MVC 3 + Sitefinity 4.0
Hi,
I am about to embark on a journey to integrate MVC 3 view engine with Sitefinity 4.0...
Before I start, just wanted to check if anybody has done it before and if so, are there any issues that I need to be aware of...
Although Sitefinity is great, I would like to use MVC 3 Razor View engine for custom pages and from what I read online, using MVC 3 + WebForms in the same application is no big deal...
However, if there are any potential issues that I should be aware of, let me know...
Looking forward to get feedback....
Any thoughts on this?
Hi ,
We have not made tests and integration applications with MVC, so we cannot support this scenario officially for now.
All the best,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team
Has the Sitefinity team considered MVC for the architecture at all? Sitefinity 4 is embarrassingly slow and think MVC would be a better architecture than the bulky, messy one that was decided on. Orchard CMS is using MVC and is lightening fast. Umbraco is changing to MVC in their next major version. Sitefinity 5 maybe? Preetham, keep us posted on your progress. Sounds like an interesting project especially if you can bypassing the hundreds of bugged, bulky layers of Sitefinity 4.
Hi Truman,
Can you please list advantages of MVC over the architecture of Sitefinity right now?
The layers that currently exists does not necessary slow the system down. The slowness and the bugs come from the implementation itself, but not from the architecture. Once you have the right architecture, it's a matter of time to make the right implementation, or fix the issues in the one you have.
I am looking forward for your feedback.
I think it is also not a matter of architecture.
But what you see is that Microsoft is contributing much more on MVC and Razor as then WebForms.
Just see how quickly this Orchard CMS is growing! It is free, uses the clean MVC / Razor approach and has a big community. Even easier to explain to non .NET developers (PHP) because of MVC.
I think this is (going to be) a very serious concurrent for SF.
Regards,
Daniel
MVC is proven pattern spanning decades and will attract more developers even from other languages. It is the future in relation to the dinosaur web forms (bulky, clunky, and old).
Really though from practical stand points:
1) SPEED, SPEED, SPEED! Sitefinity is so slow and MVC architecture would give it the speed it needs to be in a web 3.0 world.
2) TESTING, TESTING, TESTING! With MVC having a built in testing architecture, the Sitefinity team would not be introducing more bugs than it fixes. Seriously, you'd think the quality assurance of Sitefinity would be immaculate since Telerik offers testing tools, but Sitefinity has the worst QA I have seen. I'm embarrassed for you.
3) CONTROL, CONTROL, CONTROL! Developers of Sitefinity would have more control over the rendering of HTML, CSS, and Javascript that the MVC architecture provides.
Instead of outright replacing asp.net forms with MVC I would love to be able to use razor view syntax when rendering content widgets on the front end. Razor syntax has proven to be much more friendly for rendering frontend content and produces much cleaner html.
Here is an example of razor views being integrated in to SharePoint which is also based on asp.net forms.
http://tqcblog.com/2011/01/22/asp-net-mvc-3-razor-views-in-sharepoint/
Since Sitefinity 4.2 is already .net 4.0 this should be a much more straight forward implementation.
Razor has already been used to build a templating engine outside of MVC which is available on codeplex.
http://razorengine.codeplex.com/
DNN is another asp.net forms based CMS which has a Razor Host Module.
- http://dnngallery.com/blog/id/266/razor-in-dotnetnuke
- http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Blogs/EntryId/2858/WebMatrix-and-DNN-ndash-5-ndash-Hosting-the-Razor-Engine.aspx
Thanks,
Jason Chester
*Bump*
It seems as though this thread might need some kickstarting. Has Telerik started to think about a MVC implementation? I'm not sure Microsoft will be supporting WebForms for much longer as their focus seems to be MVC driven now.
Anyone from Telerik have an update? ..Or has anyone taken a stab at implementing MVC + Sitefinity yet?
Thanks!
-Sean
Hello guys,
So, to conclude, should we be MVC or WebForms... or should we provide you with a choice and support BOTH? :)
Just a little bit more polishing, and you'll enjoy the Sitefinity 5.1 release with the MVC support in place.
Any word yet if we can introduce MVC into our existing Web Forms sites (or convert them?), or will we have to start completely from scratch?
Hey Dan,
Congrats on the new release! The release notes look promising. Looking forward to the webinar. I would love to see some documentation as soon as it is up as well.
Hello Don,
The documentation is currently being rolled out. We have documentation for all the new features, so you will find it on the web site pretty soon.
Kind regards,Wow - this truly is remarkable addition! It is clean, slick and native. I know because we released the first Sitefinity MVC widget into the marketplace ;) I also wrote about my take on it and go over it a bit:
http://blog.falafel.com/Blogs/basem-emara/2012/07/18/mvc-comes-to-sitefinity-5.1!