Bryan Soltis Technical Evangelist at Kentico Software

Hello friends. This is my last blog post as Technical Evangelist here at Kentico. I can’t describe the awesome time I’ve had serving this community and helping developers build solutions with our products. Before I go, I wanted to let you know a little about my future, what will happen with Kentico Technical Evangelism, and a few things in store for the community moving forward.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we now have a functioning MVC site with some dynamic content stored in a Kentico installation. We’ve preconfigured the site for widgets, applied a design, and some script bundling. In this article, I’m going to show you how to create a custom widget within your sites and use it in an Editable Area. Let’s get to it!

Welcome back! In Part 1 of the series, I covered creating a VERY basic MVC site and pulling in some Kentico-hosted content. This article is going to keep the party going with applying a design, implementing the new Page Builder functionality, and setting ourselves up for some custom widget development. 

With the release of Kentico 12, there’s no secret that MVC is the future for all things Kentico. From the simplest brochure sites to the most complex integrations, MVC is the recommended approach for any developer working with the platform (have we made that clear enough yet?). In this new article series, I will walk you through creating an MVC site using Kentico 12 and document every step.

Kentico’s technical community is a vibrant and diverse mix of developers, designers, and site administrators. Among those members are several individuals who go to great lengths to help others and promote Kentico and its features. For their efforts, Kentico awards these dedicated members the title of Kentico Most Valuable Professional (MVP).  In this article, I will introduce you to the 2019 Kentico MVPs.

Kentico partners come in all shapes and sizes. Some are small, 5-10 people operations, while others are enormous titans of industry with employee counts into the hundreds. While these companies may operate and handle their projects differently, one thing remains: they all must come up with a plan to move to MVC. As one of our largest partners, MMT Digital has crafted a unique process to get their team up to date. And because our MVPs are such awesome folks, Ilesh Mistry recently told me all about their MVC plans.

So, you know that we’ve released Kentico 12 with all its awesome MVC support. And you know you should be using MVC for all your new sites. Sounds like a perfect plan! But what about your existing sites? Our Support and Consulting teams are fielding a lot of questions from our partners as to when they should migrate their existing Portal sites. Because everyone loves charts, I made a handy workflow for you in this article to help you out.

With the release of Kentico 12 and our updated MVC support, developers have a big question they have to answer. For their new projects, which development model should they choose? We have been publishing many articles and best practices on this topic, including deep dives into the tech, interviews with community experts, and technical webinars to help companies along the way. Sometimes, people just want a simple chart to help them decide. In this article, we’ve got you covered on how to choose the model for your next project!

Having a large development can bring a lot of advantages. With more developers, knowledge and experience can be exchanged easily as downtime can be minimized with group trainings and meetings. For smaller development teams, the impact is far greater, often requiring special planning when a new technology is being adopted. In this article, I’ll share with you some highlights from my recent interview with Founder of Kehren Development and Kentico MVP Brenden Kehren on how his team is making the transition to MVC in preparation for Kentico 12.

MVC is kind of big deal here at Kentico. If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been pouring a ton of development into the framework to help developers build better solutions. In order to make an awesome platform for you, we had to adopt the MVC mindset, as well. And what better way than to migrate one of our own sites to it! Let me walk you through our experience of migrating the Kentico Advantage site to MVC.

The rise of MVC has not been a quiet process. Over the past few years, developers have been saying...err…SCREAMING that they want to use modern, scalable frameworks for their Kentico applications. And they’re right! Modular, flexible architectures allow sites to be developed and tested much easier, by separating logical areas of the functionality. Sure, you can do that with Kentico. But what about your Azure hosting with MVC? In this article, I’ll give you some tips on how to get the most out of your Azure-hosted MVC sites.

In this video, Kentico Technical Evangelist Bryan Soltis talks with BizStream Co-Founder and MVP Brian McKeiver about what partners need to consider when transitioning their development to MVC.

Editors have a lot to do. From crafting perfect content to managing campaigns, they are often overwhelmed with tasks needed to manage an application. With more and more regulations being adopted for usability, ensuring a site is compliant is paramount. An often-overlooked area is media descriptions. In this article, I’m going to show you how to leverage the Azure Cognitive Vision API to automate your image descriptions within Kentico.

Who doesn’t love flexibility? From programming to juggling chainsaws, the ability to adapt to any situation is always a welcome capability. With new devices and platforms being released every day, this becomes especially important to web applications. Enter .NET Core, Docker, and Kentico Cloud. Each of these are extremely capable components of a flexible architecture developers can use to build some amazing solutions. Don’t believe me? Let me show you how…

When it comes to the web, SEO is everything. If people can’t find your content, then you’re pretty much wasting your time. Making sure your URLs are properly formatted and optimized are an essential step to ensuring your content is easily found. Kentico has a lot of great functionality to take care of this, however, you may need to customize the process to fit your specific needs. In this article, I’ll show you how to leverage global event handlers to transform your URLs into SEO-friendly values.

Automation can go a long way in making a developer's life easier. When it comes to content, the less to deal with, the better! Let me show you how to automate translation with Kentico Cloud.

Ever since we released Kentico Cloud, developers have asked for a way to write content into their projects. To meet this need, we released a Content Management API last November, which allowed content to be created programmatically from any source. So, what are the possibilities this interface? In this article, I’ll show you how I leveraged Azure and the Kentico Cloud Content Management API to automate translating my content. 

If you’re using Kentico in Azure, then you probably have seen a lot of options in your portal for your SQL database. Azure SQL Database, Microsoft’s SaaS database option, is a fantastic tool that gives you nearly unlimited SQL computing power and capability. But what about all those security options and performance recommendations if shows you? In this article, I’m going to cover a few of the key features of Azure’s SQL Database to help you get the most out of cloud-hosted Kentico sites.

If you have an e-commerce store, chances are you ship things to your customers. This means a lot of orders and a lot of calculations. One of the biggest ways to get more sales and happy customers is to integrate real-time shipping rates into your site.  In this article, I’ll show you how to add real-time FedEx rates to your Kentico 11 site.

By now, I’m sure you’re an expert on GDPR. You‘ve hung out with your favorite legal team to talk about it, read all the riveting blogs about the rules, and started dreaming in GDPR-eze. You have all the info on what you need to do, but may not be sure how to get things going within your Kentico sites. In this article, I’m going to walk you through the new Data Protection module included with your Kentico 11 EMS installation to help you get compliant.

Our Community team is hard at work, producing new SDKs for Kentico Cloud for all types of platforms. From frontend to backend, web to mobile, there are countless frameworks we’re looking at to expand our samples and SDKs. Recently, we launched our new Kentico Cloud Delivery JavaRx SDK, enabling Java and Android developers to easily integrate Kentico Cloud into their apps. In this article, I’ll take a closer look at the SDK and sample projects to help you get started with these new GitHub projects.

Every version of Kentico is packed full of amazing features and updates. With Kentico 11, one of the biggest advancements was our built-in integration with Azure Search. In this article, I’m giving you a crash course in this new functionality. In the end, you should be able to get your sites up and running quickly on Microsoft’s Search as a Service.

When you build your applications with microservices, integration is the key. The ability to connect systems and move information easily is essential to architecting and developing stable, functional solutions. With Kentico Cloud, we are constantly working on new SDKs and sample projects to help companies leverage the platform on more projects. In this article, I’ll tell you about our latest SDK additions.

“We need to start thinking about OMNICHANNEL for our content.”

