ASP.NET MVC Support, Custom Pages, Document Management, Mobile Website Support, Multilingual Content, Multi-site Management, Integrated Campaign Management, Marketing Automation, Web Analytics. These are some of the features that Kentico Suite brings to the table. The actual list is quite long but we are not going into that (despite have already, seemingly so). It suffices to say that Kentico is an awesome web solution for enterprises, and is packed full of features. And this CMS is getting an upgrade coming November.
Kentico is set to launch its version 10.0 this November. The version would be unveiled on 4th November at the Annual 404 Conference which is being held in Las Vegas this year. As Kentico development partners, we are excited about the new version and are looking forward to test it out.
We can't keep quiet anymore—#Kentico10 is coming in November, and it's our best yet. Watch for our updates! pic.twitter.com/krnJhtsYt7
— Kentico (@Kentico) September 7, 2016
Not much is known about the new version and most information would be made available in coming months. We can however speculate on what’s to come. So here are top five things to expect in the coming new release.
ASP.NET MVC Framework Improvements
Kentico 9.0, i.e. the previous release of Kentico, added many new features to support ASP.NET MVC 5 Framework in Kentico. The Kentico development methodology can now be divided into two approaches, the MVC development approach, and the Kentico portal engine model approach which is based on ASP.NET webforms. Considering the growing popularity of MVC development approach, Kentico is bound to release more features related to it. We are going to get more MVC support in e-commerce, online marketing, and content management feature sets. For e-commerce sites specifically you can expect a smoother and more flexible ‘Checkout Process’ and Payment integrations and payment process could see a few changes as well.
In addition, we can expect more test coverage for MVC modules. The roadmap highlights extended test coverage for Content Management and Online Marketing feature sets.
Continuous Integrations
Continuous integration is the development management practice that involves multiple kentico developers adding to a shared code repository, often multiple times a day. This practice is totally essential in today’s highly connected and diverse development environment, especially where timelines are strict and developers are at different locations.
Kentico has been steadily encouraging this practice by adding support features to enable more immersive continuous integration practices. Version 9.0 left out some modules for Continuous Integration Support. This new release can pick those up and bring them under the integration support umbrella. We can also see an extension of support for custom modules as well.
Contact Management
There would be more MVC features in contact management. Contact tracking could become more streamlined, membership more trackable, and overall marketing automation more personalized. We are also expecting out-of-the-box support for the tracking of more user activities which will again help in more personalization of the marketing campaigns.
Campaign Management
Improvement in Contact Management will lead to improvements in campaigns automation and campaign management as well. More activity tracking will give us the ability to create more personalized marketing campaigns. We are expecting MVC features for campaign management modules. Activities could become part of campaigns tracking as well. With increasing relevance on campaigns designed specifically for promoting user engagement and user interactions, making activities a part of the campaign can allow web admins more flexibility in testing out the perfect content and design.
Miscellaneous Stuff That Milestones Tells Us
We also check the Kentico development milestones that are given on this page http://www.kentico.com/product/roadmap . What milestones are completed gives you quite a deep insight on what you can expect in the newer releases. So here are the main points covered in the recent Kentico development milestones that we can expect in the new version.
- Improvement in first page load time: This improvement can impact a lot of page load time. Again page load time, in turn, have a lot of impact on website’s user experience and even SEO.
- Dancing Goat Guide for MVC: When Kentico released version 9.0, it added support for the development of applications using ASP.NET MVC 5 Framework. Dancing goat is a sample program built using this new feature of Kentico and is available on GitHub. You can find it here . This sample app now has more detailed documentations.
- Separating Kentico Presentation Layer: Again this could make one of the biggest impacts yet. Separating presentation layer with business layer will give rise to more specialized developers and developer environment.
- Support for SQL Server 2016: SQL server 2016, the latest offering by Microsoft would be now supported by Kentico release.
References: Kentico Newsletters, 404.digital, Kentico Product
Rachit Agarwal
