Experiences with Kentico CMS

Question

I'm wondering if anyone has experience using Kentico CMS to manage content for a public facing website. I downloaded the trial version and at first look it seems pretty full featured and well designed.

I'm interested in things like:

• Quality of product and support
• Community (I looked at their forums but didn't seem like there was a lot of activity)
• Ease of extending the platform
• Ease of incorporating pages developed outside Kentico

If anyone has experience please let me know what you think.

Answer 1

In my last job we used Kentico for a number of public facing websites. In general we found it very good.

• Product quality was very good and their support was excellent, both for helping us find our way around the product and for fixing the few bugs we found.
• We didn't use their forums so I can't comment on this.
• The system is very easy to extend. We created a number of custom web-parts and had no problems incorporating them into the system.
• Kentico is (obviously) designed to host pages built within the system, but we did include a number of static html pages in our sites - again no problems.

All-in-all a very good Content Management System.

Just to add - try before you buy. If you are serious about using the system ask if you can have a trial. Implement some of the most complicated parts of your site to see if it copes.

Answer 2

To add to what Chris said, it is really robust system and support is very good, we had good experience with them.

but if you want really extendable system with great user interface and support try sitefinity.com we are having great time with it.

if you want a fast great blogging system user blogengine, it is free and community is great, have plugins and themes.

but as always with any premade CMS there are limits.

Answer 3

We use Kentico as the main CMS package we use for our clients.

• Quality: Thumbs up.
• Community: The outsider community (users like me) isn't large, but the Kentico staff respond to the forums and bug reports quickly in my experience. This may grow though, as Kentico has been recently adding various features to their site to encourage community, like their Marketplace.
• Depends on what you're extending. Some parts they make incredibly easy to manipulate and extend; others get very complex if they weren't designed to be extended. (For example, e-commerce. Simple if it is something they expected to be extended, like Product Options to choose a shirt color. But try to add a different type of discount besides the few types they have, and write off the next two weeks of your life!) Although, over the whole framework, I'd say it is reasonably extendable.
• Non-platform pages: Easy. Just add the pages or directories of the custom areas to the 'Excluded URLs' list in the settings, so that the URL rewriter won't touch them.

I also concur with everything ChrisF said.

Answer 4

Kentico is awesome (no I don't work for Kentico).

As a Content Management System it just makes sense. The first time I used it I had no problem navigating around the system, adding content, and utilizing its features.

Kentico is an excellent Content Management System, but more importantly in my mind is the fact that it is also a great framework. As a developer, you will LOVE Kentico. It's VERY easy to create custom web parts, or override default functionality of the different modules. Also, the development community is fairly strong, and the support is good.

Answer 5

I have built a number of sites using Kentico, and overall the experience has been positive.

Their support is really great, they respond very quickly and will not give up until you have an answer. If you don't have a maintenance contract you can ask questions on the forums, and they will always try to answer your question and help you with your issue.

For end users the UI is a bit complex, at any moment they might be looking at several levels of nested tabs. So be prepared to train your customers (for which you can rely on official training partners if you want to).

The community is not so strong imho. The amount of extensions on the marketplace is limted (mostly templates), and I haven't found that much blogs about Kentico. The best thing you can do is follow the official Kentico blogs, since they will point you to other blogs as well, like these blogs.

One of the reasons the third-party development is lacking right now, is that the API is not that well designed, and you'd constantly need to recompile and release extensions after each hotfix (weekly). An example of this is the excellent Marker Kentico Business Library, which was released some months ago, and hasn't since been updated to work with the latest version of Kentico.

They are planning API improvements for v6 so hopefully that will improve the situation. Kentico CMS really needs to get a better database abstraction layer, preferably using LINQ.