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Introduction

Did you know that your job can be much easier? Now you can create fully editable web sites without extensive coding. Kentico CMS (http://www.kentico.com/) gives you all you need for a price that will suit every budget.

Quick Overview

Kentico CMS is a full-featured content management system for dynamic web sites. It’s completely web-based and provides you with many useful features:

Fully customizable ASP.NET page templates
Tree hierarchy of pages, documents and files
Editable regions and structured document templates with custom fields
Workflow and approval
Versioning and archiving
Content scheduling and expiration
Document-level permissions
Multilingual support
Full-text search
27 built-in smart controls, such as menu, grid, master-detail view, etc.
... and much more.

Kentico CMS is:

Open - It’s fully documented and delivered with the administration interface’s source code open for re-branding and customization.
Flexible - Whatever you can do in ASP.NET, can be done with Kentico CMS. You have full control over your web site structure, design, page layout and HTML code.
Extendible – You can easily define your own page templates, document types with custom fields and create custom modules.

Architecture and System Requirements

Kentico CMS is a three-tiered application. It uses the standard architecture of ASP.NET 1.1 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 which means you can easily deploy it using FTP on a shared hosting server without any changes in server configuration.

Your new web site is a standard Visual Studio.NET project written in Visual Basic .NET or C# (you can use other development tools as well). Page templates are standard ASPX files that receive a URL parameter and display specified content. If it’s necessary, you can add your .NET code to page templates as you do it now.

Figure 1 – Kentico CMS uses a three-tiered architecture with standard ASP.NET web projects.

If you’re familiar with ASP.NET, HTML and CSS, you will be able to learn Kentico CMS very quickly.

The supported client browsers for the administration interface are Internet Explorer 6.0, Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.7 and FireFox 1.0. The browser compatibility of your site depends on your code and on the controls you use. All Kentico CMS controls render valid XHTML code and their design can be customized using CSS styles.

Administration Interface

You can edit your web site using Kentico CMS Desk, which is the administration interface. Once you’ve signed in, you’ll be offered six core modules:

My Desk module, with an overview of your documents and workflow status.
Content module, for management of documents and files.
Tools module, with built-in and custom modules.
Administration module, which allows you to manage users, roles and global permissions.
Development module, which contains all system settings, such as document types, page templates, transformations, queries, etc.

The Content module allows you to browse and modify the tree structure of pages and documents. It provides you with all the tools you need – site view, editing, versioning, workflow and document permissions.

Figure 2 – The Content module organizes all documents in the structure that reflects the site map.

Content Editing

Kentico CMS offers two ways of storing and editing content: Editable Regions and Document Templates.

Editable regions allow you to easily convert a static page into dynamic. You only add a few special tags that specify which parts of the page should editable. This way is useful for unstructured content, such as Home page, About Us page, etc.

Figure 3 – Editable regions allow you to easily modify unstructured page content, such as Contact Us page.

Document templates allow you to define new document types with custom fields, such as “PC”, “notebook”, “car”, “mobile phone”, etc. This way is recommended for structured content and it allows you to completely separate content from design. You will typically use it for product catalogs and various listings.

Figure 4 – Every document template has its own editing form with custom fields.

Document Templates and Custom Fields

How many hours do you usually spend developing editing forms for articles, news or product details? With Kentico CMS, you can use a powerful wizard to define your own document types in a few moments. The wizard automatically generates:

Database table
Queries
Editing form with custom fields of different types and validation

For example, if you’re creating a real-estate site, you can use the wizard to define a document template named “House” with the fields: Price, Location, Description, Available from, Photo, Bedrooms, etc.

Figure 5 – The Document Template Designer automatically creates an underlying database table for your content, generates queries and an editing form.

The Document Template Designer automatically creates an underlying database table for your content, generates queries and an editing form.

For every custom field, you can choose from 6 SQL data types:

Text
Longtext
Integer
Decimal
Bit
Date/time

You can also choose the type of every field:

Textbox
Textarea
WYSIWYG Editor (FCKEditor, FreeTextBox or any third-party editor)
Drop-down list
Checkbox
Calendar
Your own user control (ASCX)

Can you imagine how much time that saves? No coding, no manually written SQL, no testing – the editing form is immediately ready-to-use and your users can start entering structured content straight away!

