What’s New in Sitefinity 15.3: Improved Features to Boost Efficiency
Progress just released Sitefinity 15.3, and it’s packed with updates to help teams work faster and smarter. With additional support for AI tools, features to speed up multisite content creation, and enhancements for developers working with Next.js, this release brings practical improvements across the board. Let’s walk through the features in this release and how they will benefit your team.
AI Tools to Help You Write Better, Faster
Sitefinity 15.3 adds helpful AI tools right into the text editor. When you highlight text, you’ll see options like “Generate text” or “Improve writing”—making creating and refining content easier without leaving the page. You can even use AI to quickly shorten or expand text. These features are great for speeding up content creation and helping teams produce polished, on-brand messaging with less effort.
Smarter Image Search with AI
Sitefinity 15.3 makes finding the images you need easier with AI-powered search. Now, you can search your image libraries using keywords that describe what's actually in the image—not just the file name or tags. Of course, you can still search by things like library names, categories, or URLs, too. It’s a faster, more intuitive way to manage media while making it more accessible.
Section Presets for Multisite Setups
If you aren’t familiar with section presets, they are pre-built layout sections you can reuse across pages to speed up content creation and maintain design consistency. They help give a website a unified look and feel while aligning your branding and structure without rebuilding sections from scratch.
Now, those same benefits are available for multisite organizations. You can quickly build section presets in the new page editor and share them across other websites within your Sitefinity multisite instance.
On-Page Editing of Widgets from Templates
In Sitefinity, page templates define the layout and structure of your pages, helping you maintain a consistent design across your site. Page templates can be customized with layout elements and widgets, but widgets placed on ASP.NET Core and Next.js page templates could only be edited on the template themselves.
In 15.3, you can now edit a widget in the page editor, even if it was added on the template level, by enabling the option to “Make editable on pages” within the on-page widget settings.
More Control Over Content Lists
You can now exclude specific content types from the Content List widget in ASP.NET Core and Next.js. This gives you more control over how and what gets displayed—so your users see the right content in the right places.
For example, custom content types like "redirects” are an option in our list widget because they are listed under Types of Content in our Sitefinity dashboard. This custom content module is used to manage redirects, but there isn’t a case where we would add this to a page. We could exclude this as an option from our content list widget.
Improvements to the Next.js Renderer
New Profile Widget for Next.js
If you’re using a decoupled setup with a Next.js front end, you can now access the Profile widget available on the .NET Core front end.
The Sitefinity Profile widget lets users view and update their personal information directly on your website. Common use cases include membership portals, event or course registrations, customer dashboards, intranets, or anywhere you want to streamline user account management.
Improved Cache Invalidation for Next.js Renderer
The Next.js Renderer starter template now includes CDN caching configuration, enhancing cache invalidation processes.
This means that when changes are made to content, those updates show up faster for your site visitors instead of being stuck behind old, cached versions. This is thanks to better built-in caching rules in the updated Next.js starter template.
Modular and Performance-Optimized Widget Designers in Next.js
Widget designers in the Next.js front end have been restructured to be modular and performance-optimized, following a tree-shakable approach. A more straightforward way of saying this is Sitefinity has updated how widget editors (the UI used to configure widgets) work in Next.js apps.
This optimization results in faster load times and a more efficient development experience because the widget designers are now broken into smaller, reusable pieces of code instead of being bundled all together (modular), and only the parts of the code that are needed for a specific page or widget are included when the app is built. Any unused code gets “shaken off” and left out of the final bundle. (Performance-Optimized and tree-shakable)
Improvements to Search
Ability to Search While Reindexing
A temporary index is created and populated with new data while the old index remains available, ensuring uninterrupted search functionality during reindexing.
Error Handling During Search Index Operations
Users now receive error messages on the active screen if issues occur during index creation, deletion, or merging.
Automatic Update of Content Items Using Renamed Classifications
The search index automatically updates associated content items when renaming tags or categories.
Upgraded Lucene.NET and Azure.Search.Documents
These underlying technologies have been updated to their latest versions, enhancing search performance and reliability.
New Tool to Help You Migrate from Web Forms and MVC
If you're still running a Sitefinity site on Web Forms or MVC, Sitefinity 15.3 makes it easier to plan your move to modern front-end technologies like ASP.NET Core or Next.js.
The new Sitefinity Migration Analyzer gives you a clear picture of what your current site is using and what needs to be updated. It scans your project, identifies which frameworks are in play, and highlights the components needing migration.
It’s a significant first step to help you estimate the effort and create a smoother, more strategic migration plan. For a more strategic migration plan, reach out to our team today.
Overall, Sitefinity 15.3 focuses on flexibility and usability—making things easier for content creators and developers. Whether you're building new pages, managing multiple sites, or utilizing the Next.js renderer, this release brings a lot of tools to help you do it better.
Have questions about how these updates might fit into your Sitefinity project? We’d love to help. Contact us today!