Sitefinity Thunder: What You Need To Know

If you are a business owner and have a website, then you must be aware of the fact that a static website is usually not very interactive and offers only some basic experience for the site users. Organizations that have very limited budget and use not so feature rich technology may begin with a static website, but with time they also often choose to invest more on the website development and this means investing in a proper content management system.

Sitefinity is a popular CMS in the market right now and creating a site using this technology makes it more professional, rich in features and interactive. Once you are aware of your organizational needs, it is easy to roll out your new site using the Sitefinity in less than a month because the platform is designed for enterprise organizations and is also compatible with current Microsoft technologies. Not only this, there are also important plug-ins that make the task of website developers easy and offer productivity and flexibility to the site.

Sitefinity CMS Thunder is a plug-in used for Visual Studio that enables the developers to create and maintain widgets, themes, dynamic modules and etc. through the Visual Studio environment. It also connects to any of the websites and can modify them on the go. So let’s take a look at some of the features of Sitefinity Thunder:

• Increased productivity and flexibility:This Visual Studio plug in allows the developers to deploy custom codes to various Sitefinity projects automatically from the most common and integrated development environment that is used by.NET developers.
• Use code templates to skip the boring stuff: Sitefinity Thunder has a rich set of templates that offer the boilerplate code that is needed to extend Sitefinity. This allows the developers to create the modules, themes, widgets and other extensions that are essential to customize the web project without even pasting the code from documentation. These templates allow full access to the API’s of Sitefinity and allows the developers to focus on the task instead of the implementation details. Once the extension is created, it can be easily added and enabled with a single click even without leaving Visual studio.
• Intellisense: Sitefinity Thunder offers the developers hints directly in Visual studio through IntelliSense. This helps the developers to access the custom properties quickly and also create complex data queries easily. By using Sitefinity Thunder, the developers can now easily connect to the projects and surface the details through IntelliSense. This makes the developers spend less time while referring to the documentation and spend more time on addressing the unique challenges of the project.
• Maintain all the codes and projects in a single place: Often developers who have to handle multiple projects at the same time and share codes and functionality face problems to manage the codes of each project. Sitefinity Thunder allows the developers to centrally manage the connections of all the projects in a single place and once the connections are established, custom code can be deployed with a single click to any Sitefinity instance. This makes it quite easy for the developers to create a suite of Sitefinity extensions and reuse them for multiple projects.

What are the requirements of Sitefinity CMS Thunder?

To use Sitefinity CMS Thunder, there are certain requirements for the Visual Studio environment. It is supported only for web application type projects.

• The solutions that are open in Visual Studio should contain only a Sitefinity CMS web project
• The project should not be in a solution folder.
• The configurations of the CMS instance should be stored in a default configuration folder.

It is by using Sitefinity that you can create customized themes and templates and custom widgets and also construct user friendly control interfaces for them. Sitefinity Thunder helps to save your time and effort and allows you to create the elements in an automated way and set them in the right folder structure, create sample codes and use it as reference or modify it accordingly to suit the exact needs.