“Kentico Cloud is all about OMNICHANNEL! So, how do we use it?”

“I’ve been watching for hours but there’s nothing but reruns and infomercials on every OMNICHANNEL!”

The phrase “Omnichannel” is certainly making the rounds when it comes to content. Hatched from the minds of over-worked marketers tired of creating posts for everywhere they need to. In a quest to reduce their stress (and chances for carpal tunnel), people have gotten smarter about how and when they produce content, planning for multiple channels from the start.

Makes perfect sense, right? Everyone wants their job to be a little easier and more effective.

But what does it all mean to developers?

Best of breed solutions often offer two things: great functionality and an easy-to-user interface. When it comes to email marketing, providing users a simple, guided experience allows them to create their campaigns without having to deal with technical hurdles. In Kentico 11, one of the biggest features was the new Email Builder, a drag-and-drop utility to allow marketers to create dynamic email campaigns. In this article, I’ll show you how to create a custom email widget to display popular site content using macros.

Kentico’s technical community is a vibrant and diverse mix of developers, designers, and site administrators. Among those members are several individuals who go to great lengths to help others and promote Kentico and its features. For their efforts, Kentico awards these dedicated members the title of Kentico Most Valuable Professional (MVP).  In this article, I will introduce you to the 2018 Kentico MVPs.

As another year wraps up, I wanted to write my annual post recapping the year in Kentico Technical Evangelism. The last 12 months have been filled with loads of articles, events, and more than a few discussions. So, let’s kick back and see what all has happened in 2017.

Content editors have a lot do. From managing web content to social media, they are tasked with curating and publishing all sorts of data to many locations. With so much activity on a daily basis, editors are constantly looking for ways to be more productive, and reduce the amount of manual steps they have to take.

Macros have long been a friend to any Kentico developer. Whether it’s one of many built-in methods or a custom one, these little code blocks can be powerhouses when it comes to developing your applications. One of their best aspects is their ability to be contextual, based on the user that inserted it.  While this very powerful, using macros between instances often resulted in broken or invalid macros, when it came to security. In Kentico 11, we’ve solved that challenge with macro identities.

The world is becoming more automated. From cars to coffee makers, systems are becoming more dynamic as developers leverage integrations between applications and platforms. When it comes to publishing content, any improvements that save an editor time is a huge step in the right direction. Luckily, teaming Kentico Cloud up with Azure Logic Apps can bring you a ton of automation, with only a little custom code.

In a recent article, I showed you how to leverage claims-based authentication within your Kentico sites. In my example, I chose Auth0 for my identity provider, as it’s one of the easiest systems to implement around. In this blog, I’ll give you a deeper look at how to setup and configure Auth0 for your Kentico sites..

As the headless CMS approach becomes more and more common, the implementations become increasingly complex. When a project is new, things are much great! When dealing with an existing application that is moving to the cloud, things get a little more challenging. Luckily, Kentico Cloud has a great new Content Management API to help you out! 

Everyone’s been to a site with truly awful search. You have an idea of what you are looking for, but no clue as to where to start. You click on the Search link and are taken to a box, with little else. Sure, you can get some results there, but we’ve all seen a list with “Page 1 of 1,580” at the bottom. Not very helpful, is it? Before you go throwing your monitor across the room, I’m happy to tell you that Kentico 11 is going to support Faceted Search! Long gone are the days of your users sifting through the abyss in search of their content. With Version 11’s Azure Search integration, you’ll be able to build an intuitive (and USABLE) search experience, no matter the content.

With Kentico Cloud being a SaaS (Software as a Service), our development team is constantly improving the product. By controlling the environment, we can push out improvements on a regular basis. Recently, we rolled out several features that are going to make your development with the platform even better. I’ll fill you in on the latest enhancements.

When it comes to security and authentication, there’s no shortage of customization that developers will need to implement. On-premise and cloud-hosted AD servers, everyone’s favorite social media platform, or some Access database on that one guy’s machine; you name it! Companies have very specific verification processes for their users’ identities and it’s up to you to make it all work. While Claims-Based Authentication is nothing new, you may not know how to best handle it within your Kentico sites. In this article, I’ll show you how to get your external users logged in quickly and working within your application.

As the Headless CMS concept comes more prevalent in technology, so do the questions from the clients. On top of selling their services and skill, agencies often must educate their customers on why a Headless CMS makes sense for their project.

As MVC becomes the main development model for Kentico developers, understanding how to host your applications becomes an important skill to master. Depending on your hosting environment, your application structure can have a significant impact on your ability to scale, update, and manage your projects. With more and more companies considering Azure App Services, I wanted to give you my thoughts on how to best use the platform for your Kentico MVC sites.

Kentico Cloud’s webhook support is a great tool for developers to use within their applications. By configuring this feature, you can easily automate processes and simplify your custom code. Webhooks can update external systems, ensure data integrity, and keep all your systems (and people) in sync as content changes. In this article, I’ll show you how you can use this new capability to update your team’s Slack channels when content is published.

If you’re ever attended a Kentico event, you know they are full of some awesome content and great connections. With so much packed into each conference, staying up to date on the sessions and details can be tough as new speakers and locations are added. With the new Kentico Events app, you’ll have access to the latest information as soon as it is released. In this article, I’ll tell you about the app features, give a glimpse into the architecture, and let you know how to get it installed on your phone.

All the best features in the world don’t mean a thing if people can’t see your product. As a vendor, you always want to be in front of as many users as possible. You also want to get people using your product quickly. We’ve recently launched the Kentico Cloud Sample site in the Azure Marketplace to do just that. In this article, I’ll show you how easy it is to getting going with Kentico Cloud in Azure.

Everyone loves looking at their phone and seeing an app update waiting for them. Maybe it’s a new feature or capability, or just a slick new UI, and that magic little icon is your ticket to the goods. Regardless of the industry or platform, it’s exciting to see what companies have baked into their new releases, and to start planning how you can use them. In this article, I’m going to dive into some awesome things coming for developers in Kentico 11.

It’s been nearly a year since Kentico Cloud was released and the Headless CMS concept is beginning to be a major player for developers. As more companies start to offer these API-first models for implementing their products, the technical community may be left scratching their heads on how to best implement them. In this article, I’ll tell you about some great resources waiting for developers looking to build with Kentico Cloud.

When it comes to the web, it’s all about speed these days. Sure, flying toasters and embedded videos were all the rage 10 years ago. These days, people want to get to the information they’re looking for quickly, and without the riffraff of extra content. Google figured this out long ago and has steadily been implementing the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) concept into the industry. By limiting what tags and content can be displayed, Google can ensure a speedy delivery of sites in a predictable manner. In this article, I’ll show you how we converted the Kentico Advantage site to use this new technique. 

The world is full of horrible typists. From the ever-devolving grammar on social media to the classic hunt-and-peck, there’s no shortage of people that could use a little help in their data entry. When it comes to capturing data on the web, this is especially important as the information often contains personal and contact information. In this article, I’ll show you how you can leverage Azure’s new cloud-based Bing Spell Check API within your Kentico sites to proof your user’s data.

Developers want to automate everything. Whether it’s moving code or testing a function, enslaving a machine to do your dirty work is the best way to exert your authority over computers, and to simplify your coding life. With Kentico Cloud’s new webhook support, the platform just got a lot more attractive to the development community. In this article, I’ll show you an example of how to use this new capability to streamline your applications.

