Upgrade from Kentico Xperience 13
This section provides information related to upgrading projects from Kentico Xperience 13 to Xperience by Kentico.
Technical comparison
The following table and diagram outline the main differences in the architecture of the Xperience products.
Xperience 13 | Xperience by Kentico |
Consists of two separate applications – one for the live site and one for the administration. The live site application can be built using ASP.NET MVC 5 or ASP.NET Core (as part of .NET Core 3.1 or newer). The administration application is based on ASP.NET Web forms. | Both the live site and administration run as a single application, based on the current .NET version requirements. The Xperience administration is integrated into the application via a NuGet package. It is possible to deploy sites without the administration. To learn more, see the full System requirements and Website development basics. |
Major differences
- Sites – sites are no longer used in Xperience by Kentico. Instead, websites are represented by channels.
- Cultures – multilingual functionality and content is based on languages that users configure in the system.
API
Xperience by Kentico preserves a large part of the Xperience 13 API and general code patterns, including:
- Info and InfoProvider API and custom object types
- ObjectQuery
- Page Builder components
- Form Builder components
- Event handlers (with differences in the available events, see Reference - Global system events)
However, the Page API and data structure is completely different. See Content item API and Content item database structure.
Xperience by Kentico currently provides a smaller, more focused set of features than Xperience 13. Correspondingly, there are differences in the API due to unavailable features, or features with a different scope and capabilities.
See also: Builder editing components in Xperience by Kentico
Administration
The Xperience by Kentico administration is based on .NET and uses React.js as its UI framework. This is a major change from the Xperience 13 administration built using Web Forms.
The administration can be customized and extended, as described in the Extend the administration interface chapter. However, customizations of the Xperience 13 administration UI are incompatible due to the different technology stack.
Migration toolkit
Kentico provides a Migration toolkit, which allows you to transfer content and other data from Kentico Xperience 13 to Xperience by Kentico.
Due to differences in the feature set of the products, the Migration toolkit cannot transfer all data available in the Xperience 13 source. Certain types of data are migrated to a suitable alternative or discarded.
The Migration toolkit only supports content and objects stored in the database, except for related binary data on the file system, such as media library files. Code, customizations, and any other types of content need to be transferred manually to the target project and adjusted for Xperience by Kentico.
To download the tool and learn about its functionality, visit the Xperience Migration Toolkit GitHub repository.