That motivation is why I have created this blog post series. I’d like to fully answer the question of “Why MVC?” once and for all. I figure that if I am having this conversation multiple times, there must be other people having it to with their clients. Why not answer it fully in writing and in a holistic way, that way all of us in the Kentico Xperience community are able to use it as a resource for all clients out there who have Portal Engine based Kentico Xperience sites and are considering what to do next.

I figured that there was no way it would take more than just a few minutes to do this task. It’s just creating a few users in Kentico which is like 4 or 5 lines of code in a for loop, right? As it turns out, there is a good way to do this, and then an even better way to do it using some freely available NuGet packages.

With that being said, one of the most common requests that we get at BizStream when building a custom e-commerce site in Kentico is the ability for B2B users to make purchases via the use of a Purchase Order Number (PO Number) instead of a standard credit card payment method. That's one feature that isn't totally 100% out of the box when you have a custom checkout process. Again this task is not a tough issue, and there are many helpful links to get you started in this area if you need to.

Funny enough, we are actually currently working on a project that has this requirement in Kentico 9 (yes this is actually a Kentico MVC site too). And after demoing the working functionality to the client, we received a question of how to then look up orders in the administrative interface by a PO Number. And that is something that I didn't have an immediate answer for. After doing some quick research, it turns out that this customization is not that hard to do.

There are great articles out there, from some very smart people, on how to best utilize scripts in Kentico. So I'm not going to cover those scenarios in today's blog post. Instead I am going to focus on a real world scenario that I have dubbed "The Revenge of the JavaScript Web part". Basically it boils down to a Kentico quick tip on one very sneaky gotcha, when dealing with the built-in JavaScript Web Part in Kentico. Keep reading to make sure that you are not bit by the same hard learned lesson that my team and I recently went through.

The goal for Search for Kentico is to be able to easily search across every object in your Kentico instance. If you search for a term like "console.log", our tool will look through every piece of code you have in your website, on the filesystem, as well as every database object that Kentico knows about (and doesn't know about) and return you intelligent results. 

This is a very useful feature in case you want to check for debug statements, look out for dev URLs in content or email templates, or rename a column or SQL View name in the database. Now instead of waiting for some dependent object to possibly error, you can move on with confidence that your rename worked. Keep reading after the jump to find out how this free tool works.

In the latest release of the CMS, MVC is getting very close to being a first class citizen in the choice of Kentico development models, with the other leading candidate being the Kentico Portal Engine model (which has always been based on ASP.NET Webforms). I say first class citizen because the MVC improvements in version 9.0 have been considerable enough for my team and I to start building out client projects in this model, and we are quite happy with the results.

In fact in the last 6 or 7 months of using Kentico 9.0 MVC we have learned a few things that I feel are worth sharing with the Kentico developer community. So without further ado I would like to present 8 Things Developers Should Know about Kentico MVC.

Since my team and I are in charge of monitoring quite a few web applications, I found the topic of Application Insights particularly interesting as it relates to Kentico based applications. I immediately thought of questions like would this technology work for web applications only hosted in Azure, or would it also work for existing applications that were on-premise. I was also curious if how easy it was to install and use the technology, how much overhead that it introduces, and exactly how the heck does it actually work. 

Keep reading to find out how easy it is to add Visual Studio Application Insights to a Kentico based web application and what value, if any, this technology can add to your every day job as a web developer or architect.

Keep reading to find out how you can cut your deployment time, be more confident that the deployment actually worked, and keep some of your own sanity intact when it comes to moving changes from one environment to the next.

With that being said my goal of this blog post is to do a deep dive on using Compare for Kentico to visually compare two different Kentico website instances to show you how it actually works. Keep reading to find out how you can cut your deployment time, be more confident that the deployment actually worked, and keeping some of your own sanity intact when it comes to moving changes from one environment to the next.

However, if you want to make sure everything is working perfectly, and get the fullest out of your Kentico EMS site there are few more things to consider. For instance, if you have upgraded from previous versions of Kentico like 5.5 R2, 6.0, or 7.0 some of the required features and settings didn’t yet exist and therefore can cause issues. Ensuring that the EMS functionality works correctly really does come in to play if you have had your Kentico CMS site running for a while.

As a result of upgrading many Kentico sites over the years, my team and I at BizStream have found that there are a few things that seem to be recurring issues, and honestly there are some items that we sometimes forgot to check or configure, when upgrading a Kentico 7.0 CMS site to a Kentico 8 or 9 EMS site. To solve this issue I have created a checklist to make this process easier for my team, and I thought it was worth sharing with the Kentico developer community. So today I am presenting my Upgrade Kentico CMS to Kentico EMS Checklist as a free downloadable pdf.

The fact is that we frequently create custom modules in Kentico to handle any large customization need. Building your own modules is actually the preferred choice and Kentico best practice when it comes to adding in functionality to a site built with Kentico or the actual Kentico admin interface itself. But neither Mark nor I had actually taken the time to sit down and browse through the lesser known aspect of module development.

This morning I had a chance to do that, and it turns out there is a really simple solution to linking any helpful information or documentation to a custom module. The best part is that the solution was just a few clicks away. 

Kentico 9.0 has been released officially for about a month and a half. However, I have actually had my hands on it for much longer. Thanks to being a Kentico MVP, I was actually lucky enough to be included in some of the preview builds of 9.0 for a few months prior to release. During the beta period I was tasked with giving as much feedback as possible to the Kentico product team and I tried my best to do so. As usual I basically let them know that they knocked it out of the park with this release.

2015 was an excited year for sure. Now on to my best of lists for Kentico Related Posts.

My team and I have done this exact thing many times. Most frequently it involves enabling what is commonly referred to as mixed mode authentication. In Kentico, mixed mode authentication lets you use both Forms based authentication as well as Windows AD based authentication. Even though I have done this specific task many times there always seems to be some sort of trick required to getting it to work correctly. Today I am going to share a tip that hopefully helps out any developer who needs to configure Kentico to utilize Windows AD for Mixed Mode authentication.

As it turns out, I was wrong, no customization was required. The system was already built in a way that made my requirement dead simple to solve. Kentico never stops impressing me even after using it for 5+ years.

Keep reading to see how this quick tip will allow you to add and manage metadata to Kentico Media Library files without dropping into any code.

I am going to start with a question though. Have you ever heard the saying that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"? If you have, then this post should make a ton of sense. If you have not, then maybe I can teach you something today.