I'm presenting my session, "Get set.. Introduction to Windows Azure Development", that reviews how to prepare your development environment for Windows Azure and Kentico CMS. It will include a review of the required components, a walkthrough on how to setup your Microsoft Windows Azure developer account, and an install of Kentico CMS configured for Azure via the Kentico Installation Manager. I will also try to give out some pro tips on how to enhance your day to day Visual Studio 2012 productivity.

Don't miss your chance to sit back, relax, and learn about Windows Azure and Kentico CMS from some of  the best and brightest members of the Kentico community. To find out more about the event and register for it, visit Thom Robbins blog post -  Announcing the Azure Kentico Virtual Conference - Registration open!

The Bit.ly Metrics module also gives content editors the ability to shorten any Document URL right from within the CMSDesk. Utilizing this module saves you or your content administrators the time of jumping out and logging into the backend of Bit.ly to see how often your links are being clicked. My favorite part about it is that with one click I can sort the data and compare how often one or more of my links are being clicked.

Modules in Kentico CMS represent groups of functionality in Kentico. They can be a set of web parts, scheduled tasks, custom settings, and just about anything else in the platform. They are a great way to extend the system to allow for custom functionality. They are also easily exportable from one instance of Kentico to another. This module is a result of my presentation last fall at Kentico Connection 2012 about integrating with Kentico CMS. I demo’d the functionality to the audience during my session, but time flies fast, and I did not have a chance to finish it until a few days ago.

• Date: Wednesday, April 10th, 2013
• Time: 8 AM PST/11 AM EST/4 PM BST
• Location: Everywhere! Google hangouts and Twitter at: #KenticoExperts

Cloud Power GR 2013 featured six different presentations on a wide variety of technical and non-technical aspects of how cloud computing can help businesses reduce IT cost and increase productivity. The morning started off with the audience hearing about trends and changes to Microsoft’s Cloud platform and service offerings from Paul Schenkel. Paul challenged the audience to think how they could leverage cloud services to meet their infrastructure needs.

The tip itself relates to how a developer can control the order of script and link tags via simple web parts on a page template in Kentico CMS. Selectively controlling the order that CSS and script loads on a page is very important in terms of overall load speed of a page. You dont want your script loading before your style sheets because the browser will block until all of the CSS is loaded. 

Keep reading to see my list of 7 things that developers should not do with Kentico CMS.

One of the sites that was named a finalist is www.MaryFreeBed.com. The Mary Free Bed website falls in the Healthcare category. It just so happens that it is a website that BizStream developed from the ground up, and one that we are very proud to be a part of. We worked with a great set of people to make this website and I commend everyone who was part of  the team. This is the second time in the past few years that an implementation of the Mary Free Bed website has been recognized in this global competition.

During the virtual panel you and the rest of the internet will be given the chance to have your pressing Kentico CMS or Kentico EMS questions answered by the panel of experts.

We are very excited to see how this session pans out, and can't wait to start the discussion. See how to participate further over at Kentico DevNet. After the jump I have some ideas for common questions that I get asked all the time about Kentico. Click the Read More link to see them.

One of the most significant events of 2012 when it comes to Kentico, was the the release of version 7. The 7.0 release focused on optimizing and improving the Kentico CMS Desk user’s and/or developer’s experience. The overall interface is also a bit snappier than other previous releases of Kentico. And of course the release also included a whole host of new features and functionality; On-site Editing, Advanced Workflow, Translation Management, Chat, Banner Management etc. etc..

But without any further ado, below is my list of the Top 10 Kentico Related Posts of 2012 at Mcbeev.com.

These sites commonly already had product pages defined, but were only intended to serve out information about each product or service a company offers. As a web site grows, the logical next steps are to add the infamous “Buy Now” button, configure e-commerce store settings, hook up a payment gateway, and start collecting more revenue (hopefully).

The above steps are all easy to do if the site is built with content management system like Kentico, but what if the site has 100, 500, or even 1,000 products that already exist? I sure would not want to create those SKUs by hand. This scenario is a perfect time to use some automation to solve the problem.  Below is an example code snippet that used the Kentico CMS API to accomplish this task.

The full blog post can be read over on Thom Robbins' Blog on DevNet.

Also don't miss out on Bryan Soltis's post on the Top 5 Things When Deploying Kentico CMS to Windows Azure and Jeroen Furst's take on Mobile layouts in Kentico 7.

This year I am thrilled to be speaking at the conference. I will be giving a session on integrating Kentico CMS with just about anything you can imagine. I may even show you how you can customize Kentico CMS to wash your car. Full abstract is below.

Kentico Connections is Kentico Software’s annual user conference. This year the conference will commemorate the launch of Kentico CMS 7.0, give insight into where the product is going, and give attendees direct access to the people who built Kentico CMS.

To find out how to win continue reading after the jump.

I’m happy to report that everything works flawlessly. The default Kentico CMS solution was effortlessly upgraded to a Visual Studio 11 compatible solution. The web project itself compiled and built just fine. Running the project via the built in web server, as well as, IIS Express worked without a hiccup.

I actually enjoyed using BlogEngine.Net quite a bit because of it’s slick widget / plug-in capabilities. However, those capabilities can’t compare to the out of the box functionality of Kentico CMS. Plus the previous version of my blog had a theme that really limited what I could do with content. It was tough to fit good screen shots and code samples in the main content area. So it was time to move. 

