Sitefinity Versions, Lifecycle Policy, and Future Technologies
Hello and welcome to Smooth Musings, the podcast of Smooth Fusion. And today we have a special guest, Jonathan Read from Progress. Welcome, Jonathan. Hey, how you doing, Todd? Good so so we're gonna we're gonna spend some time with Jonathan talking about the versions of Sitefinity the lifecycle phases of all of that kind of what's going on with the technologies in each of these different versions and hopefully give you some really good information about what's going on and how to plan and know know how to read. all the tea leaves on that. First of all, Sitefinity is celebrating 20 years So congratulations.
I'm sure Jonathan was there day one. All right. Yeah.
I've been working with the product. So almost three quarters of the life, I guess. yeah, Smooth Fusion's been working with Sitefinity since 2009. Started with version 3.7 back in the day.
There's been lots of versions. Lots of versions, which is good, because each one get better. yeah, Jonathan, tell us a little bit about the current version that we're on now, and then we'll jump into kind of understanding life cycles.
Well, yeah, as of this recording today, the most recent version is 15.2. Let's see, it was reduced. The good thing is we have lots of timelines to tell you about it.
And if you haven't gone to this page ever before and you're ever curious about the timeline of Sitefinity, Sitefinity.com slash timeline. We have a fancy redirect to go to a progress page, but that's besides the point. But 15.2 was released close to my favorite time of the year, which was October 29th of 2024. love Halloween, I'm a big, big fan.
The highlights of features there were released were Next.js capabilities, some new WYSIWYG editor capabilities as well, some performance optimization functionality with Insight. So there's a lot of marketing-based enhancements along the way. Definitely a ton of marketing enhancements since 3.7, which again was a...
I never had to build one from the ground up, but I did have to work on one. yeah, I mean, if you're ever curious about what's been happening with Sitefinity, that timeline page is a great representation of the highlights of each major and minor release. John, what does that mean? I'm glad you asked, Todd.
Each year, we typically release the product three to four times a year with new features and functionality, right? That's your 15.0, your 15.1, two, three. and we will have another one after 15.3, which is slated to come in the March timeframe here pretty soon. Those are our new features and functionality type capabilities, right? And then we do have patches, which are typically bi-weekly. So again, that's kind of our general life cycle as we roll into that. But yeah, the latest release has been great, lots of great optimization features for authors and editors, generative AI stuff. The list kind of goes on.
We're not going to take the whole time on that today because you know, I'll go to my face turns blue but That's helpful though, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about, you when they're looking at those charts and all, there's some terminology there. Particularly, you know, obviously what the active date is, that makes sense.
That's when it became available. But explain a little bit about what is this limited backport request date? And we'll start there and kind of go through the others. What happens on that date? Yeah, I mean, so on occasion there may be a bug or a feature which they may fix in a newer version.
So for example, maybe you're on 14.4, which is a long-term supported version, right? Minimum of four years. And there's a bug that was fixed. You can make a request to have those things backported when feasible.
I mean, they're not a guaranteed acceptance or anything else, but you... Again, you can make that request during that particular period of time. Followed by that, there's the next phase. So yeah, it's a limited period of time. And just to note, the date that's in there, it's the first day of that month that that particular period happens. explain what do you mean by having it backported? Yeah, again, it would be to a version that is potentially not supported or again, they're kind of special request cases.
Okay and then after that, obviously the next date there is sunset. So explain what happens at sunset and how that differs from retired. Besides the beautiful thing that happens every night, right? I'm kidding.
You know, you got to rub it in. We got some good ones here in the cornfield of Indiana, but we're both very flat country, so whatever. Besides the point, yeah, so sunset.
What does that particularly mean? So in general, the sunset period, again, starts on the first date of the month that it's happening, right? And then sunset, again, is the capability of patching for security purposes of high capabilities, right? You still get support. Typically, a lot of times best case depends on the issue at hand. And then my friends will join us here. And then again, any high critical security patches would also be placed during that particular time, again, on any versions that are in that particular period.
