Sitefinity October Releases
Kali Karakasidou | Office of Information Technology Oct 30, 2019This month’s release is light due to our heads-down work on upgrading to Bootstrap4 to prepare for the Sitefinity v12 upgrade happening in January 2020. However, read on to learn more about the small but mighty features and enhancements you can utilize and enjoy now!
馃敟Hot Release of the Month 馃敟
Redesigned people detail view
We’re super excited to release a re-designed people detail view that features a new design, new layout/information architecture, and new fields for you to add in the content type. This has been a huge cross-functional effort and we’d like to thank all our site builders and community members who provided feedback on requirements to help us redesign this in the best way. Please note that as a V2 to this, we’ll be releasing a new grid view as well as new filter functionality (ie: when you’re choosing people to list, this would allow you to filter down a master list by certain criteria) for you all in early 2020, so stay tuned.
馃ぉOther Features & Enhancements 馃ぉ
Button links in hero image, carousel, and video can now open in new windows.
At the request of the Office of Equity, we’re now allowing site builders to choose whether to have the links of the buttons/CTAs in all hero’s (image, carousel, and video) in new windows. There will be a new icon on the button/CTAs as a visual indicator of the link opening in a new window. Note: This will be especially useful if you’re linking to an external site.
Ability to autoplay hero carousel
In an effort to boost user experience, site builders now have the option to configure their hero carousel to play automatically. Autoplay can be turned in via a simple checkbox when you’re building your hero carousel. When autoplay is on, the carousel or image gallery will autoplay once, upon page load, will go at the speed of 5 seconds per slide, and will still provide users the ability to pause the slideshow/carousel at any time using the same button as the hero video. Note: we’re working to apply this to the image gallery widget, however since that’s an OOB (out-of-box) widget for Sitefinity, it has customization hurdles.
Alphabetizing content types and widgets in the drop-down
In an effort to improve the site building experience, you will now see that content types and widgets are alphabetized under the “content” drop-down menu item in Sitefinity. Note: we’re working on applying this to the toolbox view when you’re building a page for early 2020.
Associate file attachments to cards.
At the request of the School of Education and Human Development, you can now associate file attachments to enhanced cards (as well as continuing to associate URLs with enhanced cards).
Chevrons removed from side nav
We removed the chevrons on the side nav that are shown in activate state (when a user hovers over the link in the side nav).
馃悶Bug Fixes 馃悶
October’s release is addressing the following bugs:
Events: in the tile view, images on events were not showing up.
People Content Type: in the detail view, tabs were showing up even if there wasn’t any content within them.
Articles/Newsroom: some articles were showing the original published date instead of the updated date or custom selected date.
Hero Video: on mobile devices when the video gets replaced by an image, there was still a transparent overlay on the bottom of the image if there was no text inserted.
Ordered/Unordered lists: list items were not hanging properly, bullets were not indenting next to floated images, and sometimes list text would overlap a floated image.
Testimonials: images would go full width for tablet screen width which expanded the image too much, and now the image goes full width only for phone screens
What’s Coming up in November / December
In the next two months, our team’s main priorities are the following:
Develop and release a new Sitefinity theme for the Colorado School of Public Health.
Upgrade our code base to Bootstrap4 in effort to prepare for our upgrade to Sitefinity v12.1 in January/February 2020.
Kick-start our user testing efforts in and beyond the University, including user testing our hypotheses on the navigation.
Onboard Atlassian tools (JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket) to optimize our project and code management processes.
Continue doing discovery work on the following projects: People content type performance & SEO enhancements, Site-wide page properties, Newsroom 2.0, HawkSearch (or enterprise-wide solution), Keyword search on content types and widgets, Timeline widget.