Improved settings in Kentico CMS 6.0

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A small but useful feature, which will be included in Kentico CMS 6.0, is support for creating custom settings and improved settings configuration. Read my post for more details.

Improved settings configuration
There is a lot of built-in settings in Kentico CMS (for caching, content management, file management, modules, etc.). Moreover, each new version usually brings other new settings. We realized that there is a need for improving the settings configuration UI to help you find the requested setting more quickly and easily. As the result, we integrated support for hierarchical settings categories and settings groups. It means that the category structure will no longer be flat but tree and similar settings of each category will be grouped together:

Settings improvements


Custom settings
You have often asked how to create your own custom settings programmatically to be able to configure them in the very same way as the built-in settings, i.e. in the CMS Site Manager -> Settings section. That's why we will give you this feature out-of-the-box in version 6.0.

There is a new custom settings management UI in the CMS Site Manager -> Development section where you can create your own settings categories, groups and keys:

Custom settings management


Once you have your custom settings defined, you can switch to the CMS Site Manager -> Settings tab. There is a built-in Custom settings category on the left where you can find all your defined custom categories. You can configure their settings for a site or globally.

Custom settings configuration


Do you like it? I believe so. Anyway, please give us your feedback. E.g.: Would you recommend reordering the settings categories in the category tree? If so, please put your ideas bellow.

Thank you.

  
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Petr Vozak

Technology Partnership Product Owner at Kentico. He works with technology partners to enrich the Kentico product offering and bring greater value to those using our products.

Comments

petr.vozak-kentico commented on

Unfortunately, it is not allowed to add custom categories and settings among the categories and settings which come with the standard installation. You can add your custom categories and settings only under the "Custom settings" category. We will consider improving settings customization in this way in some of the future versions. Thanks

PS: If you want to try to achieve your scenario, create your category and its settings under "Custom settings" category. Then go to database, locate CMS_SettingsCategory table and change CategoryParentID, CategoryIDPath and CategoryLevl of your custom category to match its new required location. It could work;) Anyway, I am not sure if it keeps working after you upgrade in the future.

Nortech commented on

We would like to create a new settings category for a payment gateway.

Can we add a settings category (e.g. ECommerce -> Payment Gateways -> another payment gateway) using the Site Manager? Or should we use custom settings instead?

Jeroen Fürst commented on

Great feature! Hmmm new LinkedIn membership provider? :)

petr.vozak-kentico commented on

Thank you guys for your kind words and suggestions.
Unfortunatelly, there is no more room in version 6.0 for such improvements. We will consider them for some of the future versions.

To Chanan: Settings ordering is the thing we will certainly take into our close consideration in version 6.0 because there will be a lot of new settings.

Chanan Braunstein commented on

Great love it! Two things:

1. Can you please order the tree alphabetically like the other tabs are? It seems to be the only one that isn't.

2. Custom Setting, I think would be even more powerful if you had built in support for Dev, Staging and Production settings. So that settings can be configured in one place (Dev box) and would flow and be picked up in the correct server.

Thanks!
Chanan..

Glen Deathridge commented on

The custom settings looks a cool new feature, something that we have been after for a while.

Brian McKeiver commented on

I like it. I think it would be nice to also be able to expand / collapse each group header in the inner setting page in the first screen shot.

I also think it would be nice if all the special web.config application settings were pulled into that screen as well. Like CMSSearchOnlyWhenContentPresent or CMSUseCustomHandlers for example.