Boris Pocatko

I’ve found that quite often the same data is used over and over again on a website. I would bet that you do the same thing, retrieving the same DataSet or a subset of entries of the same DataSet on multiple pages. Without any additional thought on configuration, the system will execute as many SQL queries as there are listings on your website. Let’s have a look at how to bring down the number of executed SQL queries to a single one.

Output caching is a great feature for improving the overall performance of your website. However, there are cases where the page is simply too dynamic to utilize this useful feature. Kentico again has a solution for you. You can create context dependent output caching with a few lines of code.

Online Marketing has a set of powerful features covering most of your requirements. There are, however, certain scenarios in which you might need to extend the system a little bit. This article shows you an example of how to do just that.

No two websites are the same and no two clients have the same requirements when it comes to e-commerce. There are plenty of options in Kentico, which can be used out-of-the-box. Just a few examples are role-based discounts, “buy X get Y discounts,” product options, variants and other approaches. This functionality, coupled with marketing automation, gives you a lot of out of the box freedom. However, occasionally some parts of the system will need to be extended or customized. In this article, I’ll try to list the most important customization scenarios and safest approaches in regards to future upgrades of the system. 

Many developers think that by providing a finished website, their job is done. Even if they’ve followed all of our best practices regarding website design and setup, there is still an ongoing need to keep the overall system healthy. Websites should be serviced regularly; just like you would service your car.

There are several areas you should pay attention to when maintaining your website. The areas can be divided into:

• Linking content
• Unnecessary performance hogs 
• Long term content strategy
• Database health
• File system health
• Monitoring

We will take a look at each of these areas, and describe how to tackle them effectively in order to keep your website running smoothly for a long time. 

Sometimes email just isn’t enough. It can get lost amongst the heaps of spam you receive daily and you may not even notice its arrival. If you want to be notified about something immediately, or perhaps even need to elevate an issue, push notifications to mobile devices or PCs are the way to go. This article shows you how to set up push notifications for any of your devices (Android, iOS, PCs) as part of an online marketing or workflow process in just a few steps.

When developing new controls, modules or web parts, you should always think about performance and caching. But sometimes you are unable to create caching dependencies that cover your scenario, so you need to use an alternative approach to keep the most recent objects in the cache and to remove old ones before the cache expires. One of the possible approaches is discussed in this post, in which we implement a method that caches the last N requested objects. 

A lot of modern websites today feature a predictive search in the header of each page. I would bet that your website too has a search box at the top of every page. This gives the visitor a convenient way on how to search your website from anywhere. This functionality comes with a price tag of course, as any feature you add to your website. In this case the price tag is quite high, since when using our build in search you cause postbacks, so you can't use output caching. Let's fix that. 

In this session we've talked about all the different caching options in Kentico, how they are enabled and used. We took a look at some caching setups and inspected the cached content with our debugging tools. We used also caching dependencies to keep the displayed content fresh.

Sometimes you need to showcase  features of your software that require third-party services to be connected to your program. In our case, for example, we required a nice demo page to showcase our EMS functionality based on the  Google search results page. This article describes one of the ways to achieve this in Kentico CMS. 

In this article, we will have a closer look at how to extend the built-in Document library web part to be able to use it with a custom navigation web part and we will also add some additional columns to give the user a better overview of the displayed document. 

Join Boris (Kentico Solution Architect) and learn more about how our ComponentEvents class will help you execute code from different controls without needing to create a custom notification with only a few lines of code.