Sitefinity - First Look

I have been playing around with a Content-Management-System (CMS) called Sitefinity by Telerik for the last few weeks. I have known about Telerik for many years. They create a suite of ASP.NET controls (RadControls) which I have used in several of my projects. My impression of their company and their products has always been extremely positive. Their software & service has always seemed inspired to me.

My past relationship with CMS products has not been positive. I have evaluated dozens of them in the past. My impression of almost everything I have encountered is that it is clunky and inflexible. Over & over again I have ended up building my own rather than be limited by a rigid framework that someone else has established.

When I first started evaluating Sitefinity I thought I was going to have this reaction yet again. In fact, at one point I abandoned it entirely and started building my own CMS. As I worked through the project though I started making design decisions that seemed to closely mirror what Telerik was doing with Sitefinity.

I finally decided to give Sitefinity another run. At the very least I wanted to build my own Sitefinity custom Module and gain a clearer understanding of how the product could be extended. I'm still very early into this process, but I think I'm becoming a believer. The framework that they have established is becoming very impressive to me.

All this being said, although I like what I'm seeing for the Sitefinity framework, the documentation and modules that are currently being made available feel immature to me. Their Blog-engine, for example, pales in comparison to nearly everything else available. Even adding Blog categories requires you to personally extend the module through programming. Even worse are the modules that don't exist at all: site search, forums, products, user comments, user ratings, events, etc. If you want any of this stuff, you will have to build it yourself. Telerik has some of these features included on their roadmap for future versions, but that doesn't help right now.

I'm happy enough with what I'm seeing to use Sitefinity for one of my smaller personal projects. I will try to make additional posts as I work through this process.