5 Tips for Making Your Kentico Development a Little Easier

1. Application Search Box

Since being introduced in Kentico 8, the application menu has been a favorite for anyone that was around before that magnificent event. By being able to list all the installed applications / modules, developers can quickly find what they need. While the list is great, there is a little trick you can use to find things quicker. First, you can start typing the letters of the application, and it will filter the list. (Yeah, I know that’s not that exciting).

But what about when you need to find something specific like Web Farms. You can type the first letter of each word and quickly see those results.

A big shout out to Brenden Kehren for telling me about that one!

2. System.aspx

Sometimes when you deploy code, it doesn’t play nicely with other things that may be loaded in memory. Your site may not be running smoothly because it’s looking for values that don’t exist or have changed. When this type of situation affects the admin area, you may scratch your head wondering how you can reset the site without rebooting the machine. Did you know that you can hit the System page directly to access the Clear cache functionality?

The file is located here:

[root]/CMSModules/System/System.aspx

This little trick allows you to access the page without the rest of the interface. If you are having trouble with macros or other cache-related data, try hitting that page and clearing the cache to (hopefully) resolve your issue. And don’t worry! The page will still require users to login before they get to the goods.

3. Settings Search

Finding a setting buried in six sub menus can be harder than anything Indiana Jones tried to dig up. Much like Applications, Settings can be quickly searched using the built-in search bar. While it doesn’t support the “dynamic filter as you type” capabilities, the results are great for showing everywhere a phrase is used. This can save a lot of time if you have need to update something like Cache, Debug, or Web settings, which may be in several locations.

4. Helpful Settings

Sticking with Settings, there are a number that I’ve found helpful when developing applications. While you certainly want to familiarize yourself with all the options, this list may help you find some more obscure ones for your projects.

Content/Media/Render HTML 5 media tags

These settings determine if Kentico will render HTML 5 tags for video and media. This can be helpful when displaying digital content on your sites.

System/Form engine/Field editor

These settings set the default fields for the form engine. If you have a custom form engine control for all emails, you can set it here so that it’s always selected.

On-line marketing/Web analytics/Excluded URLs

Web Analytics are great, for URLs you care about. When it comes to admin or internal tools, you may want to exclude them from tracking. This setting allows you to filter these out of the Web Analytics engine.

Versioning & Synchronization/Web farm/Synchronization interval

This setting determines how often web farm synchronization tasks are generated. This can be especially helpful when setting up your load-balanced environments.

5. Worker Threads

Sometimes you just need to know what’s going on in the application to determine what might be causing an issue. The Debug/Worker Threads tab gives you a glimpse into all the tasks in the system. This includes both the running and sleeping tasks, so it’s a great window into the inner processing of the site.

Moving forward

Like most enterprise applications, Kentico has a lot of hidden gems and tricks up its sleeves. From shortcuts to full-blown modules, there’s a lot of horsepower behind the scenes to help you develop amazing applications. Hopefully, this list taught you one or two you didn’t know. If not, try leaving a comment and letting me know of others. Good luck!