Sitefinity: Great framework, poor support.

As a developer, when you run into a problem, sometimes it will be incredibly difficult or impossible to diagnose yourself. No one likes seeing a "NullReferenceException", but when it's thrown and it's deep in a Telerik (Progress) stacktrace, what are you supposed to do?

Telerik Progress has left a bad taste in my mouth in the past about their brilliant ability for marketing and sales, but when it comes time that you need help, you feel like a second-class citizen. StackOverflow (the de-facto website for all software, development, and programming help) has very few Sitefinity questions and answers. The Sitefinity forums will probably provide you with some very old results. Responses are very slow, and sometimes never come from Sitefinity staff. There's a few heros (like Sitefinity Steve) that will come around and help. Sitefinity's own support portal absolutely needs improvement. When you begin creating a ticket, you're provided with a very clunky interface. The actual box to provide detail is a very tiny 100x200 pixel box- I've pointed out that it's very difficult to use, to which I was told to type somewhere else and copy into the box. Once you create your ticket, they claim you will receive a response in 48 hours, but that is rarely the case. Typically the response is about 6 days, +- 2 days.

The documentation site is not too bad. It can be very helpful. Sometimes you will run into areas that have not been touched in a while. For example, the current documentation for creating a widget designer does not provide an example of how to create a widget designer. All it says is to use Sitefinity Thunder, which is an extension for Visual Studio. That's fine, but there is no supported extension for the latest version of Visual Studio (Visual Studio 2017). Plus, the industry is headed in a direction where you shouldn't need particular tools to get the job done. We've got JetBrains Rider and Visual Studio Code (different than Visual Studio), so we shouldn't need a particular extension to a particular version to get a job done.

There's a lot of bugs. I currently have 7 support tickets open. Some features, like the ability to export all pages/data, and import them into another instance, does not work at all. There's similar issues with SiteSync, which is their ability to sync multiple separate instances.

There's some really bad UX (user experience) choices. For example, I filed a support case because when you're on the Backend / Users page, and click "Search", a search box appears but it does not focus it for you. Because of this, you will begin typing but have it not go anywhere. So you focus the search box and begin typing the name of the user you are looking for (The first column of the table shows the User's first and last name). However, search does not use the user's first and last name. Because of this, you can search for the name of the first user you see in the table, and there will be no results. I was told that this is expected and is not a bug.

Sitefinity has two main data layers: the "native api" and the "fluent api". The native API is older and is fully implemented. The fluent API is the newer, "more readable" API. But, it appears that "readable" just means that you chain the calls and perform actions using callbacks. This would mostly be fine, except that the fluent API is only partially implemented. This is unfortunate when you're trying to maintain consistency and suddenly you run into a feature that is not implemented. Now you'll have to switch back to the native API.

The Sitefinity certification exams need to be completely redone. They're not as serious as the Microsoft Certified Professional exams. I don't mind that nearly as much as the actual questions on their exam. There's spelling and grammar mistakes. They don't include topics on the latest features and best practices.

Learning materials for Sitefinity tend to be outdated and questionable. The official learning material for the Sitefinity certification exams are outdated. There are only a couple of videos on Pluralsight for Sitefinity, one of which provides the questionable suggestion that, in order to figure out how to do something, you should decompile the Sitefinity DLLs and read the code. I think if you were to do that you'd spend significantly more time and be much more confused than if there was sufficient documentation. There needs to be examples for everything. The language in documentation needs to be as simple as possible. There needs to be multiple delivery mechanisms (docs, videos, books, forums with fast and intelligent moderators).