Kentico CMS launches version 6 during the Kentico Connection

Earlier this week at Kentico Connection 2011 in Denver, Kentico launched the biggest yet release of its content management system. The conference also saw the birth of Kentico’s new product, Kentico Enterprise Marketing Solution (Kentico EMS.) Over 20,000 hours of work went into the release of these two products. That is as many hours as have been spent for versions 3.0 through 5.5.

This blog post will cover the biggest improvements of the CMS product, if you want to read more about the new product, Kentico EMS, please continue reading here.

Kentico CMS version 6 offers many improvements for all stakeholders in website development, content editors, developers and site administrators alike. Also, the e-commerce module has been extended and now offers out-of-the box support for donations, memberships and bundles.

What's new for content editors

The list of new features is long, so I will only list the features that I know most of my clients will be glad to see...

• The text editor was upgraded to the CK Editor 3.6 which will eliminate many little annoyances and browser incompatibilities;
• The CMS administration desk is now compatible with all major browsers such as IE, Firefox Chrome and Safari
• The new multi-file uploader for document attachments is a potential time-saver.
• The image editor has been improved and site editors can now use a convenient drag-and-draw tool to precisely crop images.
• There is now a customizable, widget-based dashboard for editors and administrators. Given that widgets are based on web parts this means the possibilities of what can be displayed on these dashboards are almost unlimited.
• Content editors can now send out a preview link for unpublished pages. This means that a client can preview and approve changes to a page without having to log into the system.

There’s good news also for multi-lingual site owners. Improvements for handling multi-lingual content include a site wide URL prefix for each language that will make URLs even more SEO friendly.

Kentico also integrated a split screen that allows translators to have a side-by-side view of two languages. A very helpful feature when it comes to change or smaller updates verification to multi-lingual content.

Defining and translating site-wide variables were, until now, only possible from within the Site Manager. This task can now be achieved by editors, for example from within the online form creator. This means no more jumping back and forth between the Site Manager and the CMS Desk.

Major improvements for developers

Among the many improvements for developers I would like to focus on two features:

The first is called K#. K# is based on C# and replaces the existing macro language with something much more powerful.

So far, macros have been a great tool to insert dynamic values into transformations or web part definitions. K# practically removes all limitations of the existing macro language and gives developers access to pretty much all available data in the system. K# ships with an integrated IntelliSense feature.

There is no doubt that with K#, the number of page templates per site can be reduced, which will in turn make the maintenance of a web site a lot easier.

Kentico Import Toolkit

There are fewer and fewer web site projects where you start from scratch. In many cases a database driven web site already exists and the task is to redesign the site and import the existing content into the new framework.

For these cases you can now count on the help of the first major version of the Kentico Import Toolkit. It allows you to use the data of an existing SQL database to populate the content tree of your new Kentico site. An early version of the Kentico Import Toolkit was released in September for version 5.5R2 . It can be downloaded here.

Various other improvements

Finally a couple of other improvements, in no particular order:

• Global roles are now available to enable a single sign-on for multiple sites within the same installation
• Sites can now have a username prefix per site to allow the same user signed up on multiple sites of the same installation.
• Hierarchical repeaters will facilitate the setup of nested data display.
• With the new layout web parts it will become very easy to create tabs, accordions or multi-column layouts.
• Administrator can setup permission based content trees, so that editors that are only concerned about certain sections of a website won't even see the rest.

The final release of this impressive new version is announced for October 18. Clients of r42 can expect to see the new version rolled out over the next two months.

To learn more about Kentico EMS, please read this post.