Understanding Kentico platform

Hi Kim,

A few things which come to mind are:

• Purchasing consulting time with Kentico
• Work with a Kentico Partner
• Take the courses (which you've already done)
• Attend as many webinars and events as you can pertaining to Kentico
• Check out the Knowldege Base Articles
• Work with an ASP.NET developer who can write code but may not know Kentico
• Trial and error

The last 2 options in my opinion are last resorts but the others are very viable solutions.

Thank you. This gives me something to focus on..learning the Kentico database structure. From there, learning how to work with it.

Hi Kim,

This is how I learned Kentico and made others learn the Kentico system. I have taken Kentico training myself. I think Kentico's training is great if you are already aware of the system somewhat. I have felt that their training fails to connect dots how different components of the system works. How everything comes together to make sense. I have trained many people in Kentico with prior or no prior training. I think the only reason I was successful in helping them understand was to structure my training in a way that could overcome frustrations I had with official training. In all these training people made a tremendous turn around after five days, and everything started making sense to them.

1. Read the documentation as deeply as possible. There is an example out there to what you want to achieve.
2. Reach out for answers on Devnet. We have wonderful contributors here who are willing to help you sail through. Of course, Brenden Kehren should be the first name that comes to my mind.
3. Fail fast often fail often experimenting.
4. Reach out to support at kentico.com

Wish you luck on your journey

Cheers, Chetan

Thank you everyone. This is exactly what I needed. I was starting to think it was just me being frustrated but it helps to see that others had that same level of frustration.

The official training (all of it from content to developer) shows how to use the the basics of content entry to the more advanced content editor portions. It also shows the standard development practices within the Kentico UI as well as some of the more advanced examples of what could possibly be done with some custom code.

Yes there is not a lot of examples for things you or others may think are basic tasks but if you really think about them, they are specific to your own site. In the time I've worked with Kentico, documentation has been significantly improved and Kudos to Kentico for this. If you're looking for something specific, you might need to Google around or as others have suggested, read the documentation more in depth to get specifically what you need.

Kentico won't provide specific examples on how to implement a slider or how to fully create a custom payment provider or how to implement a custom tax provider because once you get in past creating the standard boilerplate code, it gets very specific to the plugin or 3rd party provider you're using.

So maybe instead of being frustrated, document out what you need from a user perspective or high level and then research what Kentico has to help you accomplish this. Using the system more and more will only help you become more familiar with it. I've been using Kentico since 2008 and still learning new things every day. Others have been using it since it came out in 2004 and still using methods or approaches from 2004 while others have educated themselves and are using the modern approaches for site implementations.

What I'm trying to point out is, Kentico documentation is not here to provide every possible scenario for you on your site implementation. Documentation is provided to help educate you with the tools Kentico offers and in some cases provide generic examples on how the tools may be used.

Good luck and hope your frustration goes away soon!