How bad is your Sitefinity 4 experience?

We are currently too nervous to put our site live on Sitefinity 4 (4.1.1501.0) because of the number of serious bugs that stop us doing fundamental things like editing Pages, publishing Pages, and managing content (such as taxonomy). Right now our site is still live on the previous open source CMS we were using and we're miles behind schedule.

I want to love Sitefinity -- and sometimes I do when it works. I also have to say that the technical support is mostly excellent and very responsive (thanks Victor, Boyan, etc). However, these are just a selection of the problems we've had:

1. Unable to Publish any Pages on our site because of this JavaScript error.

2. Unable to Edit any Pages because of this MasterPage problem.

3. Unable to Edit any Pages because of a bug (error reads: "Cannot insert the value NULL into column 'is_backend_object', table 'SentoriSF4SP2.dbo.sf_object_data'; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails".)

4. Unable to delete Tags because of this bug.

We've not even started any serious development work to integrate Sitefinity with our own software, this is just very basic editing of content that is stopping us. Right now, I can't hand the system off to users because I know they are going to have problems.

Are we just desperately unlucky or are other people struggling too?

Cheers,

Ian

Hi Lanp,

I agree that we've had some issues, but the progress with every service pack is great. I think all of the issues from this list has been fixed for 4.2 version. In order to be sure though, we would kindly request your database and project files - we will check for all the issues reported by you. Even if something from this list is not fixed, we will fix it for 4.2. Since you are not running on the latest version, I suggest you to update your system to SP3 (1574) in order to take benefit from all the fixes and performance improvements. 

I'm pretty content with SF 4.1. I'm stilling running SP1 because we're in testing and aren't publicly exposed so we skipped SP2 and SP3 because SF 4.2 is just around the corner.

We've run into a few issues. Some of the issues were addressed by fixes. Some of them I was able to work around with help from the SF team -- the one that sticks out in my mind is very specific to us and probably not worth SF "fixing" for everyone. Others I was able to fix with help from SF because of something stupid I did.

My experience hasn't been bad. A few hiccups, but nothing major.

I agree with Georgi

If you can forget about 4.1 and 4.1 SP2 - then you got a product at hand that will be within 6 month the best CMS on the market again.

Usability has always been the key issue for me to use Sitefinity over any other CMS. 4.1 SP3 is a product you can finally use and I am quite sure that if Telerik concentrats on fixing all the bugs (there are still some anoyances) in the next 3-4 month 4.3 will be a product you and your customers will absolutely love.

Markus

My question to you is, what do you need so vitally from SF4 which SF 3.7 doesn't provide?  Lets be honest, unless your license is running out, I'm betting there isn't anything drastic that SF4 currently provides that 3.7 doesn't. 

SF4 is great when it works and it is only started to really fall in to place lately.  If we could turn back time, I would actually tell my manager, it's a bad idea to start a new project with a deadline based on 4.0 and instead we should wait until July (now) to even begin development for a product with bells and whistles.  That is my gripe, the fact I spent so much time working with a broken product, lack of documentation, working examples, and community knowledge when really I should have focussed my time on anything but SF4.  In the time I had been waiting, I would have built what I needed, in 3.7, twice over but this is also heavily due to the fact that SF4 is potentially one helluvah' powerful product and the sacrifice for that is one helluvah' learning curve (for me personally).

So in answering your question, I believe you can start your development now as things are just starting to heat up.

Good luck.
R

Richard, there's nothing we need vitally from SF4 feature-wise. In fact, I would recognise that SF3.7, when you factor in the number of modules available, is significantly more feature rich. My concern was investing development resource in old technology. It's always a risk going with a newer product, but we thought we had made the correct decision with SF4 based on our evaluation and our limited feature requirements. If I could go back in time, I may have chosen differently.

Georgi, thanks for the offer to investigate these issues. I am currently working through them with your support team and will continue to do so. They've been very helpful. We may investigate upgrading to the latest build once we have finished the current push to get features and content added.

All the best,

Ian

I'd like to add that SF4 is one of the best .NET CMS platforms out there today for an [out of the box] site. I've used 3.7 and SF4 and I'd like to say that what took me a few hours in v3 has taken me up to 3 days to accomplish and be the end of the 3rd day it still may not even work in SF4. SF 3 was much easier to create/add widgets to, create/add modules to, etc then SF4 is, it may get easier in 4 but its currenlty not looking that way.

Example: I created a widget in 3.7 to allow my user to drag and drop to the page. Once the user clicked the edit button they got the dialog with 3 input fields, 2 textboxes and an image selector button that opened the imagedialog window. To create that took about 2 hours or so, and worked the first time, now I'm trying to create that same widget in SF 4 and right now I'm on day 2 and still not working and trying to find the documentation with example code that works is like finding a needle in the haystack. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I like both versions for different reason and both have pros and cons, but from a developing/customizing standpoint, I don't think SF 4.x is at that level yet.

Hi,

Sitefinity has big defaults, but nothing is perfect. It's a great tool, if you just made site out of the box.
On the other hand if you begin to develop specific tools and to modify configurations in backend it's another story.

The developments are not easy and extremely consumer of time. For configuration in backend It's at your own risk, site can become instable with various errors.

Regards,
Nicolas

To be honest it's been pretty bad. We're still struggling to get a blog site deployed. After having trouble converting our existing site we decided to start with something we thought would be simple. It seems like we've run into every issue possible though.

The clean solution/rebuild issue with the DLLs was a pain. Managing the DLLs in general is a pain.

The upgrade process from 4.x to 4.x is buggy. I don't like how it creates a new SitefinityWebApp project. I have absolutely no confidence in the upgrade process.

Support is slow.

The "return code is 0" message box

We're constantly getting into strange situations where we get stuck with a "system is restarting" message or 
blog posts or pages won't delete or workflow problems or Master page issues.

In my opinion, it seems like they've tried to add too much functionality without making sure the basic stuff is stable and working.

Hey NewToCMS,

I really appreciate the use-case, these are extremely valuable.  I'm guessing you were using the WebEditors for 3.x:  http://www.sitefinitywatch.com/blog/09-02-04/Getting_Started_with_Custom_WebEditors.aspx   Is this what made widget creation easy?

There isn't a great replacement for these tools in 4.x.  Although, I suppose it could be argued that the AJAX'ified UI dialogs in 4.x are more user-friendly (perhaps not as developer-friendly though).  Either way though, we don't like to hear about customers struggling for days to implement a custom widget.  

Can you please confirm my assumption above (about using WebEditors).  Understanding what customers liked about 3.x can help us pursue equivalent 4.x features.

Gabe Sumner
Telerik | Sitefinity CMS

@Gabe, Correct I used the web editors for most of the widgets I did in 3.x, however trying to create the same style widget in 4.x just plain out doesn't work. There is nothing in 4.x to replace how it was done in 3.

If I could see something to show me how to get a widget to allow my user to add information in 4.x I'd be a happy camper.


All I'm looking for is a widget that my user can drag to the page, click Edit and then add a [title[, [url], and select/upload an image and then once they click save, the title will show as well as the image which would be a link to the URL the user provided. I did this exact samething in 3, but 4.x not so lucky