Can you combine Kentico 12 MVC and Kentico 12 Portal Engine development within the same website?

Reed Soria asked on November 11, 2020 05:38

One of our clients has a rather large website, currently build in Kentico 11 / Protal Engine. We are now preparing the transition to Kentico 12 / MVC.

We woul'd like to do this gradually, per section. We have a couple of concerns regarding this:

Is it possible to run parts of a website Kentico 12 MVC and other parts Kentico 12 Portal Engine like walgreenslistens?

Is it possible to handle specifice cultures first? So is it possible to have 2 versions (MVC / Portal Engine) of the same page?

Are there any best practices concerning a gradual transition to K12 MVC? Since this is a rather large site, we have to do this transition gradually.

WalgreensListens

#kentico

Recent Answers

Brenden Kehren answered on November 11, 2020 06:05

While ANYTHING can be done the question is SHOULD it be done. You can run PE and MVC together but it's not an easy setup or solution. It requires a lot of planning and prep work to get things to work properly. The time you'd spend prepping and planning to do both would be better spent planning your migration to 100% MVC.

I'll let others chime in as well but id recommend 100% against trying to mix and match as it will turnout to be a nightmare in the long run.

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Sean Wright answered on November 12, 2020 05:51 (last edited on November 12, 2020 05:52)

Jen Wolke from Blue Modus has an article about combining Portal Engine and MVC that might be worth reading through.

Honestly though, I would only recommend this approach as a last resort.

The technological changes between Portal Engine + Page Templates/Layouts/Web Parts and MVC + Page Builder is vast. In addition, Xperience 13 is already promoting an ASP.NET Core first approach for projects.

By the time you finish your in-place migration and have invested heavily in Kentico 12 MVC on .NET Framework, the platform/community will be heavily integrated with .NET Core (more likely, .NET 5).

At the recent Kentico Xperience Connections conference, it was discussed that the Content Management application is also going to be re-built on .NET Core within the next 9-18 months.

If running Portal Engine and MVC side-by-side in Kentico 12 is your only option for a migration strategy, it is likely doable. However, it isn't a 'supported' solution in any way and I predict many hurdles on the road to completing the project. By the time you do complete it I would expect that you'll have heavily invested in compatibility code to make the side-by-side solution work - time would could have been spent migrating to Xperience 13 on .NET Core.

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