Email marketing is a staple of any digital marketing effort. Allowing companies to target their audience with relevant, personalized information is a surefire way to generate more activity, communication, and (hopefully) profit. With Kentico, emails can be manually created, or leverage an existing page of the site. In this article, I’ll show you how you can personalize page-based emails to your subscribers with a custom macro.

Everyone loves tips and tricks. Whether it’s a cool Netflix hack to view hidden titles or words of wisdom about the snow, it’s the little things that make a task easier that really brighten your day. In keeping with the same theme, let me tell you about a few Kentico tricks you may not have known.

In Part 1 of this series, I showed you how to build a base Xamarin app using Kentico Cloud. In that article, I covered creating the initial application, adding a service, and implementing calls to retrieve the data. In Part 2, I’ll cover how to display that content and build a cross-platform app using XAML.

As a Headless CMS, Kentico Cloud is all about delivering content to any channel. Whether it’s web, mobile, smartwatch, or carrier pigeon, companies need to edit their information in a single location and have it accessible to all their applications. In this article, I’ll show you how to leverage Kentico Cloud’s new Xamarin support to build a cross-platform mobile app using KC-hosted content.

Form controls are a powerful component of Kentico. By creating these custom interfaces, developers can provide an intuitive and dynamic experience for their users. While Kentico has many controls out of the box, projects often require more complex solutions to achieves specific goals. In this blog, I’ll show you how to create a form control that allows drag & drop ordering for multiple objects.

When developing for a global audience, you have to think multi-lingual. Presenting content in native languages helps you connect with your audience and provide them information in a much more personal experience. We recently released an update to Kentico Cloud to enable localization of your data, giving you the ability to edit and store your content in nearly any language. In this blog, I’ll show you how to leverage this new capability within your projects.

In June, we hosted the annual Kentico MVP Summit at our home office in Brno, Czech Republic. A weeklong event focused on getting MVPs as much as info as possible, the summit covered a wide range of Kentico and Kentico Cloud topics. In this article, I’ll give you a little glimpse into what we discussed and what to expect for the rest of 2017.

One the best parts about a headless CMS like Kentico Cloud is the ability to develop in nearly any language. Whether it’s a slick JavaScript library like Angular or React, or a classic framework like .NET or ASP (shudder), using Kentico Cloud for your content delivery means you can focus entirely on the presentation. To help developers adopt this new platform, we have several open source projects to get you going. In this article, I’ll show you how you start building your sites using the Kentico Cloud Sample JavaScript site.

For a .NET developer, working with Kentico is usually a straight-forward process. Thanks to extensive documentation, dedicated support, and loads of blog posts from the community, finding help is relatively easy. Sometimes, no matter who you talk to, you still need to understand more about what’s happening with your site to solve your issue. Luckily, there are quite a few debugging options within the platform to help you get answers. In this blog, I’ll cover some of these tools, and hopefully help you move forward with your development. 

Once you get started developing with Kentico Cloud, you’ll quickly realize the power of the platform is its accessibility. By leveraging industry-standard services to retrieve information, companies can architect robust solutions capable of delivering content to any device. In this article, I’ll be introducing you to the various filters that are available within the Delivery API to help you understand how to get your content quickly. 

Unless you’re sticking to your web design skills from 1998, you mostly are incorporating some sort of front-end framework into your applications. Whether it’s JavaScript libraries, templating engines, or just some sweet code to add trails to your mouse movements, external scripts often power the captivating experience users have come to expect. In this article, I’ll give you some important information on the ScriptHelper class in Kentico to help build out your controls. 

Over the past few months the Kentico Roadshow has brought updates and technical information to cities around the world. If you attended any of these sessions, you got to hear about the .NET Core Boilerplate project for Kentico Cloud. As part of the presentation, we showed you how to build a site in minutes using this open-source project. In this article, I’ll share with you the process we covered, as well as all source code for the showcase site. 

Have you ever needed to get all the fields for a page type in Kentico? Maybe you needed to know the list of fields that make up a class in a custom module. In this blog, I’ll show you a quick way to retrieve the fields for any class in your system.  And just for fun, I’ll implement it using a custom macro.

Websites. Mobile apps. Smartwatches. Wearables.  Digital assistants. How you deliver content is limitless, with so many options for how people consume and leverage information. Thanks to AI, people are integrating technology into their everyday lives and using it to get information from their favorite sources. Enter the Headless CMS. By hosting your content in a central location, you can easily provide your data to a digital butler with ease. In this article, I’ll show you how I powered Alexa with my Kentico Cloud content.

Nothing spells disaster for a developer like an unsecure site. Whether it’s a vulnerability or a bad configuration, leaving your application exposed is just asking for trouble. Luckily, there are some simple steps you can take to ensure your deployments are safe. In this article, I’ll give you 5 ways you can lock down your site and hopefully keep your hair from falling out.

For the past few years, I’ve presented on Azure Search at several conferences and events. Microsoft’s Software-As-A-Service search solution is a great way to add powerful capabilities to a site with a few lines of code.  Combine that functionality with Azure Functions and a Headless CMS and you get a very powerful search experience for your applications. In this article, I’ll show you how I integrated Azure Search into my Kentico Cloud site, using Azure Functions.

Developing applications using microservices is a great way to increase functionality, without being solely dependent on a single solution. By using multiple systems and services, you can leverage the best from each platform. In Part 1 of this series, I showed you how I architected my personal site using a microservices. In this next edition, I’ll break down these integrations and show you how to leverage disconnected systems in your applications to achieve some powerful capabilities.

When deploying Kentico to Azure, one of the biggest questions that comes up is what size database to use. While we publish some recommendations in our documentation, your individual mileage may vary. To know if your database is spec’d high enough, you need to understand how it’s performing. In this article, I’ll show you how you can quickly view your Azure Database information right from inside your site, using a custom utility.

In this Kentico 1 on 1, I interviewed newly crowned MVP Kristian Bortnik from Web Design Magic. Kristian is the Head of Development there and has a lot of experience around customizing the Kentico Ecommerce engine. I thought it would be interesting for the community to hear Kristian’s approach to creating customized ecommerce solutions.

Innovative technology always presents a challenge for developers. Whether it’s a new platform or language, starting from scratch can be a tough task, even for seasoned software engineers. Luckily, nearly every new library or service has some open source projects available to help you get going. For completely new platforms like Kentico Cloud, these projects could be a huge help to developers new to the Headless CMS concept. In this article, I’ll give you 5 great reasons you should check out the Kentico Cloud Boilerplate project.

Having expired content on your site is the quickest way to kill traffic and interest. If users don’t see regular updates to your content, they’ll lose interest and likely not return. Ensuring their experience is fresh and relevant is the key to keeping your visitors interested and coming back. In this article, I’ll show you how to create a Scheduled Task in Kentico to notify your content owners when their pages are getting stale to ensure you provide the most engaging experience possible.

Once you select Azure as your hosting platform, a vast world of resources becomes available. From CDNs to Load Balancers, Microsoft’s cloud has loads of great services to help you develop and maintain your applications. Because performance is king, adding Application Insights to your site is a great way to stay on top of issues and understand how your application is performing. In this article, I’ll show you how to add this great monitoring tool to your .NET Core applications.

As more companies transition to a modular development model, integration with different services and platforms has become a common approach in many projects. By leveraging multiple systems, developers can build out complex applications, incorporating functionality from several sources to accomplish their goals. Many of these systems are small, light-weight services designed to perform a single function or purpose.  In this article, I’ll walk you through the process of building an application using these microservices and Microsoft Azure.

