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Kentico CMS 6.0 has been released for quite a while now and you probably have gotten used to the semi-automated upgrades and hotfixes of your websites using the new Kentico Installation Manager a.k.a. KIM. You might have noticed that KIM has some minor issues e.g. does not refresh the list with installed instances after applying hotfixes or upgrades. Since the release of hotfix version 6.0.7 you can not only patch your websites, but you can also hotfix KIM. In this post I will show you how you can make sure that you are running the latest version of this great application.
The steps for hotfixing KIM are quite simple and it can be done from within the application. Simply run the Kentico Installation Manager and click on the Check button or select an instance and click on the Upgrade/Hotfix button.
Note: you need at least 1 registered 6.0 instance in order to apply the hotfix.
After that the following popup will show:
On the left you will see the available updates. If you select the 6.0.7 hotfix (or newer) and continue by clicking "Apply", the hotfix will be downloaded and you will be taken to the Kentico Hotfix Utitlity wizard.
In the first two steps of the wizard you will be asked to optionally backup the CMS files and/or database. Simply check the boxes indicating: "I already have a backup of my project" and "I already have a backup of my database" because in this demo we will focus on hotfixing KIM and not the Kentico website. Click on the Next button to go to step 3 of the wizard.
The image below shows step 3, and gives you an overview of the changes that will be applied. The list consists out of the options: CMS files, Setup files (only available from hotfix 6.0.7) and SQL script. Because you typically would only hotfix a website, the Setup files option is deselected. In order to select the Setup files option you will have to click on the: "Switch to advanced mode (for experts only)" link in the right corner.
Clicking the link will enable the fields and you are able to select the Setup files option. This also allows you to deselect the CMS files and SQL script checkboxes to only hotfix the Kentico Installation Manager and leave your websites in it's current version.
Hitting next will take you to the next step of the wizard where you will be prompted to stop the Kentico Installation Manager (if it's running in the background). Tick the box to select the application and click on the "Stop selected applications" button. You can also choose to stop all conflicting applications by clicking the "Stop all applications" button.
After that the new files will be copied and KIM will be patched. Similar to upgrading or hotfixing websites, you will get an overview of all the files that are being copied. If all went well you will receive the "All operations have been successfully finished." message.
Happy patching!
When creating websites with Kentico CMS, I often find myself adding default web part properties so that I can specify default web part values or access them in the widgets. That is why I added a small update to my widgetizer script. The script allows you to add all the default web part properties by simply clicking a button!
This tip is a must have when developing websites in Kentico's portal engine.
testThe second post in the page template reduction techniques series is about specifying default page templates for specific document types.
With the 6.0 beta being out for a couple of days, I thought it was time to take a better look at some of the new features. One feature that I am really looking forward to use is the new K# engine. In this post I will cover a couple of examples using K#.
It's been a busy month for the people at Kentico with the release of the new www.kentico.com website. But that is not all! Yesterday they released a beta of the upcoming version 6.0! In this post I wil show you the things that I did not cover in my first look of the 6.0 CTP.
This is the first post of a series of tips and tricks on page template reduction techniques. From my point of view it is very important that you only provide the page templates needed to your end users, making sure that they will not get lost when managing the website. This tip will show you how easy it is to create "Template scopes", to filter the "Page template selection" dialogue.
I have created a downloadable package for my latest tweaks: "Widgetize!" and "Copy web part".
This tweak is similar to the "Widgetizer!" script and allows you to copy web parts from one page template to another.
This tweak will allow you to create configured widgets from your configured web parts.
The following steps will show you how to clone the "Editable text" web part and change it's code to display default texts (e.g. {%DocumentName%} macro for the title) for your editors.
This tweak will show you the needed steps for creating default web part containers per site.
When working with users and roles in Kentico CMS it is sometimes tricky to find the needed UI permissions. This post will cover a tip for debugging the permissions needed.
Last week we visited the HartmanEVENT 2011 in the Netherlands. This is were my boss attended the "Content Tool Idol 2011" contest and informed me about a nice little feature he had seen in one of the vendor sessions. The feature allowed the editor to easily translate texts using Google's translate service.
In my presentation: "Creating websites from scratch using Portal Engine" at the Kentico Connection I showed you how to create a really blank site. In this tip I will show you the steps I presented.
This tip is mandatory: read Martin Hejtmanek's blog! Martin is the CTO of Kentico and he posts technical details on the current development process of Kentico CMS.
It's 2011 and time for a new Kentico CMS related tip which is very useful and can be easily overlooked.
Here is a quick tip that is useful if you work a lot with widgets in Kentico.
You might know that macros are not allowed in the widgets editing form because of security reasons. Luckily for us developers there is a nice little workaround to enable macro resolving in widgets:
Add the macro parameter as default value for the field and make sure to uncheck "Display attribute in the editing form".
In the screenshot below you can see an example of this where the title querystring is used in the news lists where condition.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a tip and trick on how to adjust the default properties of web parts and widgets. I wrote the post so that I could easily locate the xml files whenever I needed them. Since that time I have often used the post, but didn’t want to go to the actual files to find the id’s and types of the properties. That’s why I...
This tip and trick is something I find very useful when working with web parts and widgets. You are probably aware of the dialogs that you get when adding or modifying web parts and widgets. These dialogs consist out of default properties which apply to all web parts and widgets and some custom properties which can be set per web part and widget...
It is very easy to integrate Kentico CMS Controls with Visual Studio. Simply add the CMS.Controls.dll to the Visual Studio Toolbox.
Did you ever look for a way to transforms all URLs to a specific case? Kentico provides it’s users this functionality since version 5.0 via a simple setting. To enable it, go to CMS Site Manager, then Settings and select a site. Open the URLs and SEO settings and look for the setting called: “Redirect invalid case URLs to their correct version...
This post covers a tweak which I find useful when working with multiple cultures. The tweak does not add documents which are not translated in the content tree. This can be usefull when you are working with a lot of documents/cultures or when you simply want to keep a clean content tree per culture.
Here’s just a small tip: when you are in a context menu, right click an item to open the sub context menu (if available). For example right click on a document in the context tree and then right click on “New …”.
Have you ever worked in the content tree and felt that the maximum number of displayed documents were not enough? By default this happens when a parent document contains more than 100 child documen...
After last weeks "Where did my module go?" post, I thought that I should write a "Tips and Tricks" post in which I use create a module to quickly browse to Kentico's Developer's Guide (which I often use).
Most of you are probably aware of this setting because it has been available in previous versions of Kentico (4.0/4.1). But for those that don't, you can share user accounts and allow the user to login on all sites.
One of my colleagues showed me a small well "hidden" button, which allows the user to maximize the content view. Very nice find Roel!
Richard Pendergast, editor of Kentico Developer Magazine, recently approached me and asked me if I would be interested in publishing my blog post:
10 things in KenticoCMS 5.0 that make life so much easier in the upcoming issue of Kentico Developer Magazine. I told him that I was honored to be published and wanted to contribute to the Kentico Community with my blog post.
Hi! I thought it would be nice to cover some shortcuts in KenticoCMS which I have found useful. Please note that most of the shortcuts existed in previously versions of KenticoCMS and are not specific for Version 5.0.