Since Kentico CMS stores custom document types in standard database tables, you can easily:

Separate content and style.
Create custom reports from entered data.
Search and sort data by the value of a chosen field.
Integrate a Kentico CMS database with your existing systems.

Page Templates

Now that you know how to edit content in Kentico CMS, you might want to know how you can publish it on your web site.

When you define a new page in the site structure, you need to specify a page template. The page template is a common ASPX page that receives a Request.Querystring("aliaspath") parameter. This parameter determines which document should be displayed – it’s the path of the document in the tree structure. The page templates must be prepared by developer and registered in Kentico CMS Page Template Catalog.

When a user requests a page, Kentico CMS reads the current URL in the format www.myweb.com/products/product1.aspx and displays content using a predefined page template. It actually rewrites the request to www.myweb.com/products.aspx?aliaspath=/products/product1. The products.aspx page is your page template.

Figure 6 – Kentico CMS parses the current URL, looks up an appropriate page template and calls it.

You can easily create a new page template in Visual Studio.NET or some other development tool. You simply create a new web form, place controls on it, set their parameters and, if necessary, add some VB.NET or C# code.

Figure 7 – You can easily create page templates in Visual Studio.NET 2003 as standard ASP.NET pages in VB.NET or C#.

Here's an example of a simple ASP.NET page with one editable region:

<%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" Codebehind="Contact.aspx.vb" 
         Inherits="CorporateSite.Contact"%>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="uc1" TagName="Header" Src="Header.ascx" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="cc1" Namespace="Kentico.CMS.CMSControls" 
    Assembly="Kentico.CMS.CMSControls" %>
<html>
<head>
  <!-- insert title, description and keywords here -->
  <%=CorporateSite.Functions.GetPageTags("/contact")%>
</head>
<body>
<form id="Form1" method="post" runat="server">
  <!-- page manager control loads and saves content -->
  <cc1:CMSPageManager id="CMSPageManager1" runat="server">
  </cc1:CMSPageManager>
  <!-- insert header control with menu -->
  <uc1:Header id="Header1" runat="server"></uc1:Header><BR>
  <!-- editable region makes the part of the page editable -->
  <cc1:CMSEditableRegion id="CMSEditableRegion1" runat="server" 
       RegionTitle="Main Text" RegionType="HtmlEditor"
       DialogHeight="400" DialogWidth="700"></cc1:CMSEditableRegion>
</form>
</body>
</html>

Kentico CMS Controls and Kentico CMS API

Have you ever written code for a DHTML dropdown menu or created your own site map? You don’t need to do that any more! Kentico CMS is delivered with 27 controls that you can simply drag and drop on your page template in Visual Studio.NET. The controls include:

drop-down DHTML menu, tab control, tree menu, list menu
document viewer with XSLT and ASCX support
grid, repeater, datalist, master-detail view
bread crumbs
site map
search dialog
event calendar
product comparison
and others.

See the Control Gallery on-line.

The controls read the data from the database using automatically generated queries or using your custom SQL queries. You don’t have to write any ADO.NET and data-binding code, which greatly reduces your development time.

Since Kentico CMS is a standard ASP.NET application, you can also use any third-party controls. You can use Kentico CMS API to retrieve content as a DataSet or XML and bind it to any control.

Kentico CMS Controls and API are fully documented and delivered with many examples so that you can easily learn how to use them.

Security

Have you ever dreamt about document-level permissions for your web content? Your dreams have come true! The philosophy of document permissions in Kentico CMS is very similar to Windows NTFS file system, but everything is stored in the database. You can even specify permissions for particular sections by inheriting permissions from the parent document which makes security administration much easier.

Figure 8 – The philosophy of document permissions is very similar to the Windows NTFS file system, including permissions inheritance.

Besides, you can specify global permissions that override local permissions. Global permissions can be assigned to customizable roles in the permission matrix.

Restricted Areas for Registered Users

Kentico CMS allows you to create password-protected areas, such as intranets or extranets for partners. Once users sign in they can only see content they are allowed to read. This means that you don’t have to write any additional code for security and personalization – everything is ensured by Kentico CMS.

Multilingual Support

Kentico CMS allows you to create multilingual web sites in any number of languages. You can easily switch between languages on your web site as well as in the editing interface. The user’s preferred language can be recognized using a number of mechanisms – by domain name, by the client’s browser settings, or it can be chosen manually by the user. When the document is not available in the chosen language, the default language version can be displayed instead.

