Sitefinity Release Notes

Dear Sitefinity CMS customers and partners! We are excited to announce the release of Sitefinity CMS 14.1. Below, you can find details about what is included in this release. 

What's new in Sitefinity 14.1

.NET Core is officially supported and ready for production use

.NET Core is officially supported and ready for production use
Next Generation Cross-Platform Development overdelivers in terms of development speed, performance, ease of upgrades, and frontend scalability. Plus, it plays along with your IDE of choice.

• New page editing and widget toolset
  The new “What You See Is What You Get” page editor displays the page during the editing process in the same way as it will appear on the frontend of the website. The .NET Core Renderer provides a new way for creating page layouts and styles.
  The WYSIWYG editor comes with a set of new .NET Core widgets for displaying content, images, and navigation.
  Learn more...
• Login and registration capabilities
  Sitefinity .NET Core Renderer now has a full set of login and registration widgets, so that you can manage your website authentication. It also supports external identity providers.
  Learn more...
• .NET Core forms
  With Sitefinity CMS .NET Core Forms you can create rich interactive forms directly in your browser using the .NET Core page editor.
  You can utilize a wide array of form widgets, such as textbox, multiple choice, dropdown lists and rearrange and manage them to display default choices, implement limitations, instructional text, and so forth.
  Learn more...
• Customizable widget designers
  Sitefinity CMS autogenerates multiple types of properties in the .NET Core widget designers. With their help developers deliver complex business requirements for widget configuration with no coding. For advanced marketing scenarios, widget designers also support full customization.
  Learn more...
• Page and widget-based personalization for the .NET Core pages
  Personalizing widgets, or, creating different versions of pages, is a way to present targeted content that reflects the visitor’s context and segment.
  Learn more...
• Develop with .NET Core
  To help you create and extend widgets and layout files, we provide multiple samples and demos in a GitHub repository.
  Learn more...
• Support for Digital Asset Management (DAM) integration with Cloudinary and Frontify  
• Support of server-side Blazor components
  You can wrap Blazor components as Sitefinity CMS widgets.
  Learn more...

Digital Asset Management (DAM) integration with Cloudinary and Frontify  

The new integrations now available in Sitefinity DX enable seamless connection to Cloudinary and Frontify DAM systems. They allow you to select media items (images, documents, videos) using an integrated media picker from a DAM provider and incorporate them in Sitefinity content via the rich text editor (MVC content block, .NET Core content block, long text fields), related media fields, and .NET Core Image widget. You can connect to Cloudinary or Frontify by simply configuring one of them as a storage provider in Sitefinity. The media items are served directly from the DAM, with their metadata stored in Sitefinity. The images selected from the DAM work with the thumbnail profiles available in Sitefinity and support contextual properties such as alt text and margins.

Custom integrations with other DAM providers can be simplified by leveraging the newly added extension points.

Learn more...

Expanded search options 

Scoring profiles for Azure Search Service

Boost search results by leveraging the Azure search scoring profiles. Use the Azure Portal to create and manage scoring profiles for your search indexes and then select the desired profile from the Search Box widget. Adding profiles allows you to deliver prioritized search results set for each profile. For instance, you can configure the search results with profiles to show newer or tagged content first.

Learn more...

Personalization for the Search widget

Set different properties to the search widget (scoring profile, scoring parameters, search index) for different user segments. Use personalization to reorder the search results for different segments of your audience.

Redesigned UI for creating search indexes

The user experience for creating search indexes has been significantly improved. Several new options are now available:

• Select all content types for indexing (default option)
• Easy way to distinguish dynamic content types via a breadcrumb displaying their hierarchy
• Index content from a specific set of sites, which you select
• In Advanced settings, you can specify the type of additional fields for indexing
  

Learn more...

Exclude libraries from search indexing results

You can exclude top-level libraries from being indexed and their content from being shown in search results.

Learn more...

