Telerik, known for its rich portfolio of solutions for application lifecycle management, and web-sites, has released a new version of its content management system Sitefinity 6.1 with unique capabilities for content writers to quickly find and edit digital assets without the need to navigate to them in the WCM backend.

The latest Web Content Management (WCM) platform includes a lightweight Digital Asset Management (DAM) that helps power users the capability to change, update, and manipulate rich digital media assets. Sitefinity 6.1 also brings responsive navigation widgets with touch-friendly navigation for mobile devices using predefined CSS.

“The Sitefinity 6.1 release is all about delivering a great experience for creating and editing digital assets,” said Martin Kirov, Executive Vice President, Sitefinity, Telerik. “The new lightweight DAM solution is complimented by a desktop app which enables content writers to quickly find and edit digital assets without the need to navigate to them in the WCM backend. The release also delivers a responsive navigation widget, selective sync of assets between multiple environments and a ton of developer goodies.”

Built on ASP.NET based technology, Sitefinity offers a huge range of options for developers, marketing officers and IT-managers. The main advantage of the new release of Sitefinity is a set of functions to fit the site to the client devices with screens of different sizes. The lightweight DAM functionality makes it easy for desktop publisher to edit and creation of document, searching for a video, or editing a news item or post.

The desktop application can be used to edit live data of Microsoft Word, Excel, plain text, and RTF file types that reside in Sitefinity Libraries or connected SharePoint instances. The saved documents go straight to the website or into the workflow approval process established by the Web Administrator. Additionally, Sitefinity’s elegant interface, ease of installation, speed and performance allowed bloggers to easily author content for blog site from anywhere.

“The rapid development cycle of the Sitefinity Desktop Application delivers on the promise of ‘Deliver More Than Expected’ made famous by Telerik,” said Lino Tadros, Chairman and CEO, Falafel Software.

Sitefinity 6.1 includes a new Selective Site Sync feature, which helps to build and maintain complex forums and discussion threads. This feature provides Web Administrators complete control over the synchronization of development and production environments. In addition, it maintains control status of the participants and moderation, as well as the extended search through the records and new widget templates and changes to existing ones can now be automatically synchronized.

Sitefinity 6.1 also features an improved touch-friendly navigation widget that enables developers and designers to customize the look and behavior of Sitefinity Navigation. The new Geo-location API helps developers to create store locator, or anything with an address and give the ability to specify a wrapper element for Content Blocks.

Mobile has become a driving force in the market today, where more and more people are engaging with brands through mobile applications. To date, businesses have a fragmented approach to mobile application development, which is completely disconnected from the repositories where organizational data lives. For business users, Sitefinity offers an intuitive interface making it easy to learn. Non-technical users can then simply e-commerce, email campaign management, multi-site management, personalization, mobile analytics and management tasks.

Sitefinity 6.1 follows the release of version 6.0 released in May. The version 6.0 brought a new architecture and a new API backend for CMS developers to improve extensibility of all three mobile development strategies: Responsive Web Design, mobile websites and mobile apps.

Telerik also recently announced the availability of new tools for PHP and JSP developers, a release of Kendo UI and the availability of Version 2.0 of its Test Studio for iOS that combines mobile test automation and end-user feedback into a single product.

DevOps Angle from Kyt Dotson

Content Management Systems often rest solidly within the business user preview; but they intersect specifically with the duties of the web administrator. In this fashion, products such as Sitefinity provide a bridge between content creators and content administration staff. Developers and development-cycle comes into play at both the data entry and data presentation portions of content management and Sitefinity does a good job of providing powerful tools to developers.

Sitefinity 6.0 and now 6.1 extend connectors that enable developers to hook into Microsoft Sharepoint–for cloud collaboration and just general workflow–that also give developers a lot of control over presentation mechanics of displaying data on web, mobile, or other devices. Especially important is how Sitefinity can hook into Telerik’s Icenium cloud which enables easy mobile-environment presentation and app connectivity.

On the web administration side, the addition of more granularity or atomic syncronization will also help development teams greatly. In previous versions of Sitefinity it was only possible to synchronize the entire repository from pre-production to production; now it’s possible to sync by individual pages, content pages, templates, category, etc. The go-to example was one of a site with different localization (English, German, Russian, Japanese, etc.) and the new synchronization mechanism would permit the English pages to synchronize with pre-production without synchronizing working changes on German and Russian.

As usual, Telerik provides a beautifully well-built ecosystem of products that reduce headaches for developers and administrators. And just as much as app producers must interact with clients, Sitefinity provides a method that helps separate the roles of developers, administrators, and especially content creators, by allowing them to collaborate without stepping on each others toes.