Okay. And then when it's finally retired, then we're not touching that version anymore. is that? yep. Correct So again, support becomes a best case scenario. So if you're on a retired version and you happen to submit a support ticket, you know, they would inform you that you are on a unsupported version or a retired version and that the best course of action would be for you to upgrade to probably at least the current long term supported version.
Or you can go obviously beyond that to. to a version that is supported to get, again, get you back into support and maintenance. Gotcha.
And so let's talk about that a little bit. Long-term support. We see that the LTS characters after some of the versions. you alluded to it a little bit a while ago, but what all... Let's go through all that to make sure folks understand what LTS is. Yeah, so it's a version of the software.
Typically, the last one in a major release, so 13.3 was in the 13 timeframe. 14.4 was, again, the last release of that particular major version, so the big number at the beginning, right? And then, again, we will have a 15.4 long-term supported version. This, in general, has been a four-year support lifecycle.
So if you are on that particular version, you will, again, continue to receive a bug and patch support. Again, above and beyond what might happen in that sunset period. Of course, those do also go into the sunset period.
So, you know, if you've attended our recent webinars, you know, we have increased the length for 13.3, which is our kind of mainstay first long-term supported version, which was actually released in March of 2021. We've increased that particular long-term support. until 2026, so April 2026. in that, and again, again, it's best case effort.
It's in it's still in its sunset period, right? So we've really increased the sunset. So the last cycle of it, if there's a high security event, we, again, I'm gonna say may patch it. I can't guarantee and nor will I, but again, it has the potential to be patched for again, definitely high security fixes.
If they are minor bug fixes, things like that, unfortunately getting to the latest version is going to be your best course of action for those. So currently, the current long-term supported version, which is 14.4, it is retired in April of 2027. Again, if you've been a longtime site affinity customer, we have recently changed our lifecycle page to actually show future. releases, which I think is huge. For Todd and I have been using Sitefinity for quite some period of time.
We didn't always say that. You didn't know. So we can say currently, October of this year, so 2025, we'll have that long-term supported version. Again, subject to change, not guaranteed, and we hope to trade a company. Besides all that, again, in the October time frame, long-term supported version of 15.4.
So again, for planning purposes, and we've put a retired date of no earlier than January 2023. So that's kind of exciting. So, you know, at least from October, that's about four and a half years worth of support for that particular version of the application.
So when you say, you said 2023. uh 2030 2030 yeah sorry 2030 if i misspoke there yeah 2030 i know it's sorry yeah it's weird to say yeah 2030 yeah we're going backwards in time it's back to the future no 2030 so yeah the next long-term supported version will be no earlier retired no earlier than 2030 sorry just to get that get those numbers in the right order there So obviously a big discussion point with our customers and in the whole iDfinity community is Progress has been keeping Sitefinity up to date with the evolution of Microsoft ASP.NET. And we actually got to do a really good version of this podcast with Sam Basu about All that history and all which if you haven't seen that folks go look that up. We'll put a link to it but but let's talk about how that is reflected in these versions. I know you've got some things you can share there from web forms which was the really old way to do things that Microsoft retired web forms. I forgot a while back something like that and then ago, yeah.
And then MVC was the thing and, and Sitefinity became MVC supporting and, and then MVC got retired by Microsoft actually a while back there as well too. Yeah, don't have the number in front of me, but yeah, it's been a little bit of time. And so now Sitefinity is supporting ASP.NET Core.
And so talk a little bit about all that and what your version, how your version impacts that. Yeah. Well, we don't just support ASP.NET Core. We've actually introduced even more technology. We also have, you know, for more front-end developer type types, if you will, we also have Next.js.
So the evolution of Sitefinity, right? So the modern sort of monolithic content management system is not really the path forward, right? So previously we basically had a database and a server, right? And that worked, but it very tightly coupled together our front end presentation and where we're doing all the work, right? So that's updating pages and content and information. This had some effect on how the front end might perform. So what we've done now is decoupled the process, right? So our front end technology can be, again, ASPR Net Core or Next.js. We, of course, have a... a collection of web services where you can consume our content anywhere.
