How are you doing with Kentico CMS?

Hi Femi, you can add your custom modules, see the Kentico CMS Developer's guide, chapter Developing custom modules. You can also modify the code of the UI interface which is delivered with the solution. Again, please write such questions to our support or to our forums. Thank you.

hi,
how can i integrate my own custom admin pages into either cmsdesk or site manager using the free edition?
thanks

Hi. Sure, just write your issue to our support team at support@kentico.com and they will help you with that.

Hi,

we have just started using the Kentico for our clients and finding it a GREAT CMS.

While working with this we haev found some issue with data migration from our existing product database (ecommerce)to Kentico Databse.

we did come across the KENTICO SQL migrtaion utillity but that is not helpingg us.

we do have 1000 products that we need to feed in the KENTICO app that we did.

can you please help us on this?


regards,
naveen khanna
nkhanna@ebizneeds.com

There is an API Documentation included into the default installation. Unfortunately, we have nothing better at the moment. If you have any questions, please contact our support and they will give you the information.

I haven't found documentation for the functions in the various base classes, does it exist? If not, please add some.

(e.g.
CMSAbstractWebParts
CMS.ExtendedControls.InlineUserControl
CMS.FormEngine.FormEngineUserControl
)

Hi. As for the e-mails, there is a whole new e-mail provider in new version which has the e-mail queue and archive, that should be sufficient for your needs I think. The global.asax code is in the web project because it needs to be changed for specific configurations and integration with existing solution and users without source code license wouldn't be able to change the default URL rewriting behavior, we could do that, but the user's options would be much more limited than now and it would require Visual Studio license to change something in there. Changing the code on the live site is not that often action so it shouldn't really matter that much if you recompile or not, you still need to test you code first before you publish it, right?

I have been working with Kentico for about 8 months now and have found it to be a very powerful and comprehensive solution. My company is using Kentico to support several mult-site projects serving thousands of users. There is an issue that comes to mind that I hope is being addressed. The update from v3.0 to v3.1 fixed the error with saving files to a network drive instead of the local folder. We are using the ASPX version and after some digging around I noticed that attachments to bizforms are being uploaded to a file that is created in the site root. The path to these files is hard-coded to be <siteroot>/<sitename> so attempting to manually move them to a network drive results in Kentico not being able to find the attachment.

We would prefer the use of HttpModules instead of global.asax. If we modify global.asax or the associated App_Code/Global/CMS/*.cs files, we must recompile the KenticoCMS app. Our desire is to not modify the KenticoCMS code. If the functionality in global.asax was implemented with HttpModules, we could replace it without a code recompile.

The following link is a good reference: http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2006/06/12/146356.aspx

The ability to configure what information is included in the email log would be nice. Currently the log doesn't even include the date so we are having to create our own logger.

Hi Elijah, once again, great news for you, version 4.0 natively supports time zones so your editing interface time can be different than the time of the server and you will be able to set different time zone for each calendar on your forms.

Hi Chris, we are planning to release video Courses which should help you to better understand the solution. I will probably also create some tutorial videos and post in in my blog sometimes in the future to show you what you can achieve.

Martin: cool, thank you! I had another idea! Since my shared host (GoDaddy) is in Arizona, in another time zone, when I edit documents, post new documents, etc., the time for editing, post dates, etc. all shows up two hours early. It would be useful to have a global setting for the time zone offset that the date-sensitive areas of the CMS would refer to. Then it could be part of the API, eg. "GlobalHelper.DateTimeHelper.GetCMSTime()" Thank you again!

Thanks for the answers. I see the master pages now and how they work. I guess they just weren't where I expected them to be at first so I should have dug around a little more.

I am fairly new to Kentico but have two sites under my belt at this point. I have been very happy with the product however, one of my greatest frustrations is lack of examples/training materials beyond the Developers Guide. I would like to see more comprehensive API and WebPart examples and documentation and possibly screencasts simlar to the tutorials on the asp.net website.

Hi Elijah, we are glad that you are giving us all the suggestions, it is very helpful for us to know what customers actually need. Thank you for that. It seems you are reading our minds again ;-), the clipboard is planned, it just couldn't make it to the release yet, because we want to make it general and available for the whole CMS, not just design mode and it will take some more time to do so, but it will be worth it, I promise.

Hi Scott, you don't need to create a new template for the image gallery for the document, just allow creating of the files under your document type (in the Document type properties) and create the files under it. Then you just place the image gallery web part to your existing template and you get the document with image gallery. We didn't have the time to create galleries (unlimited number of attachments) under documents yet, but we plan this.

The blog module license ... well ... I am the technical guy, you are clearly in a wrong blog post and talking to a wrong person about it, I think you should discuss that with Petr (CEO) in his blog post about the new licensing. But what I know they are trying to make it as simple as possible so my guess is thay won't like the specific license model ...

I spoke to our management about the Virtual lab and here is what I got from them, hopefully, it is satisfying for you: "We do plan to offer virtual lab to our partners in the first quarter of 2009, so that they can integrate it into their sites, but we currently do not plan to white label it - it will still run with Kentico CMS logos."

Martin,
I know I already sent a very lengthy series of feature request to you via email, but something occurred to me yesterday that I've thought of several times now. It would be very useful for me to have a "cut-copy/paste" feature for web parts. I know you can move them between zones in one template, but the ability to copy or move them from one template to another in a clipboard fashion would certainly speed up portal development for me! Thanks for listening, and again, great work on this CMS :-)

Trevor,
You might be interested to know that you do not have to use any specific markup or layout method (table-based or otherwise) to use the portal engine. I use the portal engine exclusively and I will be the first to admit that I'm a little too obsessed about markup and source code ;-) The portal engine simply takes YOUR pieces and puts them together the way YOU specify. It's actually one of my favorite features of Kentico!

