 and its “modern design” language which prioritized content over “chrome”. Apple followed suite in 2013 with iOS 7, where skeuomorphism was abandoned in favor of flat design. Today, modern design is so prevalent in web, it is an industry standard.

Ever since its start Sitefinity has applied modern design principles to keep focus on users and tasks. In time, this led to the recognition of Sitefinity CMS as a web content management system with superb user experience.

Sitefinity 9.0 marks an important milestone in this direction as it introduces the new “Light” theme, which brightens up the look and feel of the Sitefinity CMS administrative interface.

With its minimalist approach, the "Light" theme increases the productivity and overall satisfaction of end users and introduces the following improvements:

• Reduced top navigation—to leave more room for the work area

• Less graphics and color—to remove unnecessary clutter and reduce distraction

• More focus on content—to improve the interaction with content and tasks

• Increased emphasis on actions—to make it faster and intuitive to complete user tasks

The overall feeling when using the theme is of a seamless and delightful experience.

How to Apply the New “Light” Theme

To switch to the new theme, you need to login to Sitefinity CMS with Administrator privileges and:

1. Go to Settings>Advanced>Appearance

2. In field “BackendTheme” enter “Light”

3. Click on the “Save changes” button

Please, note that the “Light” theme is in Beta and we plan to make it the default administrative theme with the next Sitefinity release. Until then, we welcome your feedback and comments, especially if you have customized the admin area.

Reinventing the Sitefinity CMS User Experience

The “Light” theme is the first step on the path to rethink and reinvent Sitefinity CMS administration. Our goal is to stretch the boundaries of what is possible with today’s web technologies and provide the best possible experience with desktop-like performance for marketers, while making it very easy for developers to add custom functionality. In that vein, we will leverage key Sitefinity CMS capabilities such as Feather (ASP.NET MVC and UI framework) and the Web Services (OData) API introduced with Sitefinity 9.0.

The team is working on prototyping and we will share more details soon.

As a start, you can go ahead and give the “Light” theme a try!