Sitefinity features missed since v. 3.7x

 

If you were a previous Sitefinity v. 3.7x user, there are several features that are missing in even the most recent release of Sitefinity which were originally present in Sitefinity v. 3.7x:

1. When creating a brand new website, you had the option to select a default website template for creating the site.  This option has been completely removed in the latest release of Sitefinity (Sitefinity v. 6.x at the time of this writing)
2. Previously, one could easily create polls/surveys in Sitefinity, this feature is also now missing in the latest release and there does not seem to be any indication on the current roadmap of a return of this feature.
3. One of the most useful features that I miss from Sitefinity v. 3.7x was the ability to add Shared Content widgets into my Master Page templates.  This functionality has not been re-introduced since Sitefinity v. 4.x. 
4. Sitefinity v. 3.7x also provided the option to browse the entire local file system to upload any content into any directory in the Sitefinity structure.  This feature is also completely gone in the latest release.
5. Sitefinity v. 3.7x provided the ability to upload User Controls directly that would be subsequently be added to the Sitefinity Toolbox.  The Sitefinity Toolbox configuration is a completely manual configuration now (at least for ASP.NET User Controls)
6. Sitefinity v. 3.7x used to provide counts of items such as Pages in the Page editing view.  This is also sorely needed in the latest version of Sitefinity.
7. Sitefinity v. 3.7x Community Edition provided unlimited content editing abilities but provided a restriction of a single administrative user and being branded with the Telerik Sitefinity logo.  In addition, the licensing for Community Edition allowed it to be use for both commercial and non-commercial projects.  Sitefinity Community Edition today only allows a maximum of 25 Content Pages, still requires the branding logo and only officially provides licensing for non-commercial/non-profit projects.
8. In Sitefinity v. 3.7x, I could use standard methods of securing content in ASP.NET projects by simply dropping a Web.config file into my Sitefinity project structure in order to secure the content.  This feature is now completely absent in the latest release of Sitefinity and requires manual coding (usually in the Global.asax) in order to reproduce the former functionality.
9. Sitefinity v. 3.7x Standard Edition was very reasonably priced at $769 when it was generally available.  Sitefinity v. 3.7x Standard Edition was also the only edition available.  In contrast, Sitefinity Standard Edition today has increased to a whopping $2000!!  While Sitefinity Small Business Edition is more affordably priced at $499, it is limited to only 50 content pages and is missing some of the essential newer features such as the Forms module and workflow approval which is present in only Sitefinity Standard Edition and above.
10. Most of all, Sitefinity v. 3.7x was very fast and low on memory consumption.  Therefore, it could be deployed to nearly any hosting provider without much issue or difficulty.  The latest version of Sitefinity requires a whopping 512 MB of memory for the application pool, thus severely restricting available hosting provider plans.  In addition, if less memory than this is allocated to the application pool used to host Sitefinity, one will typically experience slow load times as well as various other quirks and defects related to frequent application pool recycling when the memory limits are reached.