Top 3 Reasons to Love Sitefinity 12.1

Sitefinity 12.1 introduces a variety of enhancements that are designed to shave off minutes (or even hours!) from your day-to-day work. Read on to find out more.

As a product marketing manager, I like to be empowered, independent, quick and efficient at what I do. There are so many new things I want to try and so many new ideas I’d love to explore, but my calendar is full of meetings and my to-do list keeps piling up.

For many years, I was constantly bumping into an endless row of hurdles and bottlenecks. “It will take about a month” is something I could never get used to hearing.

So, a couple of years ago when I had the opportunity to try Sitefinity, I was blown away by the ease of use and flexibility it offered. I am not a (very good) developer. Thanks to the user-friendly UI, after a day of onboarding, I was able to create pages, quickly manage content, tweak widget settings and even adjust the design templates as needed. 

Since then, I have witnessed Sitefinity becoming even more capable and performant. And I still love that feeling of accomplishment every time I hit the Publish button.

Working alongside some of the most talented and open-minded developers in my universe has given me a great opportunity to take part in the fascinating process of how ideas and feedback turn into features and capabilities.

The latest Sitefinity release is no exception. Sitefinity 12.1 introduces multiple improvements and enhancements on top of what is already the great CMS that so many content creators, marketers and developers love. Certainly, Sitefinity 12.1 may be considered a minor upgrade on top of the 12.0 release, but it is the release many of our customers and partnering digital agencies have been waiting for.

I have always considered release notes to be something that end-users should not read. And while developers tend to love them, for people like me, it is the business benefit such enhancements bring to the table that matters, not the technical nitty-gritty.

Quite often marketers and developers, while having a common goal, tend to speak different languages. Something like the recently introduced “ability to set predefined default values to MVC widgets” will most likely not spark a fire in the hearts of the content editors. Tell marketers that predefined values in MVC widgets will help them slash the time of building a complete page, say, in half, and you have a winner!

And yes, Sitefinity 12.1 introduces a variety of enhancements that are designed to shave off minutes, and even hours, from your day-to-day work.

Whether you strive to get to market faster and build a site in weeks, not months, or need to crank up the volume of your content production, Sitefinity 12.1 is there to support you with a number of meaningful improvements.

Custom Notification and Confirmation Emails

In another blog post, we discussed the process of building forms in Sitefinity and also outlined several best practices every organization should consider implementing. When it comes to forms, there are use cases and business requirements galore. Sometimes we tend to pay little attention to the post-submit experience, but customizing communication such as confirmation emails is a great way to ensure that the email sent by Sitefinity will land at the top of the user’s inbox and will trigger an open action.

With Sitefinity 12.1 you can easily customize the “thank you” email messages by leveraging an easy-to-use editor that lets you add a bit of flair in addition to the dynamically inserted data in the subject and the body of the email.

Improved Persona Scoring Rules in Sitefinity DEC

Customizing email communication is a great way to improve customer engagement and satisfaction, and so is the ability to deliver personalized content and user experiences. Making personalization your competitive advantage is something every organization should make a top priority.

There are many compelling reasons to use Sitefinity DEC as the cornerstone of your personalization, A/B testing and conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy. And in Sitefinity 12.1, we have tweaked our persona scoring rules to help you identify valuable segments and audiences with ease.

Manage Content the Way You Want

There are many factors that affect web metrics such as website stickiness, bounce rate and user engagement, for example. Spicing up your content with links, images, embedded videos, media or social content is a great way to keep your audience engaged for longer. In Sitefinity 12.0, we introduced an awesome new content editor that makes content creation a breeze, and the latest version builds on top of it to give you the ability to easily select items that relate to your content. Adding related items to your content is easy—just search, point, click and… presto!

Sitefinity has always been about the ease of use and the power to deliver personalized content across sites, channels and audiences. Watching the platform becoming more powerful and capable has been a great journey that has brought me a lot of joy. One can easily spot the user-friendly interface or get excited about capabilities such as personalization and A/B testing. Based on the feedback, needs and feature requests from Sitefinity developers, our development team has been working to help make Sitefinity as capable as it is, as secure as it is and as performant as you need it to be.

Distributed cache or Cross-Site Request Forgery are the kinds of topics that generally don’t resonate well with the marketing persona or end users. Flip the conversation and start talking about improved performance and how it affects SEO, user experience and conversions and you are likely to win your audience back.

Still, Sitefinity 12.1 delivers important improvements that developers and IT will welcome with arms wide open.

• Sitefinity is a very customizable platform that helps you further elevate your digital experiences. The latest version introduces tools to search in the configuration settings and non-content items. Locating THAT config key and its corresponding value is now child’s play.
• And then there is the health check service that enables your IT team to stay on top of the daily chores of making sure your website is up and running. Database access, load balancing nodes communication, internet connectivity as well as Cache and Search service availability can now be monitored in the background.
• Not only can IT proactively monitor various system services, but they can invalidate distributed cache on-demand. Think about the number of times you have published content with a typo in the headline, and have been biting your nails waiting for the system to refresh the content to the latest version across all servers. On-demand cache invalidation is designed to make sure that whatever the reason, you can force Sitefinity to deliver fresh content.

The Sitefinity documentation portal and the release notes describe this last capability in greater detail.

One thing I cannot skip on is security. When it comes to security, you can’t afford to take any shortcuts—every little thing helps. Keeping your CMS up-to date and protected will pay off in the long run. Sitefinity 12.1 introduces yet another security feature on top of the Web Security Module which we introduced with Sitefinity 11. You can now help prevent Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) with an easy-to-use interface to configure security rules.

Whether you are a marketer or a developer, the latest Sitefinity release delivers a ton of refinements, enhancements and dozens of features designed to help you deliver on your promises. Test drive Sitefinity 12.1  today—download the installer, try it in the cloud or request a 1:1 demo.

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