Hi Mike,

I appreciate your comments as always, but I must react to some of them, because at some point, you seem like someone with the competition :-) No offense

It is not a matter of trust, and I'm not hardcore.

Yes it is, there is no reasonable reason to use ASPX over Portal engine (my personal opinion, may not be compatible with yours :-) ), because there is almost nothing that you cannot do with Portal engine and it is much more flexible. Still, we have clients who don't trust the Portal engine or want to look better and more needed in the eyes of their end users. They need to open the ASPX code in Visual Studio so it looks they actually do more professional work than it is really needed just to have a reason for their paychecks. Not nice, but sometimes true.

Conclusion: documentation needs a lot of work for $999

You don't get the Documentation for $999, you get the whole solution and compared to other solutions, no matter what license you choose, it is still a bargain, isn't it? I mean when you compare the prices, ours is still just a rounding error for the others on the same level.

Select all objects - selects all objects,
Select only new objects - selects only objects which are new

My coleague already made a statement to this, I would also like how would you like such fields to be commented. If we had a novel written around each field, you could download a BlueRay disc with documentation to fill in the long winter evenings, but you would still only know the fact that the checkbox "selects all objects" which is the only thing the checkbox does, wouldn't you?

I agree that there are parts of the documentation which need reviews and more keywords so you are able to find them better (sometimes it just helps if you rephrase what you search and search more specific words), we are working on it based on the specific requirements on what is missing from all of you.

Truth is, with Kentico CMS you focus ONLY on the core infrastructure for the better part of a development traject, because it is completely opaque how the system works! Page templates, web part containers, web parts, web templates, transformations... time is occupied 100% trying to understand infrastructure, not one page is made in this time (simply because: where do I put the page? No answer from documentation...)

This is true for the development phase and when you need to use the API, but when you need to write some code, you need to know the details of any product and that is usually what the community does (it writes examples to each other). No documentation can cover everything in such details (.NET documentation is close to that, but we are not that big yet :-) ). Actually, when it comes to VS integration itself (their customization API), their documentation is also getting thin so at this point, we may have a better one ;-)

Our community is young and not everyone knows about it, so it will take some time to have such amount of examples on the web. That's why we have you asking questions, so we can cover the missing pieces ;-)

The important thing is that when you finish your development, our statement is 100% true, because your client (end user) does not even have to know what ASP.NET or SQL is.


In general, we could have much better documentation if we have more resources devoted to do that job. For that, we need more money. So there would be two options to handle that, either to increase the price to the level of the competitors with better documentation, or just sell more licences. Both is something where you (our clients) need to do some part if you want the solution to be perfect (no solution is perfect but it can be close to that).

Your part Mike could be buying a server license with source code, so you don't need to use Reflector anymore and have the code with comments to better understand the processes, what do you say? :-) Even a web site license would be fine, you would have a subscription so you can get all this additional information from our great support team much faster than on the forums. Or maybe just promote us more so someone other can buy the licenses and get us more money for more technical writers.

Don't worry, we will improve the documentation anyway, but it takes some time so you need to be patient. Until that, just keep us informed which specific pieces of information you miss (they need to be specific, we cannot address general complaints that simply), so we can fill the blanks.

And the most important part ... If you cannot find something (again, specific) in the documentation, let our support know, they will tell you.

Martin Hejtmanek (CTO)