April fool's suggestions - Sitefinity - Ideas & Feature Requests

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Posted by Community Admin on 01-Apr-2011 00:00

It’s april’s fool day, so I thought it would be nice to come up with some ‘blond’ feature requests. Perhaps some are already listed or planned for a later release, if that’s the case, my apology for double posting.

Fix browser editing before adding new features.
Currently, for me at least, Firefox proves to be the only stable browser that allows me to edit templates and pages. Both IE9 and Chrome sometimes have their quirks where placeholders don’t show up or drag-n-drop doesn’t work 100%. Having new stuff like Newsletters, Marketplace integration and stuff is great for us (developers/partners) but eventually we’re handing the project over to our clients. Telling them they have a state-of-the-art website that’s cross browser compatible, but they have to install an old FireFox version (v4 is out atm) to edit it, somehow doesn’t inspire confidence.

Sitefinity project configuration data.
Summary:
The ability to store under ‘settings > advanced >Project’ custom data to allow for global project data be managed from a centralized and standardized location. In the form of a label and value field.

Long story:
Most of us will have some best practices and methods of storing and retrieving some global parameters for a project. Some developers will use resources, others use web.config appsettings, others might load an xml file or load some sql table.

Instead of each developer having its own method and a wild grow of configuration classes, having a central repository and standardized way of storing this data will also benefit template exchange. In an accompanying file (or automated) we could just state declare these and these variables and template features would work.

I have a code snippet that automatically retrieves a ‘companyname’ and a ‘build-year’ which will automatically create the “Copyright ‘build-year’-current year ‘Company Name’. All rights reserved” in whatever language. Or take a GoogleMaps key as an example. Instead of storing the key on the pages that use it (and thus having to edit multi-places depending on internal/test/live site) we’d have a single and centralized place to store it.

Back-End template overview.
If you’d like developers to store custom Masterpages in ~/App_Data/WebsiteTemplates/MyTemplate/App_Master please be so kind and to change the “based on” column into something that doesn’t make my client think there’s something wrong. Please also see attached screenshot (sf_editing_templates.png) for an IE/FF/Chrome overview.

Back-End page overview.
When you’re managing pages, the default views (sort hierarchy) shows creation date instead of last published or last modified date. Doesn’t really matter atm, but a year from now most pages will be a year old while the client may have edited them 2 days ago. From clients view a last published date instead of creation date makes much more sense.

Themes.
With regards to the ~/App_Data/WebsiteTemplates/MyTemplate/App_Themes/ThemeName folder structure, can you provide us with a folder policy? With the marketplace integration are you going to take the entire ‘ThemeName’ folder or the separate subfolders?

Suppose you use font-face in your theme, will it make a difference if we store them in ../ThemeName/Fonts or ../ThemeName/Css/Fonts ?

PITS.
I’ve read that Q3 2011 you’d like PITS to be fully operational, would love it! Order/sort colum by version number instead of release. Since both the project manager and the meta tag render 4.0.1210.0 version tags, I would suggest using that instead of having to figure out if a certain bug is for a Q1, Q2 / SP version.

In general overview list all the bugs per release and use the 2011 Q2 / 2011 Q2 SP1 as an estimate for resolving. As a developer I first would like to verify if it’s a bug or a quirk and secondly if it’s already filed.

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Apr-2011 00:00

Hi Jochem,

Thanks for taking the time to compile this extensive list with suggestions. Please, find answers to your questions below:

On Fix browser editing before adding new features.
IE9 support is planned for 4.1 SP1 due in a month. We are aware of some issues with Chrome as well and will spend some time to fix them in the coming Service Pack.

Sitefinity project configuration data.
This a very interesting request which will add value to many users. That's why we added it our Issue Tracking System. To vote for it and follow its status, use this link.

Back-End template overview.
In stead of showing the whole path to the master file, we can show only the name of the file in this column. Will your customers find this convenient ?

Back-End page overview.
You are right, sorting by Date last modified will be much more convenient. We have logged an internal task to correct this. In the meanwhile, you can change this your self in section Settings . If you want to change the sorting of News to be my last date modified, go to Settings> Advanced> ContentView> ContentView> NewsBackend> Views> NewsBackendList and enter "LastModified DESC" in the field "SortExpression". You can change the values for the different sections in this way.

Themes.
Some guidelines for organization of this folder are described in our Designer Manual here.
We haven't yet decided on the exact integration with the marketplace and how it will be structured under the Themes folder. As to the example with Fonts - we would recommend storing them under folder Fonts but the other approach is also possible.

PITS.
Your request was transferred to our internal web team. What our team will do is prepare a table where you can easily to what build each public release corresponds.

Thanks again for your time!

Regards,
Kalina
the Telerik team

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