StackOverflow Integration on DevNet

TLDR - StackOverflow content can be found across whole DevNet and you can identify it by the  icon.

Questions & Answers

Because StackOverflow is mainly a Q&A site, our primary goal was to integrate it with DevNet Questions & Answers. The integration uses the Stack Exchange Web API, specifically an open-source .NET wrapper, called StacMan. Because the API offers a wide variety of options for querying and paging, we've been able to map it almost 1:1 to the existing code which means you can the filter the questions by text, tags, and whether a question has been answered, as you are able to do with the standard DevNet Q&As.

Tags

Questions on DevNet are implemented as pages, which means they can be tagged. By clicking a tag, you can search content relevant to a specific topic. Luckily, the same concept is used on StackOverflow, and we've been able to leverage it successfully.

Site-wide Search

For the integration to be complete, only one thing remained: adding smart search functionality. Fortunately, it’s easy to extend the Kentico Smart Search module. We created a custom search index and wrote logic that fetches data from StackOverflow and rebuilds the index every day.

Implementation Details

In the next few articles, I'll share more information on how the StackOverflow implementation was accomplished. Specifically, I will demonstrate the awesomeness of the Macro Data Source web part and the ease of Smart Search customization.

Future Integrations

Since the integration was deployed, we've registered a more than 100% increase in activity on StackOverflow compared both to this year's average, and to the previous December. These results are a clear signal for us to continue to deepen our integration with Stack Overflow. In future versions, we plan to make the Q&As more fun and more challenging. Our next big topic will be Leaderboards.

Please use the Comments section below to let us know how you like these new features, and what else we can do to make DevNet even better.