Get Started with the Kentico Xperience 13 Baseline Site
Kentico Xperience provides the tools and APIs to build a great websites, and has the Dancing Goat site to explore ways of doing things, however if you're looking for a starting point that has all the basic features you need to get your project started, then the Baseline is a great choice to get going on your next project.
"The All in One CMS" was once a slogan for Kentico CMS, featuring a wide variety of templates and webparts to build out your application right out of the box. However, a lot of those features were hard to customize, and honestly many were not needed or used.
The move away from WebForms and to MVC (and then MVC.Net Core) has dropped most all of those front-end out of the box tools, and instead Kentico has largly focused on providing a great Xperience within it's editor and tools / APIs to enable developers to flourish.
But still, having the basic elements of a website is still great to have. This is where the Baseline comes in.
The Baseline is a 'blank' site that has all the main features sites have, already built out:
- Primary navigation (with drop down / mega menu support)
- Secondary Side Navigation
- Breadcrumbs
- SEO Meta Data
- User Management (Login/Logout/Password Reset)
- Sitemap
- Error page handling
- Ecommerce ready (with additional NuGet package)
- Tab Page System
- Image Widget
- Bootstrap Layout Tool
It also contains various baked in developer focused features:
- Localization
- Form Validation
- Interfaces and services to leverage
- Cache dependency handling
- Clean Solution Architecture
- Feature Folders
- Configuration aid
- Cache vary-by customization
- Rich Text Editor Configuration
- CSS/Javascript bundling
- Form Structure Modification
- Post Redirect Get support
With this tool you can get started in a very short amount of time.
The Baseline is totally free, check it out and also explore more features on it's Wiki.
Thanks to Kentico MVP Trevor Fayas (Heartland Business Solutions) for building it, and Kentico MVP Sean Wright (Wired Views) for collaboration and for many of the NuGet packages leveraged in this tool.