One of the coolest features to come out of the recent versions of Sitefinity is the implementation of cards. A card is a content widget where you have the option to place an image, heading, summary text, and a link within a bordered box that can help drive traffic to other pages of your website.

Card Use Cases

Cards can be extremely useful in breaking up content and providing some visualization to a page. They look great being grouped together.

One example where you could utilize a card widget is a landing page that calls out links to direct traffic to its subpages.

Card Heading - Card

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Card Heading - Card

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Another example would be to display groups of bios on a page to make the page pop a little more instead of having plain, vertical text.

Cards can be arranged in any way (usually up to 4 columns) in conjunction with the grid layout. In other words, you could have a single card on one line, or you could group them in columns of two, three, or four in as many rows as you’d like.

Exploring Sitefinity’s Integration with Bootstrap’s Cards

The most appealing feature of the cards in Sitefinity is the ability to drag and drop, meaning that you can take the card widget from the toolbox and drag it anywhere on the page. Additionally, you can add the card’s content on the spot, rather than having to fill out the content of the card on another page (think of content types like news, blogs, events.)

The following are the fields that each card contains.

• Heading
• Text
• Image
• Label (button text)
• Link (page selector or external field)
• Template (pick between a list of predefined card templates/styles)

Keep in mind that none of these fields are required and can be left blank / null. For example, a card doesn’t need to contain an image or even a link, it can just be used as a placeholder for text (like the previous example for the bios).

In addition, each card can be styled uniquely by using card templates. Sitefinity allows us at Vanguard to create as many card templates as desired, so for instance, we could do something like the following: (with each example using the same exact card widget / information, but with different templates) 

Card Heading - Card

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Card Heading - Card Simple

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In Conclusion...

Cards can be a very useful tool in separating content up and adding prominence to information to generate more traffic. It is very easy to setup and can work well on any page of a website. For more information about cards/bootstrap, please contact your Vanguard Client Service Manager.