Also the administration interface supports multiple languages and you can easily create your own translation. We provide the following languages at the moment: English, German, Italian, Dutch and Czech.

Workflow and Approval

Do you need to enforce business processes for every piece of content published on the web site? With Kentico CMS, you can define different workflows for articles, news, product details, etc. You can organize the whole publishing process into a linear, fully customizable workflow.

When a user submits a document for approval, the people responsible for the next step can be automatically notified by e-mail and can also find all the documents waiting for their approval in the My Desk module.

Figure 9 – Kentico CMS provides a fully customizable workflow process for every document type.

Versioning and Archiving

What happens if you delete an article by accident or need to return to the previous version? Kentico CMS allows you to store all document versions. The system works similarly to Visual Source Safe:

You check out the document, which means that you are the only user who can edit it.
After you finish your modifications, you check it in and set a new version number.

You can roll back to any previous version. The versioning system also allows you to remove the document from the web site while still keeping it in the archive. Then, you can restore the document at any time.

Full-Text Search

Kentico CMS allows you to incorporate full-text search in one minute using built-in controls. The search engine searches all document types (news, articles, products, etc.) as well as uploaded files (PDF, TXT, DOC, XLS, HTML) and displays results in one listing.

Source Code

The Kentico CMS administration interface is delivered with VB.NET and C# source code in all editions. You can also purchase the full source code of all libraries.

Regardless of the license you buy, you are free to make modifications to the application code, use your logo and design and even distribute the modified application as a part of your services to your clients after purchasing an appropriate license for them.

Editions and Licensing

As you can see, Kentico CMS is a powerful content management solution. Still, its price is even more interesting – starting from $349 per web site! For this price you get the content management system that can be run on your own or hosted server. If you consider how many hours you would spend creating a similar solution, the “build versus buy” decision is easy.

Use Kentico CMS and become more productive today! You can purchase the product at http://www.kentico.com/EN/Buy. Your purchase is risk-free since we provide a 30 day money back guarantee!

Feature	Express Edition	Professional Edition
Content Creation
Tree structure of documents	Yes	Yes
Editable regions	Yes	Yes
Custom document types	No, only the built-in types	Yes
Versioning and archiving	Yes	Yes
Customizable workflow	No	Yes
Scheduling and expiration	Yes	Yes
Multilingual web sites	Yes	Yes
Multilingual administration	Yes	Yes
Content and style separation	Yes	Yes
WYSIWYG editor	Yes	Yes
CSS support	Yes	Yes
File management	Yes	Yes
Security
Global permissions	Yes	Yes
Customizable roles	Yes	Yes
Restricted areas	Yes	Yes
Document-level permissions	No	Yes
Development
Visual Studio.NET support	Yes	Yes
Source code of the administration interface (VB.NET and C#)	Yes	Yes
Detailed documentation of API, database and controls	Yes	Yes
27 ASP.NET controls	Yes	Yes
Content Delivery
Customizable ASP.NET page templates	Yes	Yes
Full-text search	Yes	Yes
Friendly URLs	Yes	Yes
Extending Modules
Possibility to add custom modules	Yes	Yes
Newsletter module	No	Yes
Staging module	No	Available in September
BizForms module (easily create contact forms, surveys, capture data on the web)	No	Available in September
Prices
1 web site	$349 $262 for partners	$499 $375 for partners
1 server (unlimited web sites)	$999 $750 for partners	$1499 $1125 for partners
1 server with full source code	N/A	$2499 $1875 for partners

Become a Kentico Solutions Partner and Get 25% Discount

If you create web sites for your clients, register as a Kentico Solutions Partner and get 25% discount off the list price, which means that you can get Kentico CMS for only $262! The registration is free and without obligation! Register at http://www.kentico.com/EN/Partners.

Try it now!

Do you think Kentico CMS can help you? Try it now!

If you need more details or help:

Visit http://www.kentico.com
Send message to support@kentico.com
Call +1-888-225 2767

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here

About the Author

Petr Palas

Petr Palas is founder of Kentico Software (www.kentico.com), the producer of professional solutions for web developers. Kentico Software is focused on development and marketing of Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. Our goal is to create the most flexible and easy-to-use web content management solution for ASP.NET developers.

Occupation:	Web Developer
Location:	Czech Republic

Kentico CMS - Open Content Management System for ASP.NET