Sitefinity Content Staging and Workflow

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Ultimate Guide to Sitefinity Content Staging and Workflow

What is Sitefinity Web Content Management?

If you’re keeping butterflies, knowing their lifecycle is vital in getting to know the insect itself and taking the best care of it. This is because each step has specific needs. Similarly, any developer must know the lifecycle of their content. Without it, they've lost the game before even starting to play.

So, what is this cycle? To put it simply, there are four steps. The process starts with 'master,' goes on to 'temp,' then 'live,' and ends at 'deleted.' When the content is in the database, the Sitefinity CMS makes one row for each state. And you, the developer, use workflows to manage it. But before getting into the details of content workflow, let’s talk about the basics of Sitefinity content management.

What is Sitefinity Website Personalization?

Sitefinity content management is a wonder. It will help your site reach new heights every day. And there are a couple of reasons why. The CMS keeps you on your feet, creating new and better content regularly. With it, you can build customized experiences for your users and grow your business.

A good CMS, like Sitefinity Content Management, will even help you expand your reach. This means you can get to customers from various areas and backgrounds on to your site. And factors that can hinder this growth, such as language barriers, etc. are removed from the equation. The net benefit to your business in terms of conversions and happy customers just can't be topped. And all these benefits come from the amazing features of Sitefinity Content Management.

User Friendly

This just might be the best thing about this CMS. It streamlines your tasks and makes it easy to follow up. It also breaks down problems and challenges so that your team can fix any errors as quickly as possible. After all, you can’t fix a problem you can't understand.

But that's not all. Sitefinity content management scales a team's efficiency to help them send specific messaging. This ensures that you and your team are always on the same page. And you maintain consistent branding across different channels.

Campaign and Content Optimization

No business can reach everyone, and you shouldn't try. Instead, you should prioritize quality over quantity. And this means getting to the right people. Sitefinity content management does exactly that.

You define your audience and change your content accordingly. Then test the results through A/B testing.

Drag and Drop Layout Creator

Any task is done best when it is easy to complete. For example, if designing a page is difficult, it leads to many issues that range from a marketer taking longer to finish a task, not meeting deadlines, making subpar web layouts, losing motivation, etc.

Sitefinity content management ensures you don't have to deal with such things. It has the best content editing capabilities on the market. And your marketers can easily create complex page layouts with it. Our users have even reported novice members of their teams using it well.

They can build web designs by simply dragging and dropping widgets onto it. And once they're in place, they can be edited easily with a guided interface.

Digital Asset Management

User engagement is crucial for any business and its website. And these days, media content is the easiest way to do so. There is nothing our CMS can't help with, from images to graphics and PDFs to text files, video, and audio. In fact, Sitefinity content management pushes businesses to store them.

The drag and drop tools let you move complete folders into your library. And it keeps the file hierarchy in place. Furthermore, the meta-tagging device means users can get to them quickly.

With the rich editing tools, you can reuse any content. Whereas, you'd have to spend a lot to recreate it anywhere else.

Taxonomy Management

The User interface makes sure site administrators can maintain control over content tags, categories, taxonomy, etc. This process is smooth, efficient, and fluid.

Drag and Drop Form Creator

You can also make user-friendly forms quite easily. Instead of complex programming, all you have to do is use this powerful Sitefinity Content Management tool to drag and drop.

Multilingual, Central Multisite, and Multichannel Management

Sitefinity content management makes working more than one site super easy. You can add content or updates to multiple websites with just a few clicks and even share content.

Built-in Approval Workflows and Content Governance

Sitefinity Approval Workflows helps you put out quality content. You'll get different notifications and can choose to approve or reject updates. With the built-in version history in the CMS, you can look back, notice trends in your content, and reflect. Then make changes and see the best results.

Now let's talk about Workflows specifically

Types of Workflow Sitefinity

Sitefinity content development workflow makes sure your content is the best version of itself. This means all the work you put out is checked thoroughly. And this is done by creating levels of approval - the first, second, and third. An item goes into the first as a rough gem and comes out the third cut and polished.

This is the process typically followed. However, you can make your own workflow with Sitefinity, and it'll work like a charm as well! There are quite a few types of workflows. Some are simpler than others, but each works just as well as the next. The default option is a No approval workflow. Its lifecycle steps are: create and publish. And all users with the right permissions have rights.

Now, we get into the more complex ones. As you add more levels of approval, the process becomes a little lengthier and more in-depth.

Let's start with an example of four levels of approval. It has four lifecycle steps, just like the No approval workflow. But they aren’t the same. For this option, the lifecycle steps are: Create and send for review, send for approval, send for publishing, publish.

Always staying one step ahead of a potential feature break

Importance of a Sitefinity Staging Environment

The staging environment is a copy of your live website and the last step of the development phase. It’s a preview of what your site will look like. Making sure it’s right is essential. And this is because everyone who’s part of the website uses it. This is the customer, partner teams, technical teams. So, you use user acceptance testing (UAC) to test it out. And once you’re satisfied with the results, you can publish. When you’re making the final touches, you can use pre-configured deployment pipelines, available in the Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal, to deploy new functionalities.

How can we help

Clarity Sitefinity Experts

The Sitefinity Content Workflow Software is a key part of Sitefinity content management. It ensures your content’s quality. And you can choose how extensive you want the checking to be. Furthermore, the staging environment helps you see your product from the customer’s eyes just before publishing. This can help you make certain changes if needed. If not, you can appreciate your final work.

Clarity Sitefinity CMS Experts

Additional Features & Resources