Introduction to Sitefinity Development

Sitefinity Thunder
Welcome to the Sitefinity Thunder module. My name is Lino Tadros, and in this specific module we'll be covering the installation of Sitefinity Thunder as a plug-in to Visual Studio to enable the development of Sitefinity easily inside of Visual Studio itself. We're going to install the Sitefinity module into a Sitefinity web application so that website no matter where it is will be ready to communicate with Thunder from inside of Visual Studio. We're also going to connect Thunder to local or remote sites to be able to communicate back and forth between our instance of Visual Studio running a specific Thunder implementation against a local or remote site as well. Using the Thunder explorer, we're going to use it to download and replace or delete templates directly into the database of a living web application for Sitefinity, extremely powerful to be able to do something like that from inside Visual Studio. It doesn't even have to be local to your machine. Then we're going to use Thunder to modify database based widget templates so that if have a blog or news or events that we would like to change the way it looks and these widgets are available in the database of Sitefinity, we will be able to use Thunder inside of Visual Studio to make modification physically into these templates and save them right back into the database right away. We're also going to go ahead and create some new templates in Sitefinity using the Thunder Visual Studio templates. Finally, we're going to install any ASP. NET web user control using thunder from the Solution Explorer plug-in in Visual Studio to make it extremely easy to deploy any ASP. NET control directly into your website.

Sitefinity API
Welcome to the Sitefinity API module. My name is Lino Tadros, and it's my pleasure to actually show you how we can use the standard API to work with pages and content in Sitefinity, and then we're going to discuss the lifecycle for pages and content from Master to Temp to Live lifecycles. We're also going to use the FluentAPI, which is a different kind of API to use against Sitefinity APIs to work with pages and content as well like we did in the first part. And then finally we're going to exercise the Telerik JustDecompile product, which is a free product to view the source code of Sitefinity, and that will help us tremendously to find out how the engineers working on the Sitefinity product themselves have used the API to communicate with widgets, to create modules, and so on and so forth.

Sitefinity Configuration Sections
Welcome to the Sitefinity Configuration Sections. My name is Lino Tadros, and it's my pleasure to actually cover in this module why you use configuration sections in Sitefinity, the important part about not using the web. config to write your own app settings to retrieve it using. NET code, which you can of course do, but we're going to discuss a much better way, a much simpler way to use configuration sections in Sitefinity. We're going to use Thunder to create a configuration section programatically. We're also going to add the Global. asax file from Visual Studio into your project so that we can implement the Application_Start event. This is where we're going to use the Bootstrapper object in Sitefinity to register the config section. And finally, we're going to build a widget to retrieve information from the created configuration section on the fly.

Sitefinity Widgets
Welcome to Sitefinity Widgets. My name is Lino Tadros, and in this module we'll be covering how to build an ASP. NET WebUserControl as a native widget in Sitefinity. We're also going to be working with properties and attributes showing you how to hide properties, also how to use some C# attributes in. NET to create categories and browsables for all the property's part of a WebUserControl. We're also going to create a widget designer using Sitefinity Thunder in Visual Studio and associated with our current WebUserControl. Then we're going to move and create a separate assembly, a completely different project in Visual Studio that will contain all the code for a widget to see how we can actually build that assembly and end up putting it in the Bin directory of the Sitefinity web application so that we don't have to recompile the entire app when we use that widget. And then we're going to create an MVC widget in Thunder in Visual Studio and also how you can create controllers, models, and views to use inside of a widget for MVC in Sitefinity. And finally, we're going to use KendoUI to decorate the markup code used for the MVC widget to be able to show it in a different way using the CSS and the JavaScript Minified that comes with the KendoUI package.

Sitefinity Modules
Welcome to the Sitefinity Modules. My name is Lino Tadros, and I will be covering with you how to use the module builder to create a brand new custom module in Sitefinity. We'll also use the backend of Sitefinity to modify the module and create new records. We'll also be working with the widget templates and understand how we can actually modify the widget templates that get created automatically by the module builder to change the look and feel of the specific widget. We're also going to create a brand new widget that does not use the same exact Telerik controls that get created by the module builder to display the dynamic module completely differently using the API. And finally, we're going to use the code reference section to learn how to access custom fields whether it's images, photos, videos, and documents and so on.