Kentico brings together the three building blocks for any outstanding website: CMS, online marketing and e-commerce. Running over 25,000 websites spread across a hundred nations, they recently announced launch of Kentico 9 where the digital strategy is enhanced to sync with necessities of the client. The motive that has fueled the Kentico development is to bring under one platform all the tools needed to create seamless user experience. Kentico 9 is a huge move towards this aim armed with five new features:
- Continuous integration
- Modularization
- Web farm support
- Integrated campaign management
- ASP .NET MVC support
Continuous Integration
Kentico 9 comes with the capacity to develop your website up to 30% faster. This is made possible by integrating the mechanisms of website development (creation, updating and deleting of objects) coupled with the automatic Source Control synchrony. You can move swiftly from development through QA, onto Staging and eventually to the production. The tasks of development groups and developers are brought together in singular work-flow where the data and code is stored in a file system. These can be committed to the Source Control and imported to a different Kentico installation placed in a second environment.
With continuous integration, you can shift the changes made during the course of development from one environment to another. Apart from support for all operations, rollback versions are enabled such that you can move back to a previous version in case of errors. Other features of continuous integration include object filtering (choosing particular objects as components of the process), support for GIT, TFS, VS and any CI server, steady and readable XML files (allowing for merging of changes faster) and amplified collaboration with development team (through storage of data and code on Source Control accessible to team members at any moment).
Modularization
Kentico 9 creates space for reusing packages across many projects, once they are created and instantly stored earlier. This decreases the development expenses. This feature can be employed for deploying new ERP connector, calculation of shipping costs and other extensions. The common objects in projects: web parts, page types and form controls are packaged automatically. After you install the NuGet package and reconstruct your solution, the other stages of development are instantly managed. This is the standard method for ASP.NET platforms. The NuGet process can also be used to update pre-installed modules by changing its name, updating the code or rewriting it. Modules can also be uninstalled immediately through Visual Studio. Most importantly, an edited page type can be included in a module such that at moments of package export, the module data and concerned page types are contained within it.
Web Farm Support
As the traffic to your website spikes, Kentico 9 executes Web Farm synchronization feature to sustain multiple instances of the website in harmony with the environment. This ensures that the user experience is uniform. There is no need for extra configuration because Kentico 9 duplicates the memory (cache) and physical media files on all the web servers present in the environment. In case you see the need to manually manage the development, you can choose the Manual mode over the Automatic mode. Simple rules are also used to configure the environment for syncing with the increasing number of instances. Based on cloud and run through series of simple rules, Kentico 9 uses factors like concurrent users, memory use and page views to scale the website smoothly. The other features of Web Farm support include manual and automatic setup, regular content delivery (provision of same content to all users regardless of the server), health tracking (graphically analyze instances present within the environment and grasp their health condition) and self-healing (in case the environment is offline, problems can be detected by built-in Web Farm support and notifications can be sent to the administrator) capacities.
Integrated Campaign management
Online digital marketing campaigns can be executed across many channels quickly. You can view progress on each of the channels without the need for third-party modules. The campaign structure allows you to add-in promotional steps (like mails) and to assign content assets (like landing of pages). Also, you can also keep a track of the page visits. The success of Email marketing campaigns can be measured through delivery, contact loss, engagement and others. Campaigns can also be labeled as Draft, Launched or Finished. Custom campaign also allows you to examine the stages which are significant to the business.
ASP .NET MVC Support
Using of ASP .NET MVC (model-view-controller) removes the need to face page settings during content creation frequently. Once you generate content within the Kentico Administration Interface, it can be stored in the Kentico database through Kentico API. The main aim of ASP .NET MVC support is to provide a clean architectural layout. The process of delivering websites while following a semantic strategy to content creation fastens development of the website. The security of your website is also strengthened by separation of the administration and live site in MVC. The live site can be deployed while maintaining the administration supporting firewall of the server.
Share your Kentico 9 experiences with us. To know more about Suyati’s Kentico expertise and other CMS capabilities, please write to services@suyati.com.