Thinking of SiteFinity

Hi everybody,
I am a long term Telerik Control user, and would not develop without them. I have been looking at SiteFinity and trying to figure out where it will fit in to one my projects which is developing a Tour Operators site and I am need some help. I am an experinced developer, and I do understand the concepts. I have looked through the documentation and I have got the trail and played around with making a user control that connects to the database etc.

At present the site has around 200 hotels 14 countries and around 30 resorts. All of these as you can imagine as driven by a database so for example you have the Hotel Page (hotel.aspx) which takes a Query String and the presents the hotel information (hotel.aspx?id=77). I know you guys kinda get that :) I just want to be clear and this applies to the country and resort pages.
My first question is, how will this work in SiteFinity? At present all this data is in a very rough CMS that is updated by employees of the company. What I am looking for is a solid CMS and I think SiteFinity provides this.

Another example is: Some hotels have prices which are drawn in from our pricing system which is linked via the hotel ID.  Now we have no problems creating the Hotels again in the SiteFinity CMS if that is the way to go, but I would need a way to link to the pricing system. Or I could implement the Hotel or Data Driven pages via user controls and draw the data from our current database, but then could I some how integrate the current database into SiteFinity so that we can use the SiteFinity CMS to somehow update the current database?

I know this sounds long and may not make sense, I am trying to weigh up the options to make the best decision.
Any advice or help documentation / pointer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Hi Gary,

Thank you for your interest in Sitefinity! I am glad to hear that you are a customer of the Telerik controls. As you probably know the full suite of the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls and the Telerik Silverlight controls come bundled with Sitefinity so you can use them within the scope of any Sitefinity based project.

Now, let me try addressing your questions.
There are numerous ways to implement the division of hotels to countries and resorts. The easiest way that comes to mind is to utilize the in-built taxonomy, i.e. making a hotel a part of different categories or applying tags to these content items and then filtering the results based on these tags or categories. The great benefit here is that we have created the logic for you already, all you need to do is create the widgets that will display the results based on these filters. You would be using the API, so no hardcore coding would be required, and also we have some samples which would be able to help you out with this.

As for your second question - as you might probably know, Sitefinity is based on the Provider Model. That means that you can connect Sitefinity to any datasource of your choice by adding your own custom providers. This is how you can pull information from any location or store data there as well.

What I would recommend is to get in touch with us so that we could discuss your project in further detail and provide you with more specific information so that you could get started (and done :-) ) quickly!

Please drop us an email at sales@sitefinity.com! We are looking forward to hearing from you, Gary!

Regards,
Grisha 'Greg' Karanikolov
the Telerik team

I'll add my 2 cents. :)

I'm currently looking at Sitefinity for the first time ever (v4 is the first version I've even used, looked at, etc) and I wasn't for it at all from the start. I've used other CMS tools (drupal, joomla, dnn) and even sharepoint and I must say, out of all of them I put Sitefinity at the top. Though I'm finding some things tough to do, but I think that is due to I'm new to the sitefinity world. But overall my experience with my v4 Eval has been all good.

its easy to use
easy to implement your own code (though I'm running into small issues)
its .NET base which is a huge plus for me, I don't  have time to learn PHP for joomla and drupal.

Overall Sitefiniyty reminds me of SharePoint but without the perfomance headache that I get on my sharepoint servers.

just my 2 cents