Trellist Reviews Sitefinity
Overall Satisfaction with Progress Sitefinity
Trellist uses Sitefinity for our own website at trellist.com and we recommend and implement Sitefinity solutions for our clients. Sitefinity has proven to be an easily extensible solution that serves well for mid-size and large companies that have robust website requirements. Its combination of out-of-the-box features and robust API provides the right balance of price, core capabilities and ease of customization by extending or creating widgets. Sitefinity's intuitive interface, and ability to create custom designers, reduces the learning curve for content owners.
- We use Sitefinity's module builder for managing a lot of custom data types--think database tables but you get an interface for free. The modules come with widgets for common basic functionality and customizable widget templates, but for complete control, we often build custom widgets that utilize the API to access and manage the data.
- The MVC page templates and layout designers are a really nice feature. The page templates are hierarchical and each child inherits all the capabilities and layouts of its parent. The page layouts provide an easy way to implement bootstrap responsive layouts while making it easy for content owners to drag and drop widgets into content place holders.
- If you know .Net, Sitefinity's API is intuitive and doesn't require programmers to learn new languages or frameworks. This reduces the learning curve for developers and provides practically limitless options for writing code to meet project objectives. Sitefinity also offers a Visual Studio extension called Thunder that aids in creating Sitefinity components. Although it's not strictly necessary, it's use does reduce some of the tedious development tasks, especially around creating custom widget designers, which can be created to provide content owners with niceties like an image or page picker.
- We implemented a multisite solution for one of our clients and although the ability to share templates and content is extremely powerful, setup wasn't as intuitive as it could be and documentation was lacking a bit. We also ran into a couple bugs which we'll be reporting when things slow down a bit. Permissions was one area where some trial and error was necessary and workarounds needed.
- eCommerce and the Marketing modules need some maturity. They are not robust enough or easy enough to use to supplant more mature products.
- WordPress, Concrete5, Drupal, Umbraco CMS, Joomla!, ExpressionEngine and Ektron Web Content Management System
All continent management systems are built to do basically, the same thing...manage content. When Trellist makes a CMS recommendation to a client, it is primarily based on the project requirements, how easy it is to customize the CMS, how intuitive it is for the content owners, and cost. Sitefinity isn't always the right answer, but it often satisfies all the requirements and we are very comfortable knowing that we made a sound recommendation.