Welcome to my blog
Hi! This time, I will tell you something about my work in Kentico and for those of you who are curious about our new version of the Kentico CMS I will describe some features which will be included in it.
Welcome to my first post
Let's start with introducing myself. My name is Petr Vozak and my job in Kentico is to take care of one of the development teams, basically I work as a Technical Leader. I came to Kentico when I was studying at technical university, it was in February 2006. I remember that time quite well, I was thinking about the job which could help me to get the experience in the IT world. I joined the Kentico team - it was the important day in my professional live. Immediately after I went through the basic training and got the knowledge of the Kentico CMS, we started working on the version 2.0. I am really happy I could be a member of Kentico team from the very beginning of creating such a great product.
My job
First, I was participating in developing administration UI, user controls and different features around the whole CMS. Simply, I worked as junior developer. This helped me to get the general knowledge of our CMS and its base functionality. But when the Kentico grew and there was a need to build separate development teams which should be focused on different parts of the whole solution, I became a leader of one such team. Now, I closely cooperate with CTO when doing analysis and preparing specifications of the new features and functionality. After the specifications are approved my job is to keep an eye on their proper implementation and help the team with the development of the more complicated features. My team is currently created from 3 junior developers and me as their leader. We are standing mainly behind the Ecommerce and Blogs modules.
Ecommerce module
It is the largest module of our CMS. It covers all the features which are required to build e-shop, here you can find their summary. Together with the flexibility of the whole CMS it is really easy to start online business and shopping.
In version 3.1 we have prepared Ecommerce starter site to show you the ability of our Ecommerce solution. I hope you like it. We have also created more detailed documentation focused on Ecommerce module. I strongly recommend you to checkout our Ecommerce starter site and read Ecommerce Guide before creating your own e-shop. Then, you will become more familiar with the possibilities of our solution.
Be sure we have pretty amount of features and improvements to the Ecommerce solution on hand but you need to realize that it is not the only part of our CMS. We need to divide the implementation time among a lot of parts and improvements of the whole solution. I recommend you to send your requirements, tips and feedback to our support and sales. We closely cooperate with them because it is really necessary for us to know what you, our customers, need and what you like or don't like about our CMS. It is just the case of the product options in Ecommerce module. You were really hungry for this feature so we build it into our Ecommerce module.
Blogs module
It is one of the smaller modules but with full set of features which enable you to start blogging. Because the next version of the Kentico CMS will be focused on the community features and the blogs are one of the important parts of the community portals, it was really necessary for us to improve their functionality.
We have already added support for document tags and categories, which enable you to add tags to any document or categorize any document. Then, site visitors can use built-in Tag cloud or Category list to navigate to the required documents. These features are already implemented and will be included in the next version of the Kentico CMS.
What is my team doing now?
I am sure you want to know what we are currently working on and what features you can expect in the next version. Some of them have been already mentioned in the Martin's latest post. The next ones are the general notifications and support for data filters. My team covers implementation of these pretty cool features and we are almost done. I will describe them to you in more details:
Notifications
This module enables you to send notification messages using notification providers. Kentico will come with built-in e-mail notification gateway, however, you will be able to create your custom ones, such as SMS or ICQ providers. The way of customization will be similar to the customization of the payment providers in Ecommerce module. Site visitors or CMSDesk administrators will be able to subscribe to the specific events and choose the providers they want to obtain notification message from. It means that for one event user can obtain notification messages from multiple providers. By default, there will be several built-in events (document updated, document deleted, etc.), however, you will be able to create and use your custom ones. I'm sure you will like it.
Data filters
Imagine you can create separate custom filter which enables your site visitors to filter and sort specific data list on the web site. From the developer point of view, this filter is something like the extender of that CMS data viewer. It means that filter and data viewer are two separate controls and the filter can extend the properties of the data viewer. You simply add Data Filter web part anywhere to your page template and initialize it with the filter name and the path to the user control which represents your custom filter. Then you add any CMS data viewer web part, such as CMS Datalist, and set its filter name property to that filter. And that's all. You don't have to create specialized controls or web parts with built-in filters. Isn't it great? Showcase of the Data Filter webpart was already added to the Ecommerce starter site and you can enjoy it in the next version of CMS.
That's all for now. I hope you were not bored with my introduction. Anyway, I think it is good to know also something about the people of the company you, our customers, trust and send your money to. We really appreciate it. Of course, I will focus mostly on the Kentico CMS and their functionality in my next posts because here are many developer themes which are worth mentioning. So, I will be happy if you make any suggestions of the topics you are interested in.
Peter