Web Development

Jun 18, 2020

Moving from ASP.NET Core to Gatsby

There is no escaping the amount of traction that static site generators and JAMStack are getting these days. As a traditional .NET developer, you may feel that your skillset doesn’t contain the things you need to jump on this bandwagon and make the most of the benefits available. But is it really that difficult to get up and running with a new stack?

Oct 01, 2019

Kentico Connection 2019 (Brno) Review

If you hadn’t noticed, Kentico Connection came back last year, and this year’s Connection season kicked off in Kentico’s beautiful home-city of Brno. Having missed last years event in Prague, this was the first time I’ve been to a Connection event that hasn’t been focused on a product release, so the messaging was a little different to what I’ve been used to and focussed more on the direction that the demands on the market are heading and how those demands are helping to influence the direction of both Kentico EMS and Kontent.

Sep 23, 2019

MVC Forms in Kentico 12 Beta 2

You may not be aware, but Kentico 12 is in Beta at the moment. Those who have a Kentico DevNet account and have had a chance to look at it will have noticed and tried out the page builder. What you may not have noticed is that the beta also has taken some of the great features from the page builder added them to a new form builder for MVC.

Aug 01, 2018

Using the Kentico Pages data type

Relationship names have been around in Kentico since I’ve been using it, and are a great way to create structure within your content. When Kentico 9 was released, it introduced the Pages data type, to build on the relationship names to prompt the editors to link up content and to allow related content to be sorted.

Jul 12, 2018

Switching on AMP

AMP aims to deliver super-fast content for mobile websites. You've decided that you really need it; how do you do turn AMP on? In this post i'll walk through a method I've been experimenting with to deliver alternative AMP views in ASP.NET MVC with the Kentico Cloud sample site.

Mar 28, 2018

Reading list - February 2018

February has been busy (so much so that that I've not published anything since my January reading list). What spare time I have had has been spent planning further features for my website. During that planning, these are article that I found quite useful.

Feb 28, 2018

Why I rebuilt my blog in Kentico Cloud

Rebuilding my blog in Kentico Cloud has been something that I have been planning to do for a good few months now. Having not really had the opportunity while trying to balance work with a hectic family life, Christmas and New Year 2017 afforded me some time to get my teeth into this project and to start adding some of the features and foundations that I wanted to really build this project up. This post is all about the things I learned along the way.

Jan 28, 2018

How to make featured items easy to manage

A common function of content managed websites is the ability to add featured content at an editorial level. For this to behave at it's best, it needs to be simple to use for the content editors and provide a quick view of the currently featured items.

Nov 06, 2017

Content is everything and everything is content

'Content is King', that's the saying these days isn't it? As web solution providers we strive to find better ways to manage content and present it to end users. As headless CMSs grow in popularity, do we need to rethink what qualifies as being content?

Oct 23, 2017

Why you should contribute to Q&A sites

As a developer, the standard approach when you get stuck on something is to open up your browser and Google the error code or problem. Typically you're going to end up with results from sites like StackOverflow. These are great resources, but do you contribute?

Oct 13, 2017

GDPR Support in Kentico 11

GDPR is a hot topic at the moment. Everyone is still working on what is involved, how it might affect their business, and what steps they need to take next. In Kentico 11, the team have been working hard on a GDPR module to make some of the involved effort less arduous.

Sep 18, 2017

Generic web parts for rapid development

Working with the portal engine in Kentico support the kind of rapid development that bring visible results to the client quickly. In this post, I'll show you how using a combination of Web Part layouts and Widgets allow you to create structured reusable components to add more velocity.

Sep 01, 2017

Kentico in technology partnership with Ucommerce

Today Kentico and Ucommerce announced their new technology partnership that delivers an additional enterprise-level eCommerce platform to the set of tools at our disposal. What does this mean and how does it affect existing and in-flight projects?

Jul 07, 2017

Kentico London Roadshow

Kentico has moved away from their larger 404/Connection Conferences to smaller, regional road-shows. One of the advantages to this is that it opens up the event to more regional partners and customers. For the Ridgeway team, that also means it's easier to get more of the team involved in these events. because of that, three of us took a trip down to London to check it out.

Jun 08, 2017

Reading List - March 2017

Each month, I go through my browser history to look at the posts and articles that I have read. It seems like it may be worth sharing these to help spread the love!

Mar 17, 2017

3 things I like about Kentico support

Is something in Kentico not working as you would expect? Did you actually read the documentation to check you're doing things right and there is still a problem? Did you really check the documentation? OK, it's about now that you should think of contacting the Kentico technical support team.

Feb 28, 2017

Using hidden input fields in Kentico

I've often found the need to re-use a form throughout a Kentico implementation in more than one place. The problem this gives me is that I don't necessarily know where that form was completed. Using a custom form control blended with alternative forms makes this easy.

Jan 31, 2017

Building a blog in Kentico Cloud - Part 3

This third post in my series that explores some of the core capabilities of Kentico Cloud based on short pomodoro-size bursts of effort. This post explores RSS feeds and sitemaps as well as correcting the mime type of media files.

Dec 09, 2016

Building a blog in Kentico Cloud

With the release of Kentico Cloud, I felt like it was time for me to have a look around and see what I could achieve with Kentico's new headless CMS. My MVC is a little rusty too; this should be an entertaining challenge.

Nov 17, 2016

Selecting random pages in Kentico

Every once in a while, we all need to do something random, and sometimes it’s even related to work. Something we came across here at Ridgeway was a requirement to pick out random documents from a collection to display to the end user. We found a nice little trick to pull content at random from Kentico using a standard pages data source.

Oct 27, 2016

Kentico transformation method performance

Using data sources and viewers (think basic repeater and universal viewer) is a great way to get information on to your page. The inclusion of out-of-the-box transformation methods make formatting the information and displaying something useful to the end user a much simpler task. However, you must take care when using some out-of-the-box features that you are using the most performant method available.

Sep 22, 2016