Kentico has many features to aide developers and editors in their day-to-day tasks. From CSS validators to logging, helping users find issues is essential to a good CMS. For developers, one of the most critical steps is ensuring that their code compiles and there are no errors. While Visual Studio will certainly help with your custom code, issues in transformations and other data-based objects are a little harder to find. In this article, I’ll show you how you can test your virtual objects within the site using some built-in functionality within Kentico.

Every website should be designed to load and display information quickly. Regardless of the form factor, the content should be designed to be presented quickly and, of course, look great. Luckily, there’s no shortage of tools to help you ensure your site is as fast as possible. One of the most popular of these tools is the Google PageSpeed Tool. In this blog, I’ll show you how to easily integrate this functionality into your Kentico sites.

Every feature added to Kentico is designed to improve users’ experiences with the platform. Whether they are developers or marketers, everyone’s time is valuable and ensuring a productive experience is key. As more and more roles are driven by data, providing employees with fast and efficient tools to consume and understand the information is important. In this article, I’ll show you how we’ve added support in Kentico for Microsoft Power BI reports to help your users track email campaigns and activities.

Over the past few years, I have spoken on Azure Search several times at user groups and conferences around the world. While many developers are familiar with Microsoft Azure and other cloud platforms, I’ve found many people still haven’t used Azure Search. In previous blogs, I’ve demonstrated how to integrate this service with Kentico. In this article, I’ll show some new functionality Microsoft added to the Azure Search SDK to index and search blobs (files) in Azure Storage.

By now, you’ve probably heard a lot about Kentico Cloud and how it presents a new way to develop your applications. One of the greatest benefits of the platform is how you can quickly develop applications in nearly any language and leverage cloud-based content. In this article, I’ll show you how I recently used Kentico Cloud and ReactJS within an MVC site for a tournament website for our booth at CodeMash 2017. Oh, and of course it's deployed to Azure Web Apps!

Kentico’s Admin Dashboard is a great place to access information quickly and easily. By pinning applications to the interface, you can save users loads of time by giving them access to the information that’s most important to them. In this blog, I’ll show you how to pin an individual form to a user’s dashboard.

The CKEditor toolbar has been a long-time staple of the Kentico interface. As an open-source editor, it’s extremely flexible and allows users to update their content quickly, using a variety of built-in features. While the utility provides a lot of functionality out-of-the-box, did you know it was possible to add additional plugins? In this blog, I’ll show you how to add a Bootstrap button plugin to insert formatted controls into your content.

Kentico’s technical community is a vibrant and diverse mix of developers, designers, and site administrators. Among those members are several individuals who go to great lengths to help others and promote Kentico and its features. For their efforts, Kentico awards these dedicated members the title of Kentico Most Valuable Professional (MVP).  In this article, I will introduce you to the 2017 Kentico MVPs.

Everyone enjoys when an application is familiar to them. Whether it’s the styling or imagery, providing a consistent and familiar experience for your users is a critical step in developing a site. Kentico has long provided developers ways to customize the interface and in Kentico 10 we made it even easier. In this blog, I’ll show you how you can easily modify the admin dashboard using your own styling.

As 2016 wraps up, I wanted to share with you some Kentico Evangelism highlights over the past year. Following an eventful 2015, the past 12 months have somehow topped the excitement scale with new conferences and events, product releases and launches, and a whole lot of blogs. In this article, I’ll recap all the activities we did within the Kentico community to bring you the latest information and keep you informed.

In the previous blogs in this series, I showed you how to create a .NET Core MVC site and add content from Kentico Draft. I then showed you how to expand on the content types, nest modular content, and leverage the Deliver API to display multiple types of data. In this final post, I’ll show you how to easily add Kentico Engage to your site for activity tracking, add a contact form, and deploy the application to Azure Web Apps.

In Part 1 of this blog series, I showed you how to create content types in Kentico Draft, add content via the tool, and display it within an MVC site using Kentico Deliver. Part 2 will include expanding on the content types, adding more dynamic content, and updating the site to display the new data. It’s a good bit of code, but a simple process to get your site running with Kentico Cloud.

Kentico Cloud is a new headless CMS platform that you can use to build your applications. By leveraging an Azure-hosted content repository and APIs, you are free to develop nearly any application you want and populate it with your managed content in Kentico Draft. In this blog series, I’ll show you how I migrated my own site to MVC and Azure, while leveraging Kentico Cloud for my content and activity tracking.

Developing custom modules is a key part to many Kentico projects. Whether it’s integrating with a backend system or extending the capabilities of the platform, developers often create these interfaces to expose new functionality to their users. As with any UI, providing accurate and relevant feedback is just as important as the module itself. In this blog, I’ll show you how you can leverage a standard method in Kentico to keep your users informed.

Azure Web Apps are one of the most widely used options for cloud deployments. This is largely due to their ease of deployment and use, along with their vast customization options. In this blog, I’ll discuss several ways you can manipulate your Azure Web Apps to fit your needs and set up a fool-proof deployment experience for your developers.

Last week, Kentico hosted the first ever 404 Conference in Las Vegas. It was a great week filled with a ton of interesting topics and sessions. Along with the presentations, attendees were shown an exciting new Kentico Cloud product that allows developers to use many of Kentico’s great content management features without installing them on their systems. As part of the announcement, we created two hands-on labs to help developers get started with these new services. In this article, I’ll provide you a description of these labs and let you know how you can get your hands on them for a test drive.

Kentico has a lot of great capabilities out of the box for validating data submitted by users. For many companies, these default settings and configurations are just fine for running their sites and capturing information from their users. Occasionally, a company will encounter a specific challenge that requires them to modify how a particular type of data is validated. In this blog, I’ll show you how you can leverage a setting key to change how Kentico validates email addresses within a site.

In Part 1 of this series, I demonstrated how to create a form and implement a basic Marketing Automation process to handle when users submit their data. In this follow-up article, I expand on that functionality by implementing a custom macro and conditional logic within the process. This functionality will allow the process to be dynamic, resulting in different actions based on the user’s form submission.

Marketing Automation is one of the most powerful features of Kentico. By defining and configuring the process to execute automatically, you can simplify the marketing processes and minimize mistakes and issues. When combined with Kentico Forms, this becomes a very valuable tool to use within an organization and improve business processes. In this two-part blog, I’ll show you how to leverage several EMS features to achieve powerful and efficient results using Forms with Kentico EMS.

You’ve heard Kentico talk a lot lately about 404. Sure, you know it’s a new conference happening in Vegas where experts focus on their failures and how they learned from them. But what you may not know is why developers should consider attending. In this article, I’ll try to give you some great tips on what’s in store for coders at the event, and why you won’t want to miss this exciting new conference.

I’m pretty sure an hour after the first website launched in 1991, someone put a poll up asking people a profound question to get their opinions. Since then, polls have continued to be a great way to get a feel for how your users like a product, enjoyed an event, or any other type of survey. Kentico has a built-in poll module that allows you to place polls on your site easily and get feedback from your users. In this blog, I’ll show you how, with a little bit of JavaScript and API code, you can display poll results anywhere.

Forms (or BizForms, if you’ve been using Kentico a while) are a great way to store data within your application. With a secure administration interface, you can allow editors and administrators to design and manage the form easily, all using the built-in application. In this article, I’ll show you how you can customize the form data interface with filters to help your users search and display data quickly.

