Xperience by Kentico overview

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Welcome to the Xperience by Kentico development kickstart!

These materials will guide you through the creation of a simple Xperience website.

Using the MVC design pattern, you’ll build logic that displays pages managed by Xperience and a simple navigation menu. You will learn how to work with your site content (e.q., articles, products, etc.) - modeling it with content types, storing it in content items, and making it reusable.

Requirements

To follow along with this series, we recommend your machine has the following installed:

Before you start

These materials assume you are familiar with the ASP.NET Core and C# development concepts, and have access to standard development tools.

We do not aim to teach you the general development principles but to introduce how website development works in Xperience.

Use these free resources to quickly get on board with the ASP.NET Core MVC development and C# syntax nuances.

While we won’t fully leverage the MVC architectural pattern, you’ll find it beneficial to know the concepts behind the approach to understand how certain Xperience features work.

Development model of Xperience by Kentico

Xperience projects are ASP.NET Core applications with two main components:

  • Live site displays content managed by Xperience to your visitors. It retrieves the content using the Xperience API, integrated into the application via Xperience NuGet packages.
  • Xperience administration provides a user interface to edit and manage content, and to configure various system features.

The following diagram summarizes the general roles of the main personas that interact with an Xperience site – Xperience users, developers, and website visitors:

Main personas interacting with an Xperience site: Xperience users (admins, marketers, content editors) work with Xperience administration. Developers use Xperience administration to model content and custom functionality. They also implement business and presentation logic using the ASP.NET Core MVC application. Website visitors view and interact with the content presented by the ASP.NET Core MVC application.

Xperience administration

The administration interface allows editors to manage their project’s content.

The Content hub application is where users manage reusable content items (structured content), which they can reference in various channels.

A website channel represents a site in the administration UI. Each website channel has its own application. Editors create pages and organize them in a content tree. They can add and modify content, use the Page Builder and workflow features, and preview changes before publishing their content live.

Your role as a developer is to design the content structure for editors to work with based on customer business requirements. You can also create custom Page Builder components and UI controls or add new administration interface functionality.

Xperience by Kentico administration

Kickstart sequence

To get the best experience out of this Kickstart series, follow the pages in this order:

  1. Xperience by Kentico overview
  2. Set up an Xperience by Kentico project
  3. Create a reusable content type
  4. Add a website channel
  5. Define a page content type
  6. Configure the project to display content
  7. Build a page template
  8. Apply a page template
  9. Create a layout view
  10. Add a Contact us page
  11. Model navigation
  12. Implement navigation
  13. Next steps

All code samples you will see throughout the series come from our Kickstart repository, where you can find the complete implementation of the simple website from this Kickstart series.

Next step: Set up an Xperience by Kentico project

Completed steps: 1 of 13