Create JSON API endpoints in the Kentico Portal Engine

You might have noticed that Kentico released a new product Kentico Cloud. It has a fancy UI for managing content and easy-to-use API endpoints talking to you in JSON. This gives you a lot of flexibility and you can render and manipulate data on the server or the client side.

In Kentico CMS/EMS you can operate data only server side by default. However, with a little effort you can create a JSON API endpoints in Kentico Portal Engine that allow you to work with data on the client side.

Productivity tool: Extract BEM classes from HTML and create CSS template

Some time ago I decided not to create any more wild CSS that have no conventions and logic. Instead of that I have chosen to learn and use the BEM methodology that brings structure into stylesheets. The only disadvantage of this approach is that classes are long and so it takes some time to write them.

In this article I would like to present you a tool that saves you time by automatically generated CSS templates from HTML components.

Website optimization basics that are commonly ignored

From time to time people ask me to do a review of their website and give them some recommendation on how to improve performance or maintainability. A very common trend I see is that neither clients nor developers don’t really care of how fast the website will be or if the code will be maintainable from a long-term perspective during the website development process.

Clients notice those issues after a while. By this post I would like to give you a list of actions that may be taken to improve your website.

Smart technique: A Front-end web part in Kentico

You may wonder what I mean by a Front-end web part in Kentico. Let’s start with an example. You need to have a carousel on a homepage. As a .NET developer you would create a completely new web user control where you create a html structure for the carousel, fill the structure with content and also load and initialize a javascript library which makes all the carousel magic happen. Then you would create a new web part in Kentico and associate it with the user control. I’ve seen that approach several times on my client’s web sites.

Problem with such an approach is that the implementation is completely hidden in the user control somewhere at the hosting server. When a client asks me to change behavior of the carousel it is impossible to do it because

• clients mostly don’t have an access to the server,
• clients don’t have any documentation,
• clients are not aware of any dependencies so it is easy to break the website.

In this article I will show you an alternative and hopefully a better way on how to implement a functionality which relies on a html structure, javascript library and optionally loading content from the Kentico database. This approach uses out-of-the-box Kentico features and it is transparent because the implementation is completely accessible from the Kentico administration interface.

Quick tip: Get urls of a page's culture versions in Kentico

For SEO reasons you may need to generate alternate link tags with the hreflang attribute in your html output.

In this quick tip I will show you a macro expression which generates these links for you in Kentico.