Sitefinity DX 14.3: Perfecting the Digital Experience Toolset

Sitefinity 14.3 delivers new content tools for richer digital experiences, new technologies for higher performance and scalability, alongside advanced, AI-assisted analytics and audience targeting.

This is where we fade in to a “previously on Sitefinity” opener. Cue slow-motion and atmospheric soundtrack. Oh wait, there’s a skip intro button on your remote. One of the spoils of the age of streaming. A post-postmodern remix of video killed the radio star.

So, go ahead—press the button. Jump right to the real deal. Skip back or skip forward; everything happens in a split second. It’s a non-linear experience, the shortest path to instant gratification.

Content and Experience

But hey, this is not about what video did to radio, what streaming has been doing to broadcasting or what podcasts and audiobooks have done to print. This is personal—no matter what analog-to-digital transformation dichotomy you insert. It’s about tastes, habits and behavior. The way humans discover and consume content. The ever-blurred lines between what makes us tick and what makes us click.

When it comes to content, quality is of course a decider, but access and availability matter just as much. The right channel, the right time, the right context. These are the quantifiers of the otherwise less tangible concept of experience. And it is, of course, personal. What you like and when you like, where you like, how you like—not necessarily in that order. Not in any order, for that matter. That’s right: non-linear. I know you’ve been paying attention.

For example, that’s why streaming is the future of broadcasting. You get to watch your favorite show and listen to your favorite stuff when you feel like it, not when it airs. On your own time and on your own terms. Isn’t that a very fundamental personalization?

Isn’t that why movies based on books don’t always work? When you read, you process information, you interpret, interface and interact. Your brain gets busy, your imagination fills in the blanks. At the best of times, you’re emotionally connected. There you go, in your mind and heart you have performed the ultimate personalization. So, what’s wrong with the movie, then? Ah, it’s not the same sort of personalization. Worse yet, it’s the wrong personalization: By someone else, for someone else.

Personalized Experiences Driven by Content, Tools and Tech

OK then, personalized services, personalized shopping, personalized education, personalized entertainment. If you think about it, these are still very much public experiences, but the digital age is made up of and driven by one-to-one interactions. Less and less on-site and face-to-face, more and more online and server-to-screen.

Nano chipsets, super thin curved, foldable, bendable screens, millions of pixels, and terabytes of storage have made it possible to connect, interact and share in ways that used to border on science fiction and are now taken for granted. And these are the hardware accelerators of change. Software has more than kept up: Like gadgets, apps are also a utility, not a luxury.

Digital and physical are intersecting at so many points and creating plenty of new opportunities. If we use technology to personalize the online content and experience, how do we personalize the in-store experience through apps, digital signage and all sorts of connected gadgets? How far are we from digitizing offline conversions via near-field, network devices and beacons talking to apps and hardware accessories?

New touchpoints, emerging channels, new tools and solutions that stretch the imagination. Advances in technology have been forcing us all to rethink and retool content creation and content delivery. Personalization, integration and data connectivity have moved way past nice-to-have and have become must-haves.

Sitefinity DX 14.3: What’s New

We’ve come this far with Sitefinity DX, and the evolution of the platform is a microcosm of the great technology-driven changes we’ve witnessed over the last couple of decades. The Sitefinity DX line is our take on a set of tools and technologies for creating, delivering and personalizing content and experiences across multiple digital channels.

Sitefinity DX is built around powerful core content management capabilities, enhanced by data-driven marketing tools to orchestrate, analyze, personalize and optimize the user journey. The platform offers the technology and tools for connecting key business systems, removing silos and improving effectiveness and productivity, while offering enterprise scalability and security.

The bottom line, though, is that Sitefinity DX can be whatever you want it to be.

Its decoupled architecture and API-first approach to content delivery make it extremely versatile. It can be a classic content management platform, complete with user-friendly drag-and-drop page building and WYSIWYG editing. It can be a standalone presentation layer for content sourced from connected systems. For a React developer, it can be a pure headless CMS.

Sitefinity Insight is the fully integrated, AI-driven customer data and analytics layer that can be used for personalization and optimization—but also as a CDP hub in a connected ecosystem of apps and data sources.

Low-code connectivity and a wide range of turnkey integrations with proprietary and third-party software can put Sitefinity at the center of a highly scalable and value-driven composable DXP for creating connected, omnichannel experiences.

Scale when ready and build a global presence on a true PaaS infrastructure. That’s where Sitefinity Cloud comes in.

With this latest release, we’ve extended the toolset that enables you to create, personalize, integrate, and scale. The full rundown is available on the What’s New page, as usual. Below, we take a closer look at the standout novelties in the categories that matter most.

Content Creation

Section Presets are reusable page blocks, enabling content editors to quickly repurpose existing layouts across pages. Designed to reduce complexity, shorten time to market and help content creators overdeliver without getting overtasked.

Section Presets are based on section widgets and can be reused across multiple .NET Core pages. When several pages are designed to contain the same group of widgets, you no longer need to recreate the widgets on every single page.

Content Delivery

Enhanced Internal Search integrations and solutions to make your most valuable content easy to index and find across all your digital properties. Leverage facets, scoring profiles and personalized search to drive engagement and conversions.

The latest enhancements to the Sitefinity Chatbot by NativeChat will let you expose structured FAQs stored in Sitefinity to an extra channel. Maximize content discovery with a conversational FAQ solution fully integrated with content, along with a search fallback option and low-confidence suggestions.

The new standalone React renderer is piloting a set of solutions to develop on JS frameworks against Sitefinity. Develop on your preferred frontend technology. Deliver structured, technology-agnostic content to websites built on popular JS frameworks, including Angular, React, Gatsby and Vue.

Personalization

Content recommendations based on visitor activity let you maximize the converting content with AI-assisted algorithms for personalized recommendations tailored to each visitor. The Content recommender uses AI algorithms to combine the content managed in Sitefinity DX with the behavior patterns of your converting visitors managed in Sitefinity Insight.

The AI-assisted content recommender uses data to identify which content is most likely to influence a specific step in the customer journey. It is easy to use and requires minimal setup and configuration: Just drop the built-in widget on any Sitefinity page.

Another important novelty in Sitefinity Insight, A/B tests are now available for specific audience segments, based on a rich set of criteria including geography, visit duration, persona and lead scoring models and various demographics.

Integrations

Service Hooks have helped open Sitefinity to multiple integrations, and now the low-code solution is available in Sitefinity Insight as well to easily connect with third-party systems like Salesforce, Eloqua, MailChimp and many others.

Plug Sitefinity Insight into business-critical systems and data sources. Add contacts who have passed Persona or Lead Scoring thresholds to Eloqua and Mailchimp mailing lists for retargeting. Add new or updated contact details to Salesforce. Make the most of the data collected in Sitefinity Insight and automate your key business workflows.

GraphQL support lets you leverage a high-performance, source-agnostic query language allowing extra flexibility in multi-channel content delivery and integrations. GraphQL is fully integrated with the existing user interface for managing REST. Check out our latest blog about GraphQL and how to use it in Sitefinity DX.

Wrap-up

So, it’s not like we added a couple of extra CPU cores or more screen real-estate, or more pixels, or more terabytes of storage. On second thought, this is probably not too farfetched an analogy of what we did with Sitefinity DX 14.3. Is it a biased analogy? Oh well, this blogger is not going to argue but, for the record, would prefer heavily personalized.

The latest Sitefinity release delivers new tools for richer digital experiences and new technologies for content delivery, connectivity and personalization.

A solid package full of exciting new tech. But don’t take my word for it. It’s the experience that matters.