Notifications System

Enables in-app user notifications. Notifications included out-of-the-box:

• Notification when a form entry has been submitted. The notification leads to the form responses (requires a subscription to the form)
• Workflow events (when a content item is sent for approval or rejected). Clicking on the notification takes you to the content item. (requires a subscription to the workflow cycle) 
• Implementation of custom user notification (through custom code)

The system notifications are on by default but can be turned on or off by Sitefinity users.

Notifications are managed/deleted by a scheduled task that can be configured by Sitefinity administrators. 

Learn more...

Concurrent Site Sync execution for content editors

Site Sync can now be configured for concurrent execution in addition to the already existing queue based approach. This option can be activated through SiteSync advanced settings.

Bootstrap 5 MVC resource package

All the goodies in Bootstrap 5 are now available to Sitefinity frontend developers. In addition, Bootstrap 5 resource package provides optimized RTL support and custom Sitefinity CSS. Bootstrap 4 will still be available in GitHub for download.

Learn more...

Security Improvements

Additional robust Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF) protection for login forms and Sitefinity forms

• Robust protection of out-of-the-box login form widgets
• Uses the double submit cookie method as recommended by OWASP
• The feature is turned on for new projects and disabled by default for upgraded projects, because previously customized templates need to be updated for this protection to work properly. 
• Can be customized via code and utilized in custom widgets or even outside Sitefinity 

Out-of-the-box integration with MOVEit for secure file upload

Progress.Sitefinity.MOVEit is an optional package that implements ready integration with MOVEit, the Managed File Transfer solution by Progress. This integration enables you to securely upload and store documents with sensitive information in MOVEit, making sure your organization is compliant with GDPR and PCI regulations. You can easily configure Sitefinity CMS so whenever users upload documents that contain sensitive data in Forms, the files are automatically transferred and stored in the MOVEit storage provider. 

Learn more...

NativeChat connector enhancement

NativeChat FAQ chatbots

You can now send your FAQs created in Sitefinity, directly to NativeChat and train your bots, without the need to manually recreate and manage FAQs in both places. You can then add variations of your questions and answers in the NativeChat portal to improve the bot's conversational responses. This integration is implemented using Sitefinity service hooks that allow automatic refresh of the bot FAQ content when it is published, unpublished, or deleted in Sitefinity.
Learn more...

NativeChat widget personalization

The NativeChat widget is now personalizable. This allows you to select a bot or different start of the conversation depending on the segment that the visitor belongs to.

Integration with Sitefinity Insight

Sitefinity reports the Sitefinity Insight context to NativeChat, which is later used to report user interactions with the bot (like starting a conversation, asking an FAQ, or a custom event) to Insight. You can also use information from Insight or other systems in NativeChat to personalize the conversation flow. 

Learn more...

Corticon Business Rules Management Engine Connector

Progress Corticon Business Rules Management Engine Connector for Sitefinity CMS is a project in GitHub that showcases how forms enable users to connect their Sitefinity forms with a hosted Corticon decision service and leverage the powerful decision making capabilities of Corticon rules engine to build more interactive forms and get a quote based on form submission by their customers.

Learn more...

Sitefinity Design System Website

The website is targeted at Sitefinity clients , partners, and development agencies  who want to know more about and understand the design and user experience concepts of Sitefinity Reinvented UI. Following the recommendations of the Design section of the website, it is easy to extend Sitefinity Reinvented UI and keep the same user experience. In the Components section, there is information about each visual component of Sitefinity Reinvented UI, its variations, and how it is combined with other components. Also, for each component variation, there is an example of how to use it via code - for example, from Sitefinity Component Framework or native HTML5. In the Utilities section, all utility CSS classes of Sitefinity Reinvented UI are listed, documented, and ready to use.

Learn more...

Tracking and personalization using Sitefinity Insight

Personalization by conversion or touchpoint

Two new segmentation criteria are available now in the Sitefinity Insight group - Conversion and Touchpoint. You can use any conversion or touchpoint from Sitefinity Insight, with additional conditions of the time frame in which the event occurred, as well as apply negative operation.

Learn more...

