Transforming Sitefinity Sites into Apps with Minimal Coding

Sitefinity is a powerful and scalable CMS for websites, but what about a mobile app? With NativeScript or Telerik Platform you can transform your sites into apps.

Sitefinity is a powerful CMS solution for creating websites, with capabilities that scale and allow you to easily manage hundreds of sites in different languages. While an effective and responsive website remains essential, a mobile app is increasingly necessary too—both to engage with customers browsing app stores and to enable developers with better performance and more features.

There are two effective options that make it easy to transform your Sitefinity sites into mobile apps: NativeScript and Telerik Platform.

NativeScript and Native Apps

Developing a native app from scratch can be painful and time-consuming, requiring you to learn multiple languages and frameworks. NativeScript was custom-built to solve this problem. It allows web developers to use the skills they already have in JavaScript or Angular to build and deploy apps—native apps, with all the efficiency and feature benefits that entails—for both Android and iOS.

Sitefinity and NativeScript might seem to be in totally different worlds, but there’s a simple answer that allows for easy integration with a little coding—Sitefinity Web Services.

To install NativeScript and get started, check out the documentation here. For a deep dive into how to use Sitefinity Web Services to turn your Sitefinity sites mobile with NativeScript, read more here.

Cross-Platform Mobile Apps with Telerik Platform

Cross-platform development is key to driving down development costs, saving developers time and businesses money. Telerik Platform is a holistic platform for the entire development cycle, giving you the ability to build your whole app on-premise or in the cloud. You can build for Android, iOS and Windows Phone without the need for specific hardware, test your apps and then deploy to app stores.

Telerik Platform supports both NativeScript for native apps and Apache Cordova for hybrid apps.

The solution for integration between Telerik Platform and Sitefinity is once again Sitefinity Web Services. This integration is a little simpler than the one above though, and doesn’t require you to write a single line of code.

To learn more about how to use Telerik Platform to transform your Sitefinity sites, check out the full guide here.

Source code for the NativeScript Implementation

In the coming weeks we are going to release the source code of a Sitefinity website and a mobile app which work together. You will be able to examine the code in details and make changes to it. We’re excited to share this with you—please stay tuned for more.

What’s your favorite way to develop Sitefinity sites into mobile apps? Happy coding!