Kentico is an all-in-one CMS, E-commerce, and Online Marketing platform developed with ASP.NET and MS SQL. From developers to content editors, it’s easy to use and allows users to make edits and update the system quickly, enabling companies to operate both more efficiently and effectively. The beauty of Kentico is that it’s loaded with features such as WYSIWYG editor, workflow, permissions, multilingual support, full-text search, online forms, newsletters, e-commerce, blogs, polls, web analytics and other modules.There are three basic development models provided by Kentico.
- Portal Engine: Provides you with a browser-based interface using web parts components to create websites. Coding with the Visual studio is only required while creating custom components.
- ASPX templates: The developers can find varied templates to suit the website needs and this can be further customized using standard ASP.NET architecture and standard development tools, such as Visual Studio. This model requires you to be familiar with ASP.NET web form development and have at least basic programming knowledge of C# or VB.NET.
- MVC: Kentico allows you to create websites using the Model-View-Controller architectural pattern (based on the ASP.NET MVC framework). Note that, not all features are supported for MVC development; see Supported and unsupported Kentico features on MVC sites for more details.
Why Kentico?
1. Ease of Use
Kentico CMS is out of the box one of the easiest CMS systems to use. Anyone who has ever used the Internet has all the skills required to add and update pages, add dynamic content, and create stunning, feature-rich websites. Kentico administration system comes with plenty of tips and descriptions to guide users through nearly every process. Additionally, Kentico provides step-by-step guides and tutorials directly on their site along with videos, blogs, and forums.
2. UI Personalization
The Kentico Administration site provides the feature of UI personalization. The UI personalization application enables you to provide certain users of the website with a simplified user interface. This is useful for business users who don’t need to see all the applications, tabs, menu items, or parts of UI pages that they do not use. Setting up a personalized UI can significantly decrease the learning time for users, new to the system and makes the system generally easier to use and understand.
Note:
- UI personalization does not apply to users who have the Administrator Global administrator privilege level. Administrators always have access to all UI elements, regardless of the system’s UI personalization settings.
- Do not confuse UI personalization with the permission system in Kentico. Permissions control what users can do, such as create or modify objects, while UI personalization controls what users can see. A user may be able to see a part of the UI but still not have permissions to perform any actions.
3. Content Staging / Continuous Integration
One of the challenges of updating content on a site is the repeated effort to migrate changes from one platform to the next. Often companies will have different environments for their staging (QA) content and their production (live) content. With Kentico, publishing data from one environment to the next is accomplished easily through the use of “content staging”. With a few clicks, a user can migrate content between the systems and quickly synchronize all environments. With the use of the “Scheduled Tasks” feature, this process can even be accomplished on a daily or hourly basis to increase productivity even further. This minimizes administrative time and easily allows a company to define a concise process for updates and deployments.
4. Workflows
Workflows in Kentico allow content to be moved through a set of predefined steps. These steps are easily created and configured in the Kentico system and can be quickly applied to any or all content. An editor can make changes to a page, and then submit it for approval. The approving manager gets notified automatically by the Kentico system of the change. The managers can then view the edits, submit them back to the editor for correction, publish the changes, or even edit the edited content. Workflows can also be configured to have several steps that must be completed before the content is published to the site.
5. Smart Search
Smart Search in Kentico is a Lucene-based search functionality that quickly analyzes and locates content. Through the use of this module, defined content is indexed and stored in the system to allow searches to be completed much quicker than traditional database-based methods. Search results can be customized to only return relevant content and images. The Kentico system constantly updates the search results as new website content changes to keep the results accurate.
6. Feature-rich CMS
Off the shelf, the Kentico CMS system allows for eCommerce, blogging, forums, messaging, and a number of other critical functions. With the Ultimate license, companies have full access to every feature and can quickly add new functionality to their sites. Many other CMS systems require a series of add-ons to obtain the functionality readily available in Kentico. Even if a company decides to add modules, later on, all that is required is a simple update of the license and the features for the module are unlocked. Having such a wide range of features allows a company to focus on their business, not piecing together functionality.
7. Smooth Updates
Kentico provides step-by-step guides for every product update. Their installation packages are professionally written and provide a solid, concise process for applying the updated content. Any special requirements are clearly defined and easy to follow. Updates come complete with documentation and files targeted at a number of environments (.NET 2.0,3.5,etc.) so that all clients can benefit from their improvements.
8. Customer Recognition
Kentico is constantly gaining market share and quickly becoming a premier CMS software company. Kentico constantly communicates upcoming changes with their clients and values their input. Kentico listens to its partners and strives to deliver a product that meets their needs. For the training program, Kentico reached out to several of their “Gold” level partners to create the training material and guidelines. This type of customer involvement demonstrates Kentico’s commitment to their clients and their success.
9. Constantly Evolving
As each day passes, new technologies and functionality are being created. The folks at Kentico embrace these changes and are constantly incorporating them into their product. They test their code using the latest development environments and servers (Visual Studio 2010/Windows Server 2008) to ensure compliance. Kentico integrates a number of third-party components (CKEditor, Lucene, AJAX, etc.) and utilizes the latest source code that is available. All of these efforts allow Kentico to deliver the latest technologies and functionality that drive dynamic, interactive websites.
10. New Documentation
With the release of each new version of Kentico, it keeps on adding a lot of developer-centric functionality. With this, there comes a lot of questions from the community on how to utilize them and best practices. With the release of each new version of Kentico, they also keep updating their documentation to provide the information to get developers heading in the right direction. It really helps the developers to understand the new features and help them implement within the applications.
References
- https://docs.kentico.com/k9tutorial/site-development-overview
- https://docs.kentico.com/k9/managing-users/ui-personalization
- https://devnet.kentico.com/articles/five-things-developers-should-be-excited-about-in-kentico-9
- https://bitwizards.com/Thought-Leadership/Blog/2010/May-2010/Top-10-reasons-to-use-Kentico-CMS