The Potential is there, but you have to make it happen
April 21, 2017
The Potential is there, but you have to make it happen
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Progress Sitefinity
Sitefinity is utilized for our primary facing website. It is configured mostly OTB. Our use of content types has room for growth, and until we begin to create more content types and utilized Sitefinity's API, I would safely say we are under utilizing it as a product. Our integrations with non-Sitefinity datasources is minimal also.
- While there are not many different layouts, the ones we have configured do work well for the marketing team to create landing pages without any assistance.
- The ability to create new content types is easy to do.
- OTB functionality has plenty of room for improvement, especially the MVC modules they provide. They are quite immature in their development, and often 3rd party jQuery plugins offer a more mature interface. (e.g. News, and Calendar)
- Due to the MVC method, there is a flaw in how some redirects are handled. If Google has cached pages of a deep link it's possible that Sitefinity will fail to a parent page, and not report it as a 301, or 404, and render out a bad page. The work around requires hard coding some redirects in the web.config file requiring the need to take the site offline to implement.
- Usability has room for improvements also. While it's super difficult, we have users coming from the WordPress world and that is easier to train.
OTB Sitefinity is beat by WordPress, and is about on par with Evoq/DNN. The UX is easier with WordPress, and I would venture to say Evoq/DNN slightly edges Sitefinity out in UX. It's difficult to beat the number of 3rd party tools for WordPress, and Evoq/DNN has quite a few compelling 3rd party tools also. Sitefinity is more of a shell CMS that blends into existing Microsoft environments with the help of a development team. If you already have a development team in place and are a Microsoft stack, this is worth considering.