So, I mean, that's still a thing. We've had that since version nine, really. So when we decouple it, you can actually add in front of what you currently have today. So in order to kind of give us the opportunity to replace the middle sections of the content management process, if you will, so we'll call it the database and the tier that produces the services, if you will, We got to replace those moving forward. So adding what we call a renderer in front of that gives us the best case moving forward. So as we look at the next generation of Sitefinity, being on a renderer allows us to switch out those bottom two tiers really into anything.
Well, mean, we could chisel it on my stone wall in the back as long as it knows how to read it. Nobody cares, right? So that's kind of the process moving forward. Again, you can add on a renderer. Today, we recommend a least version 15 to use renderers, 15.2 if you want Next.js. You can add one of those on the front end. We have some new tools to help you out as well.
So again, for Todd and I, we've been doing this, it seems like forever. And during that time, we've obviously collected a lot of assets, right? We've produced widgets, we've got templates, you know, we got pages, right? I mean, a whole bunch of stuff has happened over the years that we've owned. this content management system.
So a couple of weeks ago, about a week, week and a half ago, we released an analyzer tool. If you're on version 13.3 and beyond, you can place this analyzer tool into your website. We recommend doing it in a non-production version.
So take your database back up, move it somewhere else, or get Todd and his team to help you. From there, you can get a view of what the heck's going on with your site. How many pages you have, how many templates you're using, the inheritance of templates. How many widgets you have, custom widgets, are they web forms, are they MVC? Boom, boom, mean like stuff is going everywhere, right? But you get a holistic view of the entire application in one place. We've got some charts and some tabs and some graphs that you can go through.
Well, not graphs, but charts really. Grids, grids, that's right word, grids. Whatever there.
So now you can start to analyze your site to look towards the future. Now here coming out in the next few weeks and months, we're gonna start to release migration tools. If you're still on web forms, you're going to need to migrate that. Again, one way or another, you got to do it.
So we're to come out with tools for you to migrate web forms pages. And these are not forms like contact us style forms that you're building in the back end of Sitefinity. This is the technology that Microsoft produced called web forms. It was very stateful and boring.
so you're to need to migrate, right? So we're going to help. by coming out with tools to help you do this process. Now again, you may have custom widgets that you need to rebuild. Rebuilding them in ASP.NET Core and Next.js is, I'm going to say at least 50 % faster than doing it in previous versions. Now I'm not just saying that because I work here.
I used to be a consultant. We don't talk about that part of my life anymore, but I've built anything and everything with Sitefinity. I started on version five, so I'm not quite as cool as Todd. But first site I ever built was on version 5.
It's definitely significantly faster for generating out your own new widget. So we add in this front-end technology. We will have to, again, migrate some content, some pages, and well, not the content, but the pages at a minimum. You can do a big bang theory if you want. You could use multi-site, spin up a new site, build all the new pages, maybe even take the opportunity to redesign your brand.
take advantage of the new functionalities that we have within the back end of Sitefinity and the new page editor, or you can go page by page. Decide on a section of pages. If you're not needing to go through a new design, that's fine. You can pick a section of pages, basically kind of go from the outside in. Do I have the templates? Do I need? Do I have the widgets that I need? Migrate those pages and release them. So you can do a slow migration process or you can do, I like to call it the Big Bang Theory. Or better yet, you could maybe look at one of our new hosted solutions like Sitefinity SaaS and give you the opportunity to rebuild the whole thing. We can still migrate your content.
We still have ways to do that as well. So news, blog posts, custom content types that you might generate. again, the new front end technologies, again, are much faster. They're even more what you see is what you get as far as the editor goes, at least for building pages.
Again, a lot of new tools in the back end. for navigating around through content. Keyboard shortcuts have been released along the way. So lots of new ways to help improve content flow and creation.
Great. as far as how does this affect or how does my version number affect the available technology? How far can I go with web forms? How far can I go with MVC? Sure. Good question. Well, Webforms is deprecated in version 14.1.
Now, that being said, it still works in the newer versions. We do not necessarily recommend that you release them to production. Again, we're not supporting them any longer. So if there were any issues or anything like that, I don't want to say you're on your own, but it is kind of a best case scenario. So again, for those customers who are on Webforms, we are coming out with tools to help you. Again, releasing in the March, early April timeframe is at least the anticipated plan right now to help you migrate to one of our newer technology. Our first go-around will be in the.NET stack, which we're all used to, obviously.
