FAQ

Why this project exist?

Sitefinity Feather introduces a modern, convention-based, mobile-first UI framework for Telerik Sitefinity CMS. Feather is most useful for frontend developers and provides easy, fast, and intuitive methods for developing UI components.

For additional information on Feather you can find here.

What are the Feather prerequisites?

Feather is designed to work on top of Telerik Sitefinity CMS. Therefore, it has the same prerequisites as Sitefinity CMS.

How do I get started?

Once you have Telerik Sitefinity CMS on your machine, you can follow the instructions for installing Feather.

Which external UI frameworks can I use with Feather?

Sitefinity Feather provides frontend packages based on Bootstrap, Foundation, and SemanticUI frameworks out-of-the-box. All other frontend frameworks are also supported.

Which MVC mode does Feather support – classic, pure, hybrid, or other?

Feather officially supports Pure MVC mode. In this mode you can benefit from Feather’s power for building layout templates and using the frontend package concept. After installing Feather you can also create pages in hybrid mode just as you did before - Feather is compatible with the existing Sitefinity functionality.

I think I found a bug! What should I do?

Feather is hosted on GitHub and we provide support for it through the “Issues” feature of GitHub. As an alternative you can open a support ticket. All issues and requests related to Feather are handled by the teams working on the project.

I am a Frontend developer – do I need deep knowledge on Sitefinity to work with Feather?

In Feather, you use a new convention-based approach for packaging your CSS, images, widget templates, layout templates, and master templates - all in one package. Feather also provides sample Bootstrap, Foundation, and SemanticUI packages ready for you to use and customize. With Feather, all widgets come with enabled by default responsive design and any frontend developer can handle the whole markup of the page by only editing the files inside the package.

Thus, you, as a frontend developer, only need basic knowledge for creating and editing pages and page templates in Sitefinity to use Feather.

Which are the widgets that come out-of-the-box with Feather?

Feather comes with several widgets out-of-the-box - News, Navigation and Content block. Also if you have created a dynamic content type, Dynamic content MVC widget will be automatically created. See the User Guide section for details on the widgets capabilities.

I dragged and dropped the new widgets on a page but they are not styled. What should I do?

By default, Feather does not base your page on any frontend framework. This way you do not need to remove the stylesheets that you do not want to use.

To benefit from the frontend packages, you need to base a page on a page template and that template to be based on a specific frontend package.

Are you going to abandon or remove the current WebForm-based widgets?

No. Feather includes a Toolbox Manager module that enables you to choose the widgets you want to use and how you want to use them. Sitefinity maintains the feature parity between WebForm widgets and new MVC widgets going forward.

How to create custom widget with Feather?

Apart from the built-in widgets Feather provides the capability to create your own custom widget. For more information, see Create a “Hello World” MVC widget in a separate assembly.

What are the Feather packages and how to use them?

Feather provides the ability to base your design on one of the most popular Css/Front-end frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, SemanticUI, etc. This is achieved by the introduction of resource packages. For more information, see Feather resource packages.

How to register scripts and styles in MVC views?

You must use the @Html.Script method to register resources in MVC views. See How to register scripts and styles in MVC view for more information.

Can I use a selector outside of an MVC widget?

Yes, you can. Follow the steps in Use content selectors outside of a widget designer's view to see how.

What are the different ways to filter dynamic content items?

Feather provides a large number of filter options according to your requirements. You can filter dynamic content items by URL or if your dynamic content item is using related data you can filter it by related data items via the url. In addition according to your needs you can highlight filtered dynamic content items by URL.