Brenden Kehren Kehren Development

Kentico offers many settings, configurations and suggestions on how to improve your websites performance.  Configuring Kentico correctly, you can realy optimize your website BUT there are still a few items which are not resolved like combining scripts and stylesheets into a single request.  In this post I'll share my experience implenting a module created by Kentico Gold Partner PMC-Digital which combines scripts and stylesheets into a single request and caches them for you

Over the last few months we've been working through some enhanvements and bugs with one of our clients and during some of the research on the bugs we found some issues with how the environment was setup.  Having only worked with Azure Web Apps a few times, and each time was significantly different, I wanted to share the problems and solutions along with best practices to setup your Kentico instance in Azure Web Apps for storing your files in Azure and Blob storage.

You've installed Kentico, have your site up and running locally and now you need to deploy it.  You look in your file system and see there are thousands upon thousands of files in the root directory.  Yes, Kentico is a large CMS and in order to run it you do need a lot of files but what I'll show you today is how to clean up your installation for deployment. 

In my previous post I talked about an issue with enabling SSL and tracking Contacts in Kentico.  The short story was simply disabling monitoring of on-line users.  Now a new issue has come up, I have thousands of contacts I need to clean up.

It's Thursday somewhere right?  Take advantage of this throwback Thursday tip when upgrading your Kentico 7 (or even 6) instance to newer versions.  

Kentico provides some great documentation and directions on upgrading major versions.  Unfortunately, they can't perform their tests on every website scenario..  What I'm going to provide to you today is one very large tip when upgrading those older instances of Kentico.

Here's a quick tip on how to control your contacts when using SSL, monitering online users and a load balancer.   

THE PROBLEM
Kentico EMS has a lot of features for marketing purposes.  Some of which are enabled by default and some which aren't.  Over the last few months, I've noticed my contacts to be growing exponentionally which was somewhat concerning to me.  Most people would be excited if they had almost 12,000 new contacts on their site in the last week.

2016 has started off with a bang!  It's shaping up to be the best year of Kehren Development's and looking forward to what it has to bring!

MVP STATUS
Last year I was awarded MVP status from Kentico.  With this recognition I've been able to help the community more, do some travel and speak at Kentico Connections in Orlando and Brno and meet some great people I'd normally not have a chance to meet.  As you know, this status is reviewed and updated annually.  Well, I'm happy to announce, Kentico has once again named me as a Kentico MVP!  Read the article here.

I'd also like to point out, there are 3 new MVP's added Laura Frese,  Michael Kinkaid, and Roman Hutnyk.  These 3 are great additions to the MVP team and I look forward to working with them in the upcoming year.

Many Kentico gurus have already provided some great information on what they learned, how they plan to use new features and what all the new Kentico features are in version 9 which is why I'm taking a different approach with this post. My goal is to focus on building the importance on attending Kentico Connections and speaking to how tightly knit the developer, partner and marketing communities are. Kentico has been having the annual Connection event since 2011. I attended my first Kentico Connection in 2012 in Denver, CO. Little did I know this would change my life forever.

Kentico MVP Brian McKeiver (@mcbeev) covered this subject in his post a while back. I'd like to suppliment his posts with what I learned when following his instructions to implement Disqus on my Kentico site.  The differences or changes aren't substantial but they are worth mentioning. So I'm unofficially naming this post "Part 2 1/4" of How to Connect Disqus Comments to Kentico EMS Activity Tracking.

Lately I've had several requests to create global event handlers to send emails when specific items happen.  In v7 I had difficulties getting macros to resolve in email templates and it didn't get any better in version 8.  This week, I finally sat down, did some research, wrote a test program and came up with the solution and thought I'd share with all of you.