Redesigned stage selection process for lead scoring personalization

The user experience for selecting stages when adding a lead scoring characteristic to a personalization segment has been improved. Now you can choose a specific stage or a set of stages up to the end of the customer journey.

Learn more...

Client-side tracking for file downloads

File downloads are now tracked client-side, enabling Sitefinity CMS to support library storage providers different than the built-in database and file system.
Now, you can track interactions when a file is downloaded from cloud BLOB storage providers, such as Azure, Amazon (with or without CDN configured), or DAM-based providers like Cloudinary and Frontify.

Other enhancements and improvements

User Groups

To enhance the user experience when the User Groups feature is enabled, when the user is assigned to more than one user group, the user group is automatically detected on the login page based on the provided credentials. No drop-down for selection of User Group is presented on the login screen anymore in such a scenario. 

Deprecated capabilities

• Classic content UI

Farewell to the old UI. The New UI is now the only  interface available for all Sitefinity CMS users ("the content management UI"). It is no longer possible to switch between the New and the Classic interface.

• Web Forms framework

The following feature set has been discontinued:   Web Forms widgets for front-end development;  Web Forms widget templates;  Hybrid page templates;  Responsive & Mobile design module (only used in relation to Web Forms).
For new projects on version 14.1, the listed features are not available.
For projects upgraded to version 14.1, the features will be available so that the projects are not broken upon upgrade, and you have more time to plan and execute a migration.  However, w e are sunsetting these capabilities, and therefore we no longer invest in feature development or bug fixes.
Alternative options: .NET Core widgets, pages, and templates; MVC widgets, pages, and templates.  

Learn more...

Refer to Deprecated capabilities in Sitefinity CMS for a complete list of discontinued capabilities per product version.

What's fixed:

