Sitefinity evaluation questions

1. MVC Integration
I realize this has been asked before and adding MVC to a Sitefinity install is an "unsupported" configuration, but I'm wondering what experience other users have had integrating it with .NET MVC 3. I know webforms happily coexist with MVC; is there anything particular about Sitefinity that precludes this?

2. Database access
What paradigm does Sitefinity use for talking to a back-end database? Orchard relies on NHibernate, of which I am not a fan. SQL Profiler revealed, much to my dismay, that NHibernate is implemented in Orchard relies heavily on dynamic SQL, which is just one of several deal breakers for me.

Currently, my application is locked down so that ALL database access is done via stored procedures. The site can't retrieve any metadata from the SQL server (list items such as tables, views, procs and UDFs, or get any information about the internal structure of those items). This is wonderful from a separation-of-concerns point of view, and we rely on heavy use of sprocs to allow multiple applications in a variety of applications to share database code.

3. Also, I'm unclear on the best way to integrate Sitefinity with an existing application, other than running them completely in parallel. Admittedly I haven't spent much time investigating this.

4. Orchard requires the source for each module, etc to be deployed to the production environment. This is also a deal breaker. Does Sitefinity also require this?

5. How does Sitefinity integrate with a typical dev/staging/production environment? Some CMS require that the CMS binaries are redeployed, which is fine; some seem to have a seizure when this happens.

6. Can I still use Visual Studio for development, or does Sitefinity require me to perform customizations via the web interface?

7. How difficult is it to import existing content (ie, mostly static HTML, images, etc)? I have tens of thousands of pages that must be migrated.

Hi David,

1. Sitefinity 4 is a web application and its model (MVVM) is different from the MVC model and currently there is no integration with MVC.

2. Sitefinity uses OpenAccess for database access.

3. It depends on the already existing application. Content items in Sitefinity can be created trough the API. Create a page with the API reading the page title and the url from a collection and creating widgets reading the content from a source. Unfortunately there is no one click migration.

4. When a module is created for Sitefinity you need to deploy its .dll file without the project files (.cs, aspx, .resx)

5. With Sitefinity the project files are needed. This is App_Data, bin, ClientBin, web.config and all folder under the mentioned.

6. You can perform customization to widget templates and managing files from the cms backend, but if you want to add new web control to the project you must use visual studio if you are using Sitefinity as web application(adding new control requires Build (F6)) or just deploy the .ascx file and its codebehind if you use Sitefinity as website project.

7. Refer to answer 3.

All the best,
Stanislav Velikov
the Telerik team