Welcome to your Friday Developer Survey!

Every new version of Kentico always has some changes that impact development. Whether it’s a new feature or the realignment of an API, there is no doubt there is going to be some updates that have to be made within your application. While this can be a daunting task for some, Kentico offers a great tool to help you through the process. In this article, I’ll show you how the Kentico Upgrade Tool can simplify your upgrades, and save you a lot of headaches.

Welcome to your Friday Developer Survey!

The toughest part of any software company is getting people to use your code, your product, or your platform. That’s why so many companies rely on distribution methods like NuGet and APIs to get their code in the hands of developers. Because of its popularity (and because it’s so easy to use), Kentico leverages the NuGet framework to expose a number of packages to the community. In this article, I’ll explain these packages and let you know how and when you may want to use them within your projects.

Welcome to your Friday Developer Survey!

Kentico Draft is a cloud-based service that gives companies a single location for web content production. Powered by a robust API and sleek interface, the service gives you the ability to enter content even before your site is complete, allowing projects to end on schedule and save development costs. One of the best advantages to Kentico developers is the free Kentico Draft Import module for versions 9 and 8.2 sites. In this blog, I’ll you how to add this free module to your Kentico 9 installation. 

Welcome to your Friday Developer Survey!

Do you have a tough Kentico question or challenge? Are you looking to extend the platform and need guidance on the best way to implement? The Ask the Experts webinar is the event for you! This interactive webinar consists of a panel of Kentico experts ready to tackle your toughest challenges. Covering all areas of the product, our experts will take your questions and provide guidance and solutions. 

In this edition of Kentico 1 on 1, I sat down with DevNet rock star and overall good guy Brenden Kehren, of Kehren Development. As many of you know, Brenden is one of the most active members on the forums and helps tons of developers every week with their challenges. What you may not know is how much he works with maintaining sites, upgrading installations, and implementing new code for existing solutions. Because this information can help every company with their projects, I asked Brenden about how he goes about working with different projects in various environments.

Welcome to your Friday Developer Survey!

Microsoft Azure is continually being enhanced with more and more functionality that developers can leverage within their applications. From data storage to computing, there are a ton of great features available to simplify programming, offload workloads, and improve efficiency. Recently, Microsoft introduced Azure Functions, which is a huge benefit for developers. In this blog, I’ll show you how you can leverage Azure Functions to automate functionality within your Kentico site and eliminate resource-intensive processing.

Welcome to your Friday Developer Survey!

Every digital agency faces challenges when developing websites for their clients. The ultimate goal is to bring in the project on time, which requires collaboration between marketing, content, and development teams on both sides of the table. Kentico Draft brings everyone together to collect content early in the web development process, helping avoid delays that postpone the project. In this article, I’ll take a look at how Kentico Draft benefits developers by helping them produce websites faster, minimize delays, and limit dependencies on content contributors.

Welcome to your Friday Developer Survey!

Many companies often have several contributors to their website’s content. With so many authors producing articles, it becomes essential that publishing rules are established and enforced to prevent multiple articles being released at the same time. Enforcing those rules can be a challenging task but can be easily done with a little custom code. In this article, I’ll show you how to create a custom form control to limit the number of articles that can be published on a specific day.

Welcome to your Friday Developer Survey!

Developers are, all around, pretty awesome. To the average person, they have incredible powers and the ability to do amazing things. While all are capable of being heroes (or villains, if you’re a little on the sinister side), not all developers have the same strengths. In this blog, we’ll find out which super hero developer you are, and get you started on your path to saving the world. 

Kentico Draft is a powerful, cloud-based service that can simplify content creation and collection. Using a powerful API behind the scenes, Draft allows content to be entered and maintained in a single location by multiple contributors. The Kentico Draft team has released a free module, to help developers working with the tool, to allow content to flow seamlessly into your Kentico applications.

Dynamically replacing content within a site can improve content production and ensure consistency for organizations. While this a great solution for companies looking to expedite their content editing, external links should be verified to ensure the new content is correct and valid. In this blog, I’ll show you how to build upon my original blog and add a validation step to ensure your external links are valid.

Over the past year, we have brought events to several cities in the US and EU regions. These events consisted of technical and marketing presentations from Kentico staff and brought a lot of great content to our partners. We are excited to announce that, coming this August, we will be hosting three events for our APAC partners, as well!

Macros are a great way to add dynamic values to your content and configurations and are a helpful tool for developers. However, they can sometimes cause problems with a website’s performance and functionality if there is an issue with resolving the values. When this happens, it’s often difficult to find every instance of where a macro is implemented. Luckily, Kentico provides a helpful report to tell you where in the system a macro is used.

From product data to blog posts, populating applications with data is part of many Kentico projects, especially when a website is being redesigned. Kentico provides several options for getting this data into the site, but sometimes companies have to develop a custom solution to achieve their specific needs. In this blog, I’ll show you how can leverage the BulkInsert API to simplify your imports and speed up your application.

Nearly every article features keywords and terms that grab the reader’s attention and emphasize the writer’s point. Whether it’s referencing a popular technology or product, wise authors know that using the correct terms and references within their content can greatly improve its readability and SEO. In this blog, I’ll show you how to leverage Custom Tables and the Kentico API to replace terms dynamically with links, ensuring your content is as engaging as possible.

After all the requirements have been finished, it’s time to get down to business and start developing your site. While you may know the modules and features you’re going to use, there’s still a lot to think about when you start development. Understanding and applying these seven key concepts is essential to developing your Kentico projects and ensuring your site performs well. 

We are excited to announce that we will be bringing the Kentico APAC Partner Day to Sydney and Melbourne this August! As part of the event, we will be presenting three different developer topics, each focusing on an important area of the platform. We are looking to the development community to help us decide the topics to make this event as great as possible.

Macros are one of the most powerful aspects of Kentico, and developers can use them throughout the platform. While macros are very capable, it’s important to remember what is happening behind the scenes when you use them so you know the impact they may have on the system. Because this code is compiled on the fly, it may have significant repercussions on your site’s performance. In this blog, I’ll show you a good example of how and when to use your macros the right way.

For over 30 years, readers have been delighted by the adventures of an animated boy named Calvin and his fictitious tiger friend Hobbes. While their tales are certainly entertaining, you may be asking yourself what they could possibly have to do with web development. Much like the many characters that come alive in Calvin’s mind, the key is imagination.

Developers should always be looking for ways to code smarter and more effectively. Often when developing with Kentico, objects need to be replicated within an environment. Luckily, Kentico provides some great cloning capabilities that developers can leverage to simplify their development and replicate their configurations.

In this Kentico 1 on 1, I talked with Andy Thompson (CTO at Get Started) about his experience with CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) and how his company uses them within their projects. Andy has been developing high performing sites for years and has implemented many solutions with some unique CDN capabilities. 

Do you have a tough Kentico question or challenge? Are you looking to extend the platform and need guidance on the best way to implement? The Ask the Experts webinar is the event for you! This interactive webinar consists of a panel of Kentico experts ready to tackle your toughest challenges. Covering all areas of the product, our experts will take your questions and provide guidance and solutions. 

David te Kloese is the latest Kentico MVP! David has been a very active member of the development community for years and has spoken at many Kentico events and conferences. As a Lead Software Developer at Evident, David has worked on many different Kentico projects and solutions.

Understanding what’s happening within your application is key to running a high-traffic site. Every MB of RAM matters, and understanding your resource utilization as much as possible will ensure your site is running as optimally as possible. Often, background processes and tasks can drain your site’s horsepower and slow down the application. In Kentico, you can easily view what tasks are running and which ones are sleeping by viewing your Running Worker threads.

Integrating with social media is pretty much commonplace in every project. The challenge for developers is that every social network has a different API, seemingly endless changes to functionality and authentication, and varying results you have to parse in order to get the data you want. In this article, I’ll show you how you can quickly (and painlessly) pull an Instagram feed into your site and display all of the selfies you can handle.

Deciding to upgrade a core component of your business is not always an easy choice. There’s downtime to consider, the development effort to apply the upgrade, and the impact a new feature or interface will have on end-users. Other factors to consider are whether or not the upgrade includes important security fixes, performance enhancements, and key features that will streamline your business processes. Without a doubt, deciding when and how to apply an upgrade to your CMS is not a decision taken lightly.

So what are companies to do? In this article, I’ll attempt to walk you through both the benefits and the drawbacks of each side of the dilemma that, sooner or later, faces every CMS customer.

Have you ever wished you could ask your client more questions about their project goals and expectations? What if just one question changed (completely) the way you designed a website? There is no doubt that being on track with your project timeline will make your life easier and your clients happier. How many times have you ended up postponing project deadline because of improper website design?

In this edition of Kentico 1 on 1, I spoke with Juraj Ondrus, Kentico’s Technical Support Leader. A veteran of Kentico (he’s been here for over nine years), Juraj has helped hundreds of developers solve their issues and has certainly seen just about every implementation of Kentico imaginable. In this edition, I asked Juraj about his role within Kentico, common Support requests, and the not-so-common requests that have come through.

Compare for Kentico was built to solve the problem of challenging deployments in CMS projects that fail all too often when multiple environments (Dev, QA, Production) and multiple development teams are in play. Using Compare for Kentico makes deployment easier, quicker, and more reliable than deploying by hand. Compare gives developers the ability to see the differences visually across two Kentico environments at the same time and know whether or not a change should be deployed. 

Every e-commerce site is different, and with so many payment processors available, developers are often tasked with integrating with a new system for each project. While legacy providers like Authorize.NET and PayPal have been used for years, newer providers are being launched all the time, expanding the options for companies. In this blog, I’ll show you how to integrate with Braintree, a simple payment gateway with a powerful API behind it. 

Technical Evangelist is a pretty unique title. Depending on who you ask, it may have several different definitions. For some, it’s all about blogs and forums, spreading information out to the masses. For others, it’s about growing a community and stimulating innovation. In this article, I wanted to give you a glimpse into this role within Kentico and let you know how I spend my time most days.

Proper logging and recording are at the core of every good Kentico project. Unless someone understands what the code is doing and has a record of the events, even the most well-designed and -architected solutions will frustrate users and admins and create a black hole of information within an organization. Luckily, Kentico has a number of supporting modules and utilities to help you document processes and log events quickly. In this blog, I’ll show you how to leverage logging to the Kentico Event Log within your code to get an accurate account of any processes and a record of events that occur within the system.

The ability to enter content quickly and easily should be a key part of every Kentico site. Providing an intuitive and capable content management experience ensures users are able to add and update information with ease, without relying on a developer to implement styling and formatting. Proper setup and configuration will allow marketers to target your company’s audience and provide a streamlined content production experience.

Kentico offers a great editing experience to users through a number of interfaces, utilities, and integrations. One of the key pieces of a great experience is the ability to enter and edit text quickly. Kentico relies on the CKEditor (an open source WYSIWYG editor) to allow users to insert and format their content. In this article, I’ll tell you about some helpful configuration options you can take advantage of to tailor the experience for your organization.

Securing websites should be second nature to developers. Ever since the first sites launched, people have been trying to hack them using any means possible. With the proliferation of mobile technologies, machine learning, and nearly limitless computing power at hackers’ disposal, it’s more important than ever to ensure your sites are safe and not vulnerable. In this blog, I’ll cover how to lock down your site from one of the most widely known and utilized attacks: SQL Injection.

Companies typically develop large, company-wide applications to solve critical business needs. With so many people using the system for different needs, it can become increasingly important to identify a user within the site easily. While Kentico’s default format for displaying a user will work for many companies, it may be necessary to customize this behavior to ensure that site administrators can properly identify who performed what action within the site. In this article, I’ll show you how easy it is to customize this behavior within a Kentico site.

Kentico Workflows are a great way to ensure content is entered and approved before being published to your production site. Built-in notifications can inform approvers that a page is awaiting approval and inform editors when their content has been approved or rejected. While these notifications work well for many projects, developers can customize the content publishing process to fit nearly any business need. In this article, I’ll show you how to extend the notification process to inform other approvers when a document is approved by a member of the group.

Kentico has many macros that come with the system to do all sorts of things. From formatting dates to viewing system properties, macros provide a convenient way to execute a block of code and get the results quickly. If the built-in macros don’t fit your needs, there’s a simple process to create your own functionality. In this blog, I’ll show you how I created a Lorem Ipsum Generator macro for use within my site.

Slack is quickly taking the development business world by storm with more and more companies adopting it as their “go-to” form of communication and notification. One of the things that make it such a powerful platform is the ability to extend it in seemingly limitless ways. Because Kentico is largely driven by user actions, I thought it would be cool to try to integrate this notification functionality into the platform. In this article, I’ll show you how to post notifications to a Slack channel based on Workflow actions in Kentico.

The Ask the Experts Webinar Series is coming back! As one of our most popular events on DevNet, this webinar series provides you with a panel of Kentico gurus ready to take on your tough questions. This article brings you all of the details you’ll need to join this webinar and get your Kentico questions answered.

Nearly every enterprise project requires integration with multiple systems. Often, data needs to be mapped from one system to another, requiring in-depth knowledge of business processes and relationships. In this Kentico 1 on 1, I talked with Kentico MVP Jeroen Fürst about Connect & Conquer, Kentico Gold Partner TrueLime’s answer to this challenge, and how it can simplify the integration process.

Proper content migration is essential for every organization. With multiple environments, dispersed content editors, and varying delivery schedules, finding a solution that works for your organization is key to making sure all of your digital assets are handled correctly. With Kentico’s Staging module, businesses can define their production process and implement a rock-solid delivery method for publishing their digital content.

Creating notifications in Kentico is a great way to automate communications and keep users informed. Site visitors will want these notifications in a number of ways, including email, SMS, and other alerts. In this article, I’ll show you how to create a notification gateway to alert users using SMS with Twilio.

Using the Email Marketing feature of Kentico is a great way to leverage a lot of built-in functionality in a simple, and easy to use interface. Emails can be created easily and sent out in a number of ways. In this article, I will cover what happens when a scheduled email campaign is sent manually.

The Kentico Certification is a great way to showcase your skills and demonstrate your abilities with the platform. Many developers have passed the Developer Certification exam and benefited from this designation. For those of you who have yet been certified, we’d like to know what we can do to help you achieve your goals.

Kentico’s technical community is a vibrant and diverse mix of developers, designers, and site administrators. Among those members are several individuals who go to great lengths to help others and promote Kentico and its features. For their efforts, Kentico awards these dedicated members the title of Kentico Most Valuable Professional (MVP).  In this article, I will introduce you to the 2016 Kentico MVPs.

NOTE

This blog is the second part of a two-part series. Be sure to check DevNet for the first part here.

By now you’ve probably heard about some of the great advancements and features in Kentico 9. Improved MVC support was one of the most anticipated updates as more and more developers transition to the (not so young) web development pattern. To support this development model, Kentico has reworked some of its core APIs to better allow the creation and utilization of data outside of the core Kentico installation. In addition, a demo MVC project has been offered, demonstrating best practices and use cases when implementing Kentico with ASP.NET MVC.

I decided to give MVC a shot using this demo project and upgrade some existing web parts I had created to the new development pattern. In this blog, I’ll show you how I took the Azure Search Integration Web Part, migrated it to MVC, and then into my demo site.

NOTE

This blog is the first of a two-part series. Be sure to check DevNet here for Part 2.

Did you know that your website may be very slow and, therefore, creating a bad experience for your visitors? Have you ever tried to measure how long it takes for your website to load? Have you ever tried viewing it on a device with a mobile connection? What if there was a way to minimize this time and have more satisfied website visitors?

As 2015 comes to a close, I wanted to look back on all of the activities in the Kentico community. Over the past year, I’ve had the chance to talk with some truly awesome people, discuss their projects and challenges, and hopefully help them find answers to their tough questions.  In this article, I’ll be recapping on some of the highlights of the year and some of my favorite moments in the development community.

Over the last 6+ years, I have deployed Kentico to Azure a lot. A whole lot. Amazingly, I had never tried out deploying to Amazon AWS. In an effort to broaden my horizons and bring info to others, I decided to deploy Kentico to Amazon’s cloud platform. In this blog, I’ll cover my experiences and results.

Five weeks. Three conferences. 18 flights. A couple of train rides. Too many amazing conversations to count. As another Kentico Connection series comes to an end, I wanted to take a break from coding and recap on the events and all of the great partners I got to meet. In this blog, I’ll let you know my personal highlights, as well as what our partners and their developers got out of the conferences. 

Kentico 9 has a lot of well-known, exciting changes like CI, MVC Support, and a number of others. It also contains a several updates that will affect your Azure deployments. In this article, I’d like to give you a cheat sheet of some of the important ones you need to know about when deploying Kentico 9 to Azure Cloud Services or Web Apps.

One of the questions I have been asked time and again is which Visual Studio project type should a Kentico site be? A website or a web application? Both of these options have their strengths and weaknesses, as well as different development patterns for your custom code. In this article, I will cover the differences between these project types and hopefully steer you on a path toward deciding which one is best for your applications.

With the release of Kentico 9 only a few days away, there’s no shortage of excitement in the community about the new features coming to the platform. The latest version will include some exciting functionality for developers and designers that will make creating your sites and applications even easier. In this blog, I’ll cover the top five things you should be excited about in Kentico 9.

Kentico 9 is going to bring some exciting functionality to developers. Whether you are a back-end module developer or a front-end designer, Version 9 will have something in store for everyone. So, what features are you looking forward to the most?

Every project has specific requirements that make it a unique development experience. From integrations to configurations, each customization requires developers to know how to achieve the desired functionality in the most efficient way. In some scenarios, system events need to log and track in an external system for external administration. In this blog, I’ll show you how to log all of your Kentico exceptions to Visual Studio Online for easy tracking and assignment.

In this edition of Kentico 1-on-1, I spoke with High Monkey CEO and Founder Virgil Carroll on integrating SharePoint Search with Kentico. Virgil and his team have done some really interesting work in the search space with Kentico and have a lot of great insight for companies.

Azure Cloud Services continues to be a great option for times when companies want to add an additional level of control over their applications when deploying to the cloud. With this model, developers package their applications and server configurations and then push them to Azure storage. From there, Microsoft creates a new server based on the configuration, then deploys the application. This process automates many of the administrative tasks and allows the developer to solely focus on their own sites.

When deploying Kentico to this platform (or nearly any other cloud platform), there is an initial hit to performance as the site is compiled. This can result in a delayed initial response to the first request to the site. Luckily, Azure Cloud Services offers some functionality to reduce this hit. In this blog, I’ll show you how to warm up your sites when deploying Kentico to Microsoft’s PaaS platform.

The Kentico API Examples have grown to be an essential tool for developers. These code samples demonstrate basic and advanced tasks that can be accomplished with the API, and provide helpful examples of how to integrate with Kentico. In previous versions, these samples have been an optional module to install during the setup of a site. With Version 9, we are planning some changes to help you access these samples and make them easier to maintain.

The Kentico Installation Manager (KIM) is a great utility for installing and managing your applications. Using the tool, you can quickly see the current version of a site, check for updates, download hotfixes, and apply them to your installations. One thing to note is the tool will download hotfixes you apply and keep them in storage for later use. In this article, I will show you how to clean up these hotfixes if you no longer need them.

After hundreds of questions and even more answers, the results are in from our DevNet Community Contest! We have tallied the scores and have a winner! 

In this Kentico 1-on-1, I sat down with Kentico Consulting Manager, Miro Remias, to discuss what his department does and how customers can leverage this great service for their projects. With several years of Support and Consulting experience, Miro has a ton of knowledge on projects and provided a great overview of the program and how they assist developers. 

Data is at the core of every site and deciding on its structure often is the driving factor when architecting a solution. Choosing a model that is open to integration, allows for flexibility, and, above all, is easy to manage is critical for a successful application. Kentico allows data to be structured in a number of ways to fit nearly every project requirement. In this article, I will discuss the different ways data can be stored and managed within an application and provide guidance as to when to use each option.

Are you experiencing issues when deploying your application to Azure? Are you unsure of which options are best for your deployments? Learn how to resolve common mistakes, best practices when deploying, and essentials skills to ensure your sites are running smoothly when deploying to Microsoft’s cloud platform.

Displaying content correctly is at the core of every good design. For many sites, this includes displaying different types of content together, along with specific layouts for each type. The Kentico Hierarchal Viewer is a great resource for developers that allows control over each content level. In this blog, I will show you how to simplify things using this control and these transformation layouts. 

In this edition of Kentico 1-on-1, I sat with Kentico’s Content Management Product Owner, David Komarek. A veteran in the company with experience in nearly every aspect, David has some great insights into our MVC support, upcoming version 9 features, and what the future looks like for developers. David shared his thoughts on what developers can look forward to the most and how they can help shape the product moving forward. 

The 2015 Developer Roadshow has continued to be great event series with some awesome meetups around the US. While we have reached a lot of developers in several cities, we’re not done yet! In this blog I’ll give you the details about our next event coming to the UK community!

That’s right! You can win a pass to the Kentico Connection of your choice just by helping out your fellow developers. And you just may learn some great Kentico tips in the process. Read on for the details!

As an enterprise-class platform, Kentico must be able to handle implementations worldwide. Part of this support comes from Kentico’s ability to configure and manage time zones from within the platform, ensuring that all dates are correctly displayed. In this blog I will cover Kentico’s time zone support, available options for configuration, and some best practices when developing an application using this feature.

Azure Storage tables are a great place to store non-relational data in an easy-to-access location with global availability. While writing to a table is very simple using the Azure Storage SDK, viewing the data may be a challenge for some developers. In this article, I will show you how to view and update this data quickly using some great tools provided by Microsoft.

Upgrading Kentico and feeling lost? Are you unsure about upgrading Kentico because of your customizations? Is there a possibility to customize Kentico while having a simple upgrade? Get answers to these questions and assure yourself that there is an easier way to upgrade to the newest version.

