Technical overview and extensibility

The new content editing experience is backed up by the Sitefinity CMS Admin App, which is a Single Page Application (SPA) that works with Angular, TypeScript, and OData web services to manage content. As a result, the Admin App enables you to implement a better security model, benefit from better performance, and leverage fluid and responsive user interface. You can use the Admin App in several ways:

• Seamlessly integrated in Sitefinity CMS
  The Admin App replaces the classic content editing experience for news, blogs, lists, and dynamic modules content.
• Extend the Sitefinity CMS backend
  
• Standalone mode
  You can host the Admin App standalone and configure it to work with different Sitefinity CMS instances. For more information, contact your Account manager.

With the Admin App Extensibility API, you can customize the Sitefinity CMS backend look and feel without a complex set of tooling, such as Visual Studio, IIS, or .NET framework. Following are a few examples of how you can extend and add functionality to the backend:

• Custom Actions menu
  Register a custom command in the Actions menu of an item.
• Custom field
  Replace one of the default fields when creating and editing items with a custom one. In addition, you can implement a custom visualization for each custom field you create.
• Custom list view
  Add custom columns in the list view for content items, for example, related data or data from external systems.
• Custom content editing toolbar
  When content editors edit their content in HTML mode, out-of-the-box, they can work with image and link selector contextual toolsets for Sitefinity CMS content. You can also add a custom video selector.
• Custom content editor toolbar with word count
  Apart from the major formatting functions, located on the formatting bar in the HTML content editor, you can add a word counter functionality.
• Custom dialogs in the grid and in editing mode
  When in edit mode or when browsing items in the grid, you can implement custom dialogs to be displayed to the content creator or editor.

You can find samples for the backend customizations, listed above, in the GitHub repository.