This guide talks about content modeling and its role in the planning phase of your project. For the full picture, we highly recommend our Content modeling guide.
Reading the Content modeling guide is not a prerequisite to understanding the high-level overview on this page. But for your convenience, we've included links in several places to elaborate on the concepts discussed.
We strongly recommend reading the Content modeling guide in full before building your content model.
As a solid foundation for development, every project needs well-designed information architecture.
Before continuing with this guide, we recommend you read at least the first page of the Content modeling guide. It defines the content modeling terminology, and explains its importance and impact.
You can use KentiCopilot tools to test content model decisions directly in your IDE. The Content Modeling MCP Server helps you create and validate early content model prototypes. You can then use the Management MCP server to create approved content types in Xperience by Kentico and later manage changes to the content model from your IDE.
Alternatively, the web development plugin's design-to-content skill (opens in a new tab) can derive content types directly from existing designs.
One of the most important building blocks of content modeling in Xperience by Kentico is content type.
Read about it in the Begin with business needs page of our Content modeling guide. The page discusses the importance of reusable content and explores differences between structured and unstructured content.
Xperience by Kentico allows you to store data in:
Read the Store content page of the Content modeling guide to learn about where, when, and how you should store different types of data.
Choosing the best features to meet your requirements will greatly improve your project's chances of success.
To select the right Xperience functionality for any given requirement, you need to be familiar with what Xperience by Kentico offers. As with anything, you will become more familiar with the features and how to use them over time, but where should you start? Thankfully, there are many resources available to you. We recommend starting with the following:
Once you've selected the feature that best suits your purpose, you should evaluate it further with a proof of concept. This will help you understand whether you can achieve all your functional requirements.
If you find that the selected feature meets most but not all of your functional requirements, consider whether you can extend the feature to meet all requirements.
Before extending Xperience by Kentico's built-in functionality you need to take the following steps:
Make sure that you've checked the resources mentioned earlier for other features that might accomplish what you need to do. This way, you can avoid "reinventing the wheel" and solving an already-solved problem.
Research the available extensibility options of built-in functionality, being conscious of customization best practices in the Xperience by Kentico documentation.
Compare extending Xperience by Kentico functionality versus building something completely custom. During the comparison, consider the viability of one versus the other with regard to:
Before moving onto building a custom functionality to accommodate your project's requirements, take a look at the list of existing Xperience by Kentico integrations (opens in a new tab) that we have built in collaboration with our partners.
If you find that there is no suitable Xperience by Kentico feature or existing integration that meets your needs, and you determine that extending Kentico is not a viable option, do the following:
Create a strategy for the production, organization, and management of both content and assets. Make sure to consider the initial work at the beginning of the project, as well as future additions and maintenance.
If you manage content in your solution this way, the developers must prepare the data structures and storage before the editors can enter the content.
In live projects, we recommend creating content in a separate staging environment rather than directly editing in production. You can synchronize data to the production environment using Continuous Deployment.
When you need to synchronize data between Xperience and an external system continuously, we recommend using custom scheduled tasks.
If the built-in scheduled tasks do not meet your requirements, you can look into external services like Hangfire (opens in a new tab) or Quartz.NET (opens in a new tab).
Instead of pulling data directly from the external system at runtime, we recommend storing it in your Xperience instance and working with it there if possible. If managing data in Xperience isn’t feasible, clearly define your “source of truth” (e.g., your ERP or another external system) and the process for content editors to manage each data type.
For a one-way data migration from an external system, you can use our Xperience by Kentico: Universal Migration Tool (opens in a new tab).
If you plan to migrate from an older Kentico product using the Kentico Migration Tool (opens in a new tab), take a look at our migration strategy guide for information about important considerations.
In Xperience by Kentico, you can present content to visitors using multiple channels: websites, emails, or headless.
Read the Design content page of the Content modeling guide to learn how to build, manage, share, and secure your content.
The General content modeling recommendations page that follows explores considerations for planning several features with your team, including digital marketing, routing, URL and navigation, and website system pages (e.g., search results, consent settings, and SEO-specific pages).
Our next guide outlines common approaches to development in Xperience by Kentico and important topics to think about before setting up your development processes.
If you haven't already, we highly encourage you to read the whole Content modeling guide. After you familiarize yourself with the principles, consider also going through the related how-to guides to get some hands-on experience. It is essential to have a quality content model before your team begins any implementation phase.