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Member

hodges-thebhwgroup - 1/22/2009 11:18:19 PM

ASP.NET templates vs Portal? Need a developer's opinion

Hello,

I am very new to Kentico, and I am trying to decide between using the ASP.NET templates vs just using the Kentico portal templates. I am a seasoned ASP.NET developer and feel very comfortable in Visual Studio. Should I go with the ASP.NET templates? The documentation seems to really promote the Portal templates over ASP.NET, so I'm a little torn.

BTW, I apologize if this has already been discussed. I spent some time searching, but I couldn't find this topic in the forum.

Thanks!
Jason

Kentico Support

kentico_zdenekc - 1/23/2009 9:41:44 AM

RE:ASP.NET templates vs Portal? Need a developer's opinion

Hi,

well, it is discussed quite frequently, and I'm afraid that I don't have straight answer for you. It depends on your approach to development, your needs and preferences... We indeed promote our Portal engine, because we put a lot of effort into it to make web development easier, more accessible and user friendly and still effective to manage.
I'm sure you've seen our documentation or user's guide...

The advantages in summary:
Portal engine is easy to use
Structure of the page templates allows the visual inheritance
Page layout can be shared or template based
Web parts can have custom layouts
...

Our system has large customization possibilities. That includes that you can combine both approaches (see http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/combining_aspx_templates_and_p.htm).

I'd also recommend an article about KenticoCMS evoution at our CTO's blog: http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Martin-Hejtmanek/December-2008/What-s-new-and-great-in-version-4-0.aspx

If you need some additional details, please feel free to ask.

Regards,
Zdenek Cetkovsky, Kentico.

Member

andrew - 1/28/2009 6:18:45 AM

RE:ASP.NET templates vs Portal? Need a developer's opinion

Hello,

I can only speak of my own experience here, but I would highly recommend using the ASPX templates approach and not the portal option. I have implemented a number of professional websites with Kentico and am quite pleased with it's features and flexibility.

However, if you are well versed in ASP.NET, you will find the ASPX templates approach much more logical and natural. It is much easier to integrate other non-Kentico or custom controls this way. It is a lot easier to debug also.

In addition, this way you don't have to do your coding in a browser :)

Having said all that, I think the Portals approach could be quite useful and quick if you want to build a simple (functionality-wise) website with a minimum amount of programming, but if you're building anything substantial and need complete control over markup, I'd recommend ASPX.

Just my opinion though...!

Andrew

Member

polarwarp-gmail - 2/9/2009 10:49:51 PM

RE:ASP.NET templates vs Portal? Need a developer's opinion

Hi,

Sorry for hijacking the thread :) Is it possible if you add your own page template into kentico (ie. you're not using a portal engine template) to still be able to "design" that template and easy add/remove/etc the web parts through the portal engine interface? It doesn't seem possible in 3.1 - but would be nice. (We're not seeing a design tab on the page that uses the aspx template.)

Thanks


Kentico Support	kentico_jurajo - 2/10/2009 7:07:08 AM RE:ASP.NET templates vs Portal? Need a developer's opinion Hi, No, it is not possible. Once the page template is in ASPX, the Design tab is not enabled. Also the difference is that the ASPX templates are on the disk, but the portal engine are in DB and are only virtual files. Best Regards, Juraj Ondrus