Integrating Kentico with other applications

If you need to combine your Kentico project with an existing application, consider the issues described on this page.

Location of Kentico and your application

You can organize the Kentico web project and your application in the following ways:

Mixing both applications together

If you wish to share functionality, content, security information and session/application variables between Kentico and your application, you can mix both applications into a single project. The easiest way is to use the Kentico web project as the main application. You can add your own assemblies, projects, ASPX pages and other files to the Kentico solution.

• If you need to display your own ASPX pages on the actual website, you can register them as ASPX page templates and then create new pages in the site’s content tree based on the templates.
• If your website is built using the Portal Engine, see: Combining ASPX and Portal Engine templates on a single site, Adding custom code to Portal Engine page templates
• To integrate applications that extend the system’s back-end administration interface, you can create custom modules.

Using separate nested applications

If your application needs to run independently from Kentico, you can host separate applications in your IIS. There are two possible scenarios:

• Kentico manages the main website – place the Kentico web project (CMS folder) into the root of the website and your external application into a sub-directory. You need to create a virtual directory in IIS for the external application.
• Kentico only provides a sub-section of the website or serves as a content repository – install the Kentico web project into a sub-directory under your application.

Sharing security information between Kentico and your application

• If you wish to use shared authentication for both your application and Kentico, you need to configure your environment for single sign-on.
• To use a single system of permissions (authorization), you can leverage permissions and custom modules.