In today's digital world, your web presence is an essential part of any business. Kentico CMS is an ideal solution for dynamic user-friendly enterprise websites. Out of the box, Kentico CMS includes a browser-based interface for rich content editing, over 200 web parts, built-in modules, and a highly customizable API.
In this book, we will build an example corporate website. Starting with the installation of your development environment and then diving into core modules and their features, over the course of the book, we will look at how we can use page templates, images, themes, web parts, and other features to provide a personalized experience for site visitors. We will also extend the site to include e-commerce functionality that manages products and payment gateways to accept money. Finally, we will extend our site, leveraging the built-in networking features to build a community for your company and integrate with external sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Chapter 1, Introducing Kentico CMS 5 introduces Kentico CMS 5 and explains the installation and architecture of your site. Once the Corporate Starter Site is installed into the development environment, you learn the basic navigation and tasks of the content editor and management interfaces.
Chapter 2, A Tour of your New Website explores the main components of the CMS system. You look at the importance of document types and how to build content pages using either the Portal Engine or ASPX page templates. This includes both the benefits and drawbacks that you may encounter using each method.
Chapter 3, Managing the Content Process covers site and role-based security. These security basics are extended to implement a News workflow to publish content to the site.
Chapter 4, Linking and Managing Documents explains how successful sites look at content as more than just HTML pages. This includes how to link to external sites, and manage pictures and videos using the media library features of your site.
Chapter 5, Extending the System covers site extensibility using built-in functions to transform system data and the Kentico API with C# to access Global Events and automate posting to Twitter.
Chapter 6, System Integration covers content syndication and integration into external data sources using APIs commonly available on the web today.
Chapter 7, Adding E-commerce Functionality to your Site explores implementing common e-commerce functionality that includes product management and shopping cart functionality.
Chapter 8, Advanced Management explains user personalization, multi-language options, and site deployment.
Chapter 9, SEO and Web Analytics discusses the usage of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help customers find your website and web analytics to validate and analyze the success of SEO. This is a combination of analyzing traffic patterns, optimizing pages, using best practices, and profiling visitors.
Chapter 10, Building a Community Site shows how to join together many of the lessons and features covered to build a community-driven website.
Microsoft Windows XP or higher
Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher
Microsoft Visual Studio/Visual Web Developer 2005 or higher
Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition or higher
Any of the following browsers:
IE 7.0, IE 8.0 (compatibility mode)
Firefox 3.5
Safari 4.0
Google Chrome 4.0
This book is designed for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors, and marketing professionals who want to develop a fully-featured web presence in a simple and straightforward process. No prior knowledge of Kentico CMS is expected. You do not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development in order to follow this book. Any IT-confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an easy-to-navigate and usable website.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
1. Action 1
2. Action 2
3. Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "When a new Blog post is added to the system, the PostTweet() method is called."
A block of code is set as follows:
<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Bitly.ascx.cs" Inherits="RESTExamples_bitly" %> <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="Enter Short URL" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtURL" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> <asp:Button ID="bGetInfo" runat="server" Text="Get Info" onclick="bGetInfo_Click" /> <br /> <br /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtInfo" runat="server" Height="99px" TextMode="MultiLine" Width="358px"></asp:TextBox>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Bitly.ascx.cs" Inherits="RESTExamples_bitly" %>
<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="Enter Short URL" />
<asp:TextBox ID="txtURL" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
<asp:Button ID="bGetInfo" runat="server" Text="Get Info"
onclick="bGetInfo_Click" />
<br />
<br />
<asp:TextBox ID="txtInfo" runat="server" Height="99px" TextMode="MultiLine" Width="358px"></asp:TextBox>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Choose the location for the Kentico ASP.NET project and files, and select Next."
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