Again, it still works, so you can go through those slow page migrations, but we don't necessarily recommend that you host it in production. I'm not saying you can't, but- know, do your due diligence as far as testing goes and everything else. So yeah, mean, version 14.1, web forms, actually, you know what? I did have a little chart that we could, that might make it, yeah, people who do look at it here. So let me share my, first my beautiful background here. It's whatever Microsoft popped up today.
I am not a world traveler, so I don't even know where this place is, but I definitely want to go there because it looks really cool. I probably could click on something for it to tell me and somebody is going to comment later and tell us what it is, but. But let's look at the look at the supported technologies here. So again, as as mentioned, the only current long term supported version. Again, we've only increased the sunset phase. 4.13.3 is the only, again, long-term supported version that still technically supports the web forms capability.
So the green boxes are supported stuff. Once you really get into the 14 and 14.1, we're no longer supporting it. We've not removed the technology. So again, you can still upgrade and it'll still work, but we do highly recommend that you take a look at migrating to one of the new front-end technologies like ASP.NET Core or Next.js.
Remember, you can stand it up right in front of what you already have today. As we go into ASP.NET Core was really introduced in version 14. So if you're on 14, you could add it to that. We've made enhancements of course along the way to ASP.NET Core. Next.js, so again, our newest front-end technology. This is again React Next.js type technology, TypeScript, again, more JavaScript based development patterns.
That was released in 15.2. So if you want to be on Next.js, it does work in some newer versions, but the official release from Sitefinity was 15.2. As far as Sitefinity Cloud Ready, so if you're already on Sitefinity and you are interested in using our hosted solutions, you can be on 13.3. And really you can hand over the code and the database and we'll at get it stood up for you. you're still responsible for testing the application and make sure it's functioning in the way that you anticipate.
You'll have one year to upgrade it for you, but as a side note, you'll get an automated upgrade in that particular process. So we'll upgrade your code to the latest version at the time that you're upgrading. So if you put it in there today, tomorrow, it would create a pull request and say, hey, we have a 15.2 version for you. Would you like to accept it or not? You could obviously pull it down to your own local dev. It's a quite interesting chart.
Again, if you're on web forums, now is the time to act and take a look at the future. We recommend, again, migrating to a renderer. You could migrate to MVC, but in my opinion, it's the same level of effort, actually maybe more, because I've already touted that the new renderers are even faster. So again, we recommend getting onto a renderer. That's going to be the best case for...
you know, the long-term life cycle of your Sitefinity application, you know, moving into sort of the next generation. Right. Because MVC will not be supported after 15.4 LTS, correct?
Yeah. Okay. Well, that's helpful. Thanks, Jonathan. That's good. So anything else that you think needs to be shared along with what we've already talked about? Well, I'm sure that was a lot for a pretty short period of time here.
You know, again, for everybody who's using Sitefinity, we greatly appreciate you being a customer. We're here to help, both Todd and I. As you're looking at the next steps of your application, let us know.
We're happy to help and make sure that you come up with a decent and solid plan for your future. You will have a version of Sitefinity in its current infrastructure. till 2030. So you do have some time to make some plans, right? If you are running versions 13, now's the time to act on plans.
know, technically speaking, you have about a year, a little more than a year, you know, to get onto something that is supported. Again, our best recommendation is to look at our renderers, right? And you have two choices for that. And if you're on the 14.4 timeframe, you have a little bit more time until that one is retired and sunsetted it.
But looking towards the future, we're always improving and increasing the capabilities of the application. A lot of that will be going into our new renderers. So getting to those is going to be, again, a really great enhancement for you, your marketing team, and even your developers as well if you're developing with Sitefinity. for sure. Yeah, everybody likes it better on the development side and on the page building side.
And so it's definitely worth the, worth the jump, better performance, lots of things. So, well, thanks a lot, Jonathan. Thanks for joining us today for sure. And, yeah, if, if we can help anybody who's listening to this video, just give us a call. We can help answer any questions or, help you with, some, upgrading if that's what you need. So thanks for joining us today on Smooth Musings.
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2025-03-30 09:28
