Disappointed with Sitefinity

We have migrated to Sitefinity vr 5 and are quite unhappy with the CMS. The pages created in Sitefinity do not produce a valid html code and we have seen upto 96 validation errors in each page. We also built a few custom modules on the site which again introduce invalid code onto the pages. Other issues include - Inability to edit CSS files from the sitefinity admin, we have to change this by directly logging into the server. The forms on our site are not able to pass any custom code to a third party as Sitefinity automatically deletes that code, hence we are not able to use any interactive forms. The site loading is quite slow - even with the fixes to keep it warm. 

Any one else facing similar issues?

1) "The forms on our site are not able to pass any custom code to a third party"

If you need to do this, you should inherit from the default forms control and just handle the saved event, then you can pass whatever data you want to wherever you want.  But if you're talking about stripping of the server-side code from the templates, then yes...bit annoying, removed for security reasons somewhere back in 4.x

2) Bad and\or bloated markup...we've been saying this for a while, slowly being cleaned up, 6.1 fixes the nav issues.

3) Slow: Have someone look at it...with 6.0 (even 5.4) you shouldn't really even need to keep things warm (although it couldn't hurt).

I have found if you run Sitefinity on a 64bit system with .NET 4.5 installed there is great noticeable improvement overall. (With release 6.0)

I agree, I would like to see much more cleaner HTML generated. But I don't see it as a massive problem. (Just an annoying one) 

I would probably argue that users shouldn't be able to edit the css in the admin. The Admin is for the non developers.
The site css should be maintained and tested by a developer then upload\deployed when they are happy.
You do have the css widget to add your own stuff if you really want.

Hi,

Thank you for your feedback.

The admin area is going to be naturally slower than the front end just because there is so much processing going on. Something of the things you can do to ensure performance increases in the backend is to disable modules you are not using. You can do this under Administration > Modules.

Keep in mind also if no actions are made in the backend the site will go cold like any other asp.net application and the first request will warm it up again but this first request can take a while as the site loads itself back up.

You could review the following article of our documentation describing tips for optimizing performance:

www.sitefinity.com/.../tips-for-optimizing-performance

Furthermore, you could run these scripts available in the KB article connected to performance optimization of the database. They could be found in this article:

www.sitefinity.com/.../performance-optimization-failed-fix

We recommend upgrading to Sitefinity 6.0.4200, because there are a lot of performance optimizations for the backend and the front-end. Each major releases adds more performance improvement. More information for the upgrading process could be found in our Sitefinity documentation.

Recommended environment settings for Sitefinity could be found here: