Matthew Sandstrom Support Engineer at Kentico Software

This article series covers the planning and implementation of the Stripe payment gateway implementation. The first article covered setting up the Admin interface and the class library used for the live site. The second article covered the Web API endpoint used to accept webhook messages form Stripe.

The last article will focus on the process of getting funds from orders that use delayed capture, implementing a helper class and an event handler to serve this purpose.

This article series covers the planning and implementation of the Stripe payment gateway implementation.

The previous article covered the process of creating necessary settings categories and keys, adding resource strings to the Xperience admin app, and adding Stripe Checkout to the live site.

The admin library of this integration has two main tasks to accomplish. First, it needs to accept webhook requests from Stripe and update Xperience orders appropriately. Second, it needs to capture funds for payments using delayed capture.

This article will focus on the first part, which is one of the most vital to the integration. With the live site code alone, orders can be paid for through stripe, but there is no way to automatically propagate that information back to Kentico. Store staff would have to manually keep track of orders and update them according to data in Stripe. We’ll create an endpoint so that Stripe webhooks can automatically keep our Xperience orders up to date.

The previous article in this series covered the tools available for creating integrations, and the process of choosing which tools to use for the Stripe payment gateway integration. 

The rest of the series will cover the implementation of this integration, so you can code along and learn from the process. This first article will cover the setup in the admin interface and the class library used for the live site. 

If you want to use the integration without any coding, you can find it here. 

With the release of version 12 in 2018, Kentico made the switch from Web Forms-based Portal Engine to MVC as its primary development model. This opened the door for more flexible customization— having a separate front-end site allows developers to execute custom code from almost anywhere in that site’s lifecycle. However, sometimes more complex integrations need to tie in to the admin application as well, or don’t really make sense in the context of the live site, so it’s worth looking into the available tools for such scenarios.

In this article, the first of a two-part series, I’ll summarize the various integration options for the admin application in Kentico Xperience 13, and use the Stripe payment gateway integration as an example for how the right tools can be selected. The next article in the series will cover the specifics of integrating payment gateways, using Stripe as an example.

If you’re running an E-Commerce store in Kentico, there’s a good chance you’ve used discount functionality. Seeing data about the various discounts you’ve applied can be difficult as this information is stored as XML markup in the database table for orders. In its raw form, data about discounts is stored on an order-by-order basis, and not in a very visually pleasant form. This article will go over the process of creating a report to display aggregated data about discounts.

When using Kentico, you may need to migrate your database, your website, or both to a different environment. If you’re feeling lost on where to start with this kind of project, this article should help.

During your time working with Kentico, you may have stumbled upon a field whose name includes “CustomData.” These fields can be found in many of the E-commerce related objects, such as ShoppingCarts, Orders, and CalculationRequests. In some cases, such fields can come in handy, storing additional E-commerce information that the objects don’t already contain. Their utility is furthered by the fact that in many cases, CustomData fields are automatically transferred to related objects.

Shipping is an important part of any e-commerce site that sells physical items. Using shipping carriers and shipping options, you can integrate companies’ shipping options with your store. Some companies may return additional information about product shipments that you might want to display to customers, such as delivery date, package attributes, or the address the package will be shipped from. If there is a piece of information about the shipment that doesn't have a corresponding field in Kentico, you can still pass that data to the customer using the CustomData fields in many of the classes.

This article addresses how to solve constraint errors relating to the CMS.UrlShortening.Googl settings category and its keys that occur during the SQL portion of the Kentico 12 upgrade.

Upgrading Kentico can be an intensive process when the planned upgrade path spans several versions and the project contains a lot of custom code. At each step of the upgrade it is necessary to run the application, and if you have a lot of custom code full of outdated APIs, getting it to start can be a long, troublesome undertaking. In this article, I’m going to outline a workaround that makes it so you only have to update the custom code once, rather than once per Kentico version.

Kentico 11 brings with it a host of changes, including many related to E-commerce. The release notes for the whole CMS are quite extensive, however, so it’s easy for the information you need to get lost in the noise. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to, and, in some cases, expand upon the breaking changes in Kentico 11’s E-commerce solution. This information is important for those upgrading sites which utilize E-commerce features to Kentico 11.

Here, I will try to demystify the Kentico Upgrade and shed some light on its components. Understanding the structure of the upgrade can be extremely helpful when troubleshooting problems, since it can help determine where something went wrong.  It can also give you some general peace of mind when starting this important process.