In the first blog in this series, I covered the web hosting options available when deploying your Kentico applications to Azure. While that article focused on the website side of things, this blog will cover deploying your Kentico database to Azure and how to leverage as much of the platform as possible.

As most developers are aware, Kentico 8.2 provides some API examples to demonstrate how to perform various tasks programmatically within the system. These examples are divided into categories and sub-categories and provide commented code for the action. In this article, I will show you how to execute these examples within your site, and how to see the results quickly.

Integrating Kentico with other systems is at the core of nearly every enterprise project. Often, data needs to be synced between Kentico and another source, requiring developers to create custom solutions to keep the information up to date. The Kentico Integration Bus provides a fault-tolerant option for this integration by allowing tasks to be queued and processed, ensuring all changes are synced correctly. This functionality supports both inbound and outbound changes, allowing companies to keep two different systems synchronized, regardless of where the change originates.

After having some great events in Toronto and Boston, the 2015 Kentico Developer Roadshow will keep on rolling to Chicago and Denver in August! In this article, I will be detailing the dates and times for the next two events. Hope to see you there!

Microsoft continues to expand its cloud platform with new functionality to meet the growing needs of business. Azure Search is one of the latest offerings that can provide a robust and scalable search option for applications. I wanted to see how well this search feature integrated with Kentico, so I decided to develop a prototype using this new service. In this blog, I’ll show you how to combine these two great products to provide a powerful search platform to your application.

Deploying Kentico to Microsoft Azure can have a significant impact on the capabilities and reach of your application. Azure, Microsoft’s cloud solution, is a vast, world-wide network of systems providing instant resources around the globe. Since its initial release, Azure has constantly been improved and updated to provide more options and functionality for businesses to leverage. In this article, I will cover the different hosting options for your Kentico site and providing guidance on when to use them. In a follow-up blog I will cover data, session, and storage options, so keep an eye out of that in a few weeks. Now let’s get to good stuff!

The Kentico Form Builder is a simple, intuitive interface for editors to create and design their custom forms on a site. Often, developers will create custom form controls to accomplish a specific task. In this article, I will show you how to add these custom controls to the Form Builder UI.

Many companies utilize SaaS applications for managing parts of their business. Calendar and scheduling products like TeamUp are great for administrating your corporate events and keeping everyone and everything on schedule.  Here at Kentico, we use TeamUp for a number of internal processes, including managing our blog release schedule. In this blog, I will show you how you can create a form control to integrate with TeamUp to sync your events to a specific calendar.

In my first few months as Kentico’s Technical Evangelist, I’ve had the chance to speak to a lot of developers and produce several blogs to help the community. Working with other coders is one of the best parts of my job, and I really enjoy presenting to a group of developers interested in Kentico. What I have noticed is a lack of events focused on the platform within the community in several large cities. For this reason, I am delighted to introduce the Kentico Developer Roadshow! Think of it as a mini-Kentico Connection, with less karaoke. Well, probably less.

In this edition of Kentico 1-on-1, I had a chance to talk with the Kentico CEO, Petr Palas. A former developer turned owner; Petr has a very interesting history with the CMS industry and how Kentico came to be. In our talk, Petr shared with me his thoughts on the CMS community, how Kentico fits, and some of his favorite parts of the product.

Kentico has a very powerful search built on Lucene.Net, one of the most scalable and configurable search platforms available. Developers can easily configure any page type field to be searchable, as well as customize the syntax and parameters that users can filter on. Often pages have an associated SKU and users also need to search the product fields. In this blog I will show you how to add the SKU Number field to the index so that users can also search for these values.

Among all of the announcements at Build2105, one of the most exciting has been the unveiling of Microsoft’s Edge browser (AKA Project Spartan). A lean, minimalistic approach to web browsing, this browser is aimed at speeding up your experience and delivering content in new and exciting formats.  I was curious how a Kentico 8.2 site would look in Edge and wanted to let you know what I found.

Brenden Kehren is your newest Kentico MVP! Brenden is a long-time member of the Kentico development community as one of the most active members of DevNet. In 2014 he was recognized for efforts with the 2014 DevNet Hero award. Brenden also owns Kehren Development, a Kentico consulting company in Sparta, WI and works with several companies to implement Kentico.

In this edition of Kentico 1 on 1 I had a chance to talk Kentico EMS with MVP Brian McKeiver. Brian has a ton of experience with implementing EMS and I wanted to ask him a few questions about his experiences, what he likes about the product, and how people can get started with it. He gave some great examples and a lot of useful infomration for anyone getting started with this feature.

The Kentico REST service is a great feature of the platform and allows developers to integrate with other systems using a standard Web API interface. Providing the ability to read and write data, the service is a convenient resource for retrieving and manipulating content and data within a Kentico site using only code.  Recently I was asked how to create users with the service. In this blog, I will show you how to configure your service, create the accounts, and assign them to roles.

Now that you have your application in Azure and everything is awesome (think the Lego Movie), let’s talk about keeping it running well and performing optimally. Any hosting solution can be used for your site, but Azure Web Apps have a lot to offer in terms of monitoring, updating, and maintenance of your site. This blog is focused on those features and on demonstrating how you can leverage them for your deployment.

In a recent webinar that I delivered, I was asked how to make a shipping option only available to a particular product / set of products. I thought that was a great question and one that many developers may have. A particular carrier may not allow transporting of a particular type of product so in this blog I will show you how to filter out options based on the product(s) selected.

I recently presented a Partner Webinar on Adding real-time shipping rates to Kentico. As a former developer in the industry I often had to add this functionality to the ecommerce projects I worked on. As such, I thought it would make a great topic for other partners and demonstrate a few different ways to add dynamic rates to your online stores.

So it’s been a while since I covered Azure Web Apps (formerly Azure Websites) and it’s definitely time for a fresh dose of info on what is possibly the best hosting option for your Kentico sites. This blog kicks off a new series I will be writing to detail how AWA (I just determined that is a good acronym for it) makes sense for your hosting needs. In this blog, I will cover the basics and how to get your site in Azure fast. Now let’s get to it!

Code PaLOUAsa 2015 will be taking place 4/27- 4/30 in Louisville, KY. A multi-day conference focusing on software development, CP2015 is going to be a great event with over 600 attendees and a ton of great info.  Whether it’s ASP.NET, Cloud, Angular, or Agile, there are some great sessions lined up that you don’t want to miss!

Making UI elements is one of the most common tasks when making a new module. When you are creating your links you want to have them appear similar to the rest of platform and use those cool little icons, right? Did you know there is a page within the Kentico documentation that shows all of these icons? 

This blog kicks off a new series I will be doing once a month where I interview a Kentico expert on a specific feature of the platform. The idea is to bring some real depth to the conversation and understand the functionality from a developer perspective. 

Nearly every project with Kentico requires some sort of custom development to create an integrated solution that solves a business problem. One of the most common integration points is leveraging 3^rd party SMTP systems for offloading email processing, such as SendGrid or Mail Chimp. These systems often offer functionality for monitoring and tracking messages and logging bounces and other errors.  This article details the process of creating a Custom Email Provider that utilizes the SendGrid API for all email communication within a Kentico site.

It’s been quite a while since the last Kentico Developer Newsletter, hasn’t it? Wait no more my friends as starting in April your digital Kentico digest will be heading your way again. As a Kentico developer I always enjoyed the great links and information they brought so I want to keep the knowledge flowing and will be sending these out once a month, usually within the first week.