Migrating Portal engine sites to MVC

Jon White asked on June 1, 2020 12:59

Hi all,

We run a single perpetual licence portal engine version of Kentico with unlimited sites available. On this instance we administer about 12 websites.

We are planning to make additional websites in the next few months with one being the very large main company site and it would be wise to adopt the MVC version of Kentico due to the dropping of portal support in a few years.

The issue here is in doing so what can I do about the 'old' sites that run on portal?

From my research it seems there's no way to run them in tandem on the same instance and would have to be rebuilt from scratch on the new platform - which is potentially an awful lot of work. Does anyone have any guidance on what to do about this or have any personal experience and could advise the best way forward?

Apologies if there's already reference somewhere but I'm finding any information on this issue quite sparse even though surely this is a big issue for many who want to move forward with new tech but have a number of old portal sites.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Correct Answer

Brenden Kehren answered on June 1, 2020 15:39

There is no way to have a single MVC site run Portal Engine controls/code in it. It's not a Kentico limitation, it's a technology limitation. You can't mix MVC Razor and ASP.NET controls.

You can run them in tandem 2 separate sites in once instance, but I'd recommend against it. It's much easier to spin up a new instance of Kentico specifically for MVC then migrate, when you have the time, your portal engine sites to MVC in the new instance.

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Recent Answers

Trevor Fayas answered on June 2, 2020 20:03

As Brenden said, you can run 2 sites on the same Kentico instance, one Portal one MVC, not ideal.

But otherwise if you are good with a larger content freeze, it is possible to "Convert" a portal site to an MVC Site in terms of the data. There's only a couple database fields that differentiate an MVC Site from a Portal Site, so you can use this to 'clone' over the portal engine site and make all your content pages "Content-Only" ones.

Theoretically you could then try to write a conversion script to convert widgets and zones to page builder json...but that gets complicated.

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Jon White answered on June 2, 2020 20:54

Hi guys,

Thanks for the responses, i'm a front-end developer so some of this info I need to pass on to the back-end developer I work with as he'd be working on the heavily technical stuff.

I'm a little concerned about the time it may take to migrate them all.

Most the sites have a mix of page types and editable content so i'm not sure how much of a difference this makes to migration and how manual it will end up.

Thanks again, Jon

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