MVC & Webforms

Rahim Remtulla asked on October 23, 2019 11:52

Hello everyone, Ok so we are investigating full MVC Kentico VS Portal engine and I got to say on first impressions I am disappointed and I am hoping I/we have missed something.

Here is the main issue

Our site is ever evolving, Content editors make many new pages Daily, these can range from Informative pages to Complex pages where a Developer maybe needed. Now in Kentico MVC this seems impossible, In Portal engine an Editor can make a new Page add content and boom the page is up no Dev needed, no problem. The page is built from a template etc. It seems now in MVC that wont be possible unless its a structured page i.e. following the pattern /product/{ID}/ProductName. This seems to arise from the need of the new page needing to adhere to the MVC architecture.

This to me is Crazy, In order for example for an Editor to put up a page (Rapidly) maybe on a weekend where no dev is available e.g. XXXX Disaster Response, under the following URL /Disaster Response/xxxxDisaster they would first need a Dev to create a Controller & View wire it all up and then they can add content. If this is the case then this simply isn't a workable solution! A page like this would not be a structured content page (for us) this would be an Ad-Hoc one off. I/We cant see anyway around this, we have tried dynamic routing and ok with a Dev it can be made to work. However why now where we have a CMS (Portal Engine) where the above is possible are we now being pushed to a situation where the above is not possible and yet word on the street is this is more flexible? It isn't flexible at all.

No company that wants to make money will buy the argument its more flexible when you now need 2 very different skill sets to complete a task that only needed one skill set before!

What am I/we missing here? I cant beleive this to be the case!

To clarify I'm not coming on here to put down anything, I have worked with Kentico for more than 12 years and I love it. However at this juncture I cant possibly defend what seems like a major loss of functionality here, so my question is what am I/we missing? because I cant beleive this is the case. As for being more flexible, that is an extremely hard sell to the business when as I beleive you now need 2 skill sets and extended timelines to achieve what we can now do in 10 mins.

Many thanks for your replies and help in advance.

mvc portal engine

Recent Answers

Zach Perry answered on October 23, 2019 17:39

How much did you look into dynamic routing? You can create a route and controller that just use the node alias path of the page to display the content.

Check out this blog post

You can create templates with K12SP. The real big difference is you won't have all the preexisting web parts already created, but you have enough widgets to build out the basic content of a page.

I will agree Portal Engine can be quicker to create some basic pages, but it has many more restrictions.

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Trevor Fayas answered on October 23, 2019 18:50

NodeAliasPath Dynamic routing is available through the link (which also has my nuget package), however we are also working on the new Dynamic Routing which hopefully will be out within a month or two that allows any URL structure, not just NodeAliasPath matching.

In general though, the transition from Portal Engine to MVC is a tough one, MVC has a lot of benefits but it is a code-first approach, and does require developers to wire up the functionality. Kentico is working on more components / built in widgets but as of now there is not much for 'out of the box' functionality in that regards.

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