1. Top 5 New Features for Developers in Kentico CMS 6
2. Top 5 New Features for Designers in Kentico CMS 6
3. Top 5 New Features for Content Editors in Kentico CMS 6
4. Top 5 New Features for Site Administrators in Kentico CMS 6
5. Top 5 New Features for Internet Marketers in Kentico CMS 6 (this post)

Today we have made it to the last post of the series and will cover what’s new for Internet Marketers. I must admit I am a little behind in finishing this series off, I thought it would be done sooner, but enough with the excuses lets get on with it.

Patrick Foley from Microsoft kicked off the morning with a discussion of where the whole cloud computing concept originated from and how Microsoft is positioning it’s public cloud and private cloud offerings. Patrick did a great job of explaining the various cloud models, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

I have only been to a few other conferences of this type, but this one easily rises to the top of my list. Every aspect of the conference was excellent.

The release of Kentico CMS 6.0 brings some much needed love to this area of installing, maintaining, and monitoring an instance or multiple instances of the Kentico product. Let’s dive in.

In my opinion, it is neck and neck between Developers and Content Editors for when it comes to who will receive the most benefits from the 6.0 update. So lets get right to it.

In an effort to summarize and quickly communicate the most beneficial additions, I have started this blog post as the first in a series. The goal of this series will be to break out the best new features by the intended audience.

I'm downloading/installing it right now, and I can't wait to get it up and running to see all the new features. For more on what to expect check out the great post by Jeroen Furst a Kentico MVP and his review of the 6.0 CTP.

To switch your Kentico project to use this new feature, you just need to go to the Visual Studio top menu after your solution is loaded, and click Website –> Use IIS Express.

From there you can debug the solution as normal. If you need any help with setting up a Kentico project for debugging check out my post about it. The project should start compiling normally and your default browser should pop up pointed your localhost. This request should now be served up through IIS Express and you should see the IIS Express logo appear in your system tray.

Sure enough that all worked for me, and after the default project loaded I was presented with a nice new shiny………error message.

Hmm that seemed odd to me. But as it turns out there is an HttpModule in the system.web node that IIS Express doesn’t like.

One of the sites that made it to the final round of voting is www.MaryFreeBed.com. The Mary Free Bed website falls in the Healthcare category. It just so happens that it is a website that BizStream developed from the ground up, and one that we are very proud to be a part of. We worked with a great set of people to make this website and I commend everyone who was part of  the team.

We are so proud that we really want to get the word out. We want to get as many people as possible to vote for the site so that it can win the contest. Browse on over to the Site of the year 2010 contest on Kentico’s site and vote for the www.MaryFreeBed.com website in the Healthcare category right now! I promise it will only take you about 3 minutes of your time and it will help us out.

At the very least, you will also be able to see some great examples of websites built with Kentico CMS that are powerful, easy to use, and look great.

That attention prompted me to check out the default Kentico installation and see what the settings are in the web.config file, to see if the default installation was at risk.

Sure enough the default installation looks like this (ASP.NET 4)

Kentico's Smart search web parts easily create functionality that allow you to have a very powerful search engine right at your own disposal. The built-in functionality indexes your site's content and displays search results that are ranked based on relevancy. Trust me, it's much more than just a SQL WHERE clause.  I'm not trying to cover the entire spectrum of search inside a Kentico site so if you are not used to using the Smart search check out the Smart Search documentation on Kentico's Devnet.

If you are not familiar with what a wiki is, let me give a simple definition right here:

A wiki can be defined as a web page or web site that allows a community of users to add, edit, and maintain content that usually surrounds a given topic or topics.

It’s a simple concept really, a web page that holds content, that’s almost no different than any web page out there. But the real difference between any old web page and a wiki is that anyone can edit a wiki right on the fly, while a web page is normally maintained by one person. In fact the more users that a wiki has adding and editing content, the more relevant and informational that wiki will become.

Pretty much the question boiled down to, why after submitting the Google site map URL to Google’s Webmaster tools, was the specified website’s pages not showing up in the resulting index or when viewed at the sites ~/CMSPages/GoogleSiteMap.aspx page.

Since the question came in from a friend, I decided to dig deeper and lend a hand. As soon as I logged into the site’s CMSDesk I quickly noticed what was up. Most of the content pages were using Custom Document Types. I was actually impressed to see this because it is sort of an advanced feature to use inside Kentico and normally an under utilized feature as well.

The output of the GoogleSiteMap.aspx page looked something like this, only the normal Menu Items from the CMS Tree:

In my last post I described what it takes to use the URL Rewriting and Document Aliasing capabilities of Kentico. I also promised a twist to those who made it through the entire blog post, and here it is. So without further ado, I now present my solution for creating a Custom Document Alias in Kentico that is QueryString aware.

Let’s get started. Now that you understand more about URL Rewriting say you had a URL like this:

Heck since Kentico 4.x you can even mask/change the extension or just get rid of it all together, to get more control of your site’s URLs.

I can’t stress enough how beneficial this feature is when it comes to creating SEO friendly links, maintaining out of date website paths/structure, or just making it easier on your visitors to reach the pages that they need to get to.

Let’s get started with an example. For instance let’s say your website had a products section that sold different types of potato chips. My favorite potato chips are Baked Lays. So we will go with that for the example.

Way back when developers didn’t do much to make the URL SEO or user friendly, you would have a typical URL like these:

http://mcbeev.com/products/chips.aspx?name=Baked Lays

Google and other search engines see this only as one URL, …/chips.aspx, which doesn’t do us very good.

Now let’s say you had this same website in Kentico. It might look something like this: