What Happened

Over the years I've used pretty much every .Net CMS, plus a few java and rails ones.  The last time a client went with Sitefinity it was on version 3.7.  

Sitefinity 3.7 was super simple to develop against; for instance module creation was as simple as creating some standard usercontrols and importing some sitefinity usercontrols to handle the work.  This made Sitefinity my favorite CMS, narrowly beating out Kentico.

Why did the Architects at Sitefinity decide to make everything so much more complicated in 4.x?  

I'm sure there is a good reason, such as incorporating functionality into the UI.  However, if they are trying to do a staged approach for UI integration why couldn't they have made 4.x backwards compatible.  I would much rather have to download a 200MB install, if I could use the functionality of 3.7 while the Sitefinity team is using the new stuff to bring functionality to the UI.

Am I alone here?

Hello Patrick,

Thank you for your feedback.

The functionality and the framework in Sitefinity 4.x is somewhat more complicated, but this comes with advantages beyond just embedding functionality in the UI. Just an example - this architecture allows us to create a content type builder module much faster than we were able to do it 3.x. In 3.x you had to code even your web services if you wanted to have 3rd party apps or web sites to connect to your web site.

I agree though that making the system harder for users is not good. The issue is not that the system is complex, but in the quality of the documentation. We are hardly working on this - we will provide more samples by the end of this quarter and have extra resources working on the developers guide. Moreover, we are going to provide step by step documentation for an upcoming feature that we are currently building - every step we took with this feature will be put in the docs. 

I suggest you contacting our Sales Representatives, they might be able to provide you with a 3.x license, depending on your requirements. 

Thanks for the suggestion.  Unfortunately the contract with the client states Sitefinity 4.2....  No worries though, I figured out a way to get everything to work quite a bit easier.  I have one issue that I'm working with support  to resolve and we will be in a good place.

Hey Georgi,

I think you might want to clarify this part of your post:

We are hardly working on this

Although some of us probably agree with what you said, I don't think that's what you meant ;)

Hi Kalvin,

I agree :) Let me say it again - we are working hard on the things put on the list :).

@Patrick - I'll check what can be done on your request.