Another question, are you able to whitelable the virtual lab for partners, this would be a great feature for us to have on our website /?

A couple of comments..

1. There does not seem to be a good asp Blog only application available, the best we could find earlier this year was presstopia, and its not that good. Why don't you release a blog only module, maybe freeware...

2. Maybe I am confused here, which is not hard ;-), but why can you not add say an image gallery to a document, at the moment I have to save the document as a new template to add a image gallery..

Hi Trevor, there is an entire chapter about ASPX page development in our developer's guide. See http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/how_it_works3.htm for details. The ASPX page development is just like regular web site, so you just edit the master page from your filesystem in the Visual Studio, all our sample ASPX web sites have master pages so you can use them and change them.

Hi Daleth, we are planning on adding some import tool which should be able to import just anything from any source, you would just supply your provider for the data source. We should be providing you with some "usual" data source providers. However, I am not sure about the timeframe of it.

Hi Martin,

I did look through the tutorials and didn't see any explanation of master pages in the ASPX section, only in the Portal engine. I do not want to switch back to portal. However, I must have control of the layout including creating markup that does not use tables for layout. I have posted a question in the forums, but for me this is a basic question to get started using the CMS.

A few suggestions for Kentico:

1) In the example where a Partner can edit their Profile (as described in the Web Development Guide, page 547), it would be very helpful to allow people to export all of the partner profile information in CSV format so people could then transfer that up to date information into a different DB system.

2) On most CMS systems, editor-level users can create and edit forms by default.

3) One thing I've seen before is to have partners or subscribers as a different type of user without the corresponding custom document type. But still with the capability to display and edit their information Seems that type of system would be more feasible with large numbers of partners (but perhaps with the new social networking license some of this stuff has been explored :).

As you can see, I'm working on a site with large number of partner profiles, and it's something I'm very focused on at the moment. (And maybe I'll get lucky and these things exist in the current version!)

Hi LP, I am just giving you the explanations how it works with us and why some features are not yet present. You are right, that is exactly the spirit of my post, to learn what are the most important things for our clients so we can prioritize them. I think your English is same or even better than mine so don't apologize, I won't apologize for mine either, this is mainly about the technical things, not about perfect grammar or vocabulary, the most important thing is that we understand each other ;-)

Hi Martin, just a small note to state that I understand what you are saying. Resource scheduling is a problem for everyone. What I want to highlight here is that my suggestion is not focused on a particular request or time frame. I just want to say that (in my opinion, of course) this can be an excellent feature for next versions. I think this is in the spirit of your post... I apologize if not. Please take mind on this subject (and maybe speak with your marketing and product manager) … this is the only things I want to report here. (Sorry for my bad English, sometime I feel rough, but I will not. You have, of course, all my appreciation)

Hi LP, the sample integration with third party is done entirely by our support team at their spare time which is also limited, the Development itself is too busy for doing it. So keep suggesting the support team what you would like, that is the right way, if you already suggested it, please be patient, we are working on it.

Hi Hans, we plan entirely new image selection and inserting dialog (well, not only images, but also links and media) but we couldn't make it to current version, it should be in the next one.

Hi Frans, yes, this is a very helpful recommendation I think, we will allow this as soon as possible if possible. Thank you

Hi Trevor, please always contact our support for such issues. You should get through our tutorials to understand the differencee between ASPX and Portal engine mode. I am about to write a post on this topic so it will also help you. I just don't know when I will have time for this. You may switch from ASPX mode to Portal mode by selecting appropriate page template on the Template tab of the document properties. The main difference between ASPX and Portal mode is that you edit the ASPX templates as standard ASPX pages in Visual Studio and the Portal pages through the admin interface of the web site.

I would like to point to you (and others of course) this forum post: http://devnet.kentico.com/Forums.aspx?ForumID=34&Thread=00005661

I think integration with 3th-party controls would be a great gain for your cms and professional developer working with it.

I understand your clients are frequently ASP-NET developers, and I think a good number of them (like us) use 3th-party controls.

So, maybe, a better integration (even in the form of KB and/or example) with the (most used) 3th-party control players would be a nice fit.

As a suggestion (and personal interest of couse) devexpress components is a good fit (and maybe a better fit of telerik that have their own cms :-( just my opinion of course :-)

LP

Hello Martin,

As already discussed earlier through support an annoying problem with the current release is that the stylesheets assigned to a site are only editable through the site manager. Is is wrong as i don't want to give customers access to the site manager, only to the CMSDesk. So please include the assigned stylesheets of a site to the document tabs and make them editable for the designers, just like the masterpage!

Kentico is a great product but some usability issues can become annoying, for example:
- current image selection in FCK editor only shows published images
- uploading an image in image library is not published. For this you need to go back into the site structure
- the second time you open the image library you need to navigate again to the folder you also navigated to the first time. It should be great if by default you open the folder you selected before
- uploading multiple files. For the current file import i still need to first upload all files to our server
- do move, copy , publish on multi files the same time
- When copying a new file add the possibility to enter the new name and alias directly (most of time these are the same)
- add the possibility to edit pages without the entire template...This slows down peformance if template is heavy

thanks

Just getting started with Kentico. I chose the ASPX install vs. the Portal. I don't see any way to change my master page. The page I have is all layed out with tables. I don't want that and I want to be able to easily use my own theme/css. Where do I start?