Xperience by Kentico overview

✖
Copy to clipboard

Welcome to the Xperience by Kentico development tutorial. This tutorial will guide you through the creation of a simple Xperience website.

We’ll build logic that displays pages managed by Xperience through views and view components composed of HTML, tag helpers, and other code. In Xperience, content is modeled using content types and stored in content items (each of a specific content type) that hold site content – news, articles, products, etc.

Requirements

Your machine needs to have the following installed:

  • .NET 8.0 (recommended). Older versions starting from .NET 6 are also supported.
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2019 (including the free SQL Server Express Edition and corresponding LocalDB editions). The collation set for the SQL server must be case-insensitive.
  • An IDE for development, such as Visual Studio.

This tutorial also assumes basic familiarity with the development concepts used by the ASP.NET Core framework, experience in C#, and access to standard development tools.

This does not aim to teach the general development principles of ASP.NET Core, but to introduce how website development works in Xperience.

You should already be familiar with .NET Core development concepts before starting the tutorial. To quickly get on board, you can use the following free resource:

While we won’t fully leverage the MVC architectural pattern in this tutorial, you’ll find knowing the concepts behind the approach beneficial to understanding how certain Xperience features work. 

First, let’s get some basic concepts out of the way:

The development model of Xperience

Xperience websites are built using an ASP.NET Core application, which consists of two main components.

  • Live site – presents the website and displays content managed by Xperience. Content is retrieved using the Xperience API, integrated into the application via NuGet packages.
  • Xperience administration – used to edit and manage content, and configure various system features.

How the Xperience administration works

Editors manage the website’s content in the Xperience administration, mainly in channel applications and the Content hub. For example, a site is represented by a website channel, which has its own application where editors create pages organized within a content tree and edit content by entering values into fields (based on the content structure designed by the website’s developers) or by using Page Builder. The Content hub application is where users manage reusable content items, which can be added to content in all types of channels.

The benefits of using Xperience

The following table sums up the benefits of the Xperience development model:

Developers

Content editors

  • Create sites using the ASP.NET Core design pattern, and leverage the Razor view engine
  • Work using standard tools such as Visual Studio
  • Can extend the website with customizations and integrate any ASP.NET-compatible libraries or tools
  • Use an easy-to-grasp administration interface
  • Can edit content via the Page Builder interface and a WYSIWYG rich text editor
  • Can use workflow features and preview changes before publishing content live

Tutorial sequence

To get the best experience out of this short tutorial, follow the sequence of the pages in the specified order:

  1. Set up an Xperience by Kentico project
  2. Configure the application
  3. Model content
  4. Create pages
  5. Create the website layout
  6. Display page content
  7. Create the navigation menu
  8. See the next steps in Xperience development

Next page: Set up an Xperience by Kentico project

Completed pages: 1 of 9