• Dynamic content items overview error with field type 'rich text' column (445689)
• Domain resolution of canonical Urls for details view is improper when Canonical Url Resolver is set to "Static" (446050)
• Additional URLs cannot be removed after upgrade or appear duplicate (454329)
• Orphaned media records in Azure blob storage when clear revision history or move library to another storage (455016)
• Sitefinity allows more than one taxon items to be created with the same name value (457124)
• Personalization segment for Republic of Korea (ROK) is not working (458447)
• Exporting dynamic content doesn't work when provider not active for the current site is selected (458500)
• Language Selector: Switching languages keeps the email campaign query string for any anonymous session (458859)
• Scheduled Tasks: Search reindex resume task not completing if the site is restarted (458961)
• Intermittent issue with cache invalidation after update on the site when using CDN and cache warmup. (459239)
• Authentication: OAuthServer RefreshTokenTime property is not taken into account (459745)
• Widget templates: Incorrect label under permission by section (450171)
• Submit form with only Change lead checkbox selected throws error in the log (358670)
• When change field setting export/import do not work in some cases (300796)
• Unpublished forms are shown when filtering forms with Published status only (448228)
• "Shared" label lost when editing page with shared content blocks (454218)
• When using Export as ZIP option on a Dynamic content type with a long name it can cause a problem and the export to never finish (450362)
• Search suggestion setting is not working properly (303794)
• HubSpot number values don't throw error when you enter space or comma (425538)
• SiteSync: Page templates cannot be synced after upgrade (445648)
• SiteSync: Cannot sync only a selection of configurations or labels (280977)
• SiteSync: Dynamic module structure comparison fails randomly (458179)
• SiteSync: Group page not showing up for Sync (455000)
• Improvements in site sync scheduled syncs (291528)
• Web services: Changes applied in the advanced settings are lost when web service is updated (452900)
• WebInstaller cannot install Sitefinity due to outdated url for prerequisite components (454015)
• Content block: Error when there is a link to a deleted item (457071)
• Authentication: User from external authentication logged out after an hour (457314)
• Form Submission on Personalized Page Do Not work (457383)
• Inserted thumbnail images have relative URLs in customized Email system templates (457395)
• Compiler error in the DashboardSystemStatusView view (457560)
• Azure search negative paging (458122)
• Forms: Widgets sidebar container inconsistent (454628)
• Minified init script breaks CustomEvent usage (457934)
• Multisite Multilingual: Custom classifications appear in second site (454943)
• Search widgets are not rendered when user do not have permissions for items from one provider (432726)
• Accessing page from frontend with /page/action/edit causes missing workflow buttons (450358)
• Backend indexes can be accessed through the /suggestions endpoint (454995)
• StackOverflow when reindexing a search index in a multisite instance with multiple dynamic content providers (456568)
• Front End Login Page redirection does not work when sts cookie has expired. (362718)
• Permissions: Restricted Forms can be published/unpublished from the More Actions menu (457941)
• Possible .NET Deadlock avoided in SiteMapBase (458848)
• Error logging improvement: Synchronizing documents from Sharepoint with duplicate URLs (450813)
• Added name restriction validation for child pages if Sitefinity "Action" route name is used
• Search: After upgrading to 13.3, search indexing documents start to fail due to various reasons (461743)
• Search: When add blog or List to already created search index, the items are not listed (462100)
• Search: When indexing dynamic items, content from the OpenAccessProvider is included in the index regardless of whether it is enabled for the site (461121)
• Sending page for translation makes the page automatically synced with all other translations (460915)
• Authentication: Administrator users cannot login to the backend intermittently when in LB (461387)
• Violating HTTP header case-insensitive standard with "X-Sf-Properties" (459590)
• Personalization based on Basic Profile Custom options field does not work (300706)
• sf-components could not be resolved error in Trace.log (457845)
• System email templates: Sender name missing after changing template for Workflow (458206)
• Forms: Duplicate form names in the Form's widget designer (458278)
• OuputCache profile varyByParams does not work for keys with space in the name (459687)
• MVC: Image selector doesn't show the hints when images are hovered. (461028)
• Single item site sync does not calculate/sync Related media dependencies in Non default site (461782)
• Loading thumbnail profiles in MVC widgets is slow for projects with multiple library providers (461985)
• Health check endpoint returns error instead of the actual status in case of inaccessible db during initialization (462402)
• Form: Error message is shown under each fields if form is submitted without validating reCaptcha (462416)
• Allow concurrent SiteSync execution (462665)
• Possible DB deadlock condition in OutputCacheItemsCache.GetAll (463016)
• Edit Permissions for pages do not add View (463025)
• TempItemsCleanupTask failure (463150)
• File Manager broken when Windows authentication is enabled (463503)
• SiteSync permissions are lost after upgrade (463588)
• Intermittently failing healthchecks when site specific settings are enabled for SystemConfig
• Missing related data in the grid of the backend list view after applying filter (460067)
• Application restarts with error " Both parameters 'connectionString' and 'cacheKey' cannot be empty at the same time.' (457454)
• Legacy Multilingual Mode: Page title fallback to any language not working in the backend pages tree (465379)
• Permissions: Popup error thrown when click faster on permissions screen links (437791)
• Items in status "rejected for publishing" remain locked for editing (297374)
• [Sitemap] Bing No Longer Accepting XML Sitemap Pings (462418)
• Ability to Filter Items by Edit/Modify Permissions for the Backend (465849)
• MVC - When paging parameter is second after resolved taxon, it is not validated if it is an integer (462992)
• Generic "An internal error occurred on the target server. Please, check logs for further information about error details!" when custom error pages are set up on the Target (465663)
• Distributed Cache (Redis): Static resources cache is not invalidated after upgrade (444349)
• Duplicate a large number of pages results in timeouts when hosted in Azure but pages are still created (460093)
• OData custom operations not serializing DynamicContent return type correctly (466152)
• OData web services throw an error when accessed with non-default provider in multisite setup using subfolders (464221)
• SiteSync Migration - Migrating forms with same ids does not work (466402)
• Upgrading Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather packages deletes all empty lines in AssemblyInfo.cs (466598)
• Problems with search and the "Enable filtering search results by view permissions" setting ( 340634)
  
