Sitefinity: A brief review

In the very near future we’re going to start using a fairly new product from Telerik called Sitefinity in our projects. For quite some time we’ve been looking for a solution in terms of content management. Among the many we’ve tried – Umbraco, Jahia (ack!), etc, there have been enough short comings to make us not want to use it again. Plus, these things were annoying to use, and chances are if we find them confusing, the client is sure to as well.

Enter Sitefinity, a product created by Telerik. I’ll be honest, I haven’t been the biggest fan of the crap quality controls they produce, but it looks like they’ve done a tremendous job with this one. As a template guy, I’m so happy to know that all the controls on any given page are completely customizable. Nothing is more frustrating  than having to force a set of CSS rules onto a convoluted jumble of non-semantic HTML that .NET is famous for. From what I’ve seen so far from Sitefinity, the rendered HTML for a given control is – shock of all shocks – clean and semantic! However, even if it ends up being a mess that I expect, the ability to customize the controls on the page means I have complete control over the HTML rendered.

<div id="TelerikOuterDiv">
<div id="TelerikInnerOuterDiv">
<table id="TelerikWhosOnFirst" border="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<div id="TelerkPlainText">Simple text header</div></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
</div>

Sitefinity carries a steep price tag (in comparison to the other content mangemnet systems we’ve used in the past) – $900, but I believe it’ll be worth the cost in the long run.