• Incorrect URLs are still resolved because of URLKEYPREFIX setting ( 432451)
  
• Attributes on autogenerated fields are not working correctly when applied to a property in model ( 445338)
  
• Project Manager - Error while upgrading from 14.0 to 14.0.7721 (456942)
  
• Forms: Textfield DisplayMode property does not work (459113)
  
• Using SiteMapBase.GetSiteMapProvider might cause an unexpected behavior ( 459913)
  
• Not clear XML doc for method GetChildItemsHierarchy (460332)
  
• The results from method GetChildItemsHierarchy contain a lot of duplicates ( 460335)
  
• Implement lossy and lossless webp conversion in the thumbnail profiles ( 461003)
  
• Autogenerated field types: LinkModel is not persisted if it is in the Model ( 462195)
  
• Last Modified field for page node is not being updated ( 463621)

New content editing experience

• Related media is replaced with related media of related data when the fields have the same name (457221)
• Images fields are not presented in complex object list (456090)
• The Publish button is hidden by the Notes to Approvers on iPad when a workflow for pages is enforced (460130)
• GetRecentItems fails with 404 not found when the specified provider of the related field is not added to the current site (461379)
• Auto population of SEO content properties interfering with editing (443105)
• Editing existing link doesn't create sfref (448873)
• Moving content to another storage provider throws a Database error (455447)
• Documents get corrupted when uploaded as a Related Media (457243)
• When going from Documents to Images libraries from documents shown for a brief period of time (459719)
• When opening subfolder, the libraries inside don't load directly (459720)
• Improve performance in libraries with many folders and items (459156)
• Fixed issue with image link selector suggestions and search (457627)
• Using the image tool to insert a thumbnail of an image hosted in Azure blob results in a wrongly constructed img src domain. (454444)
• "Cannot use SaveChanges or CancelChanges on instance manager" error when regenerating image thumbnails (455993)
• Issue with loading the Backend List View for Pages in Sitefinity 14.0 when using OpenID authentication protocol (457905)
• Add title field to WYSIWYG embed function (453620)
• AdminApp: High memory consumption and slow loading of requests with Related data (455207)
• AdminApp: Email validation definition is not taken into account (444570)
• Analytics operation not available in AdminApp under operations menu for content item (453847)
• Documents: Cannot upload documents on Mac when using the new UI and Safari/Chrome (459013)
• Autogenerated field types: LinkModel is not persisted if it is in the Model (462195)

Authentication changes

The Default authentication protocol (introduced in Sitefinity 14.0) is now enabled by default for upgraded and new projects. The   Default   authentication protocol uses the same secure foundation as OpenID but does not offer internal identity provider application, IdentityServer3, which makes it more lightweight, simpler to configure and mange, and more extensible. The   Default authentication mechanism improves the performance and maintainability, and speeds up login time. It is intended to obsolete SimpleWebToken (SWT) and OpenID, which rely on an internal identity provider shipped with Sitefinity.

Learn more...

API changes:

Changed Telerik.Sitefinity.Modules.Pages.ServiceHooks. PagesServiceHookTriggerSettings - changes in PagesServiceHookTriggerSettings constructor, removed Type parameter. If you have used this method in your custom code, please rebuild the solution following the new signature public PagesServiceHookTriggerSettings(string key, string triggerTitle) : base(key, triggerTitle, typeof(PageEvent), PageManager.MODULE_NAME)

Developer Tools updates:

• TelerikUI for ASP.NET AJAX updated to 2021.3.914.45
• TelerikUI for WPF updated to 2021.3.914.45
• Kendo UI updated to 2021.3.914
• HtmlSanitizer updated to 6.0.441
  
• ServiceStack updated to 5.12.0
  
• JQuery Validation updated to 1.19.3

API and DB Change

API Changes

• The complete list of API changes is available here .

Database Changes

• The complete list of API changes is available here.

Regards,
Progress Sitefinity Team