Kentico 12, Raptors, Documentation, and Training

There are no magic words to tell. Year after year, our documentation and training are improved, and we can't do anything to stop them. Improvements, uh, find a way. Even in 2018, we have a couple of new examples. Don't worry, though, we're not selling them separately in an auction, you'll get them out of the box, old-school!

Switchosaurus

You probably thought before that it would be slick to be able to switch between Portal Engine and MVC documentation just by a click. Like when you find an article about developing web parts in Portal Engine and you want to see the direct alternative for MVC. Voilà, it's now possible in the Kentico 12 documentation!

From the documentation point of view, both development models are equivalent now. You have two page trees for each model. So, not only does the Kentico 12 documentation display the alternative page when clicked on the model switcher, but it also changes the page tree so that you see only articles related to the chosen development model. Clever girl!

We also thought about the case when you're just looking for stuff, and not sure of the model, and you just want to find an article or verify that Kentico can do something. Now, if you search for something, you'll see a checkbox on the search results page saying Show results for all development models. That will show you all pages, regardless of their model of development.

Tip!
When you're establishing a park full of aggressive carnivorous animals, hire more than one developer to develop and maintain the system.

It's Kentico MVC, I Know This!

Since MVC is the new king of the jungle, we also prepared a new training course for you. It will be available for purchase right after the release, and it will guide you through the best ways to work with Kentico using the MVC model. Your goal will be to create a multilingual Kentico MVC website with a navigation menu and using media libraries, and we'll walk you through the process from beginning to the end.

Also, the course will be further extended based on the attendees' feedback and what we'd like to test in the certification. But don't worry, all attendees that purchase the course are also going to get all subsequent extensions for this course.

We have to state something in the beginning, though. The course doesn't teach MVC generally. If you don't know what a dependency injection is or how to write a controller, we recommend taking a general MVC course beforehand.

Did you know?
Even a really intelligent ten-year-old child wouldn't be able to hack a UNIX-based system, or probably any system, even in the 90s, however, they'd "know this."

Meteorite or Certification?

Dinosaurs didn't manage to overcome a meteorite. Developers and marketers undergo an equally dangerous test when they're trying to pass our developer or marketer certification exams.

For Kentico 12, both our certifications test knowledge from both development models. Our goal is to ensure that our certified developers and marketers have a high level of knowledge and skills, and all of them should be able to develop both MVC and Portal Engine projects, respectively, and set up and use marketing features on MVC websites.

You can expect the developer certification to be ready in January 2019, while the marketer certification is going to be publicly available a month later, in February 2019.

Fun fact – Where did the meteor that killed off dinosaurs hit the Earth?
To be accurate, it actually was neither a meteorite nor a meteor. It was an asteroid. And it hit the Earth in Mexico, it left what's now called the Chicxulub crater, 150 km/93 miles wide and 20 km/12 miles deep.

Welcome to Kentico

Our tutorial, which opens after installation and is available when you switch Documentation to Tutorial in the documentation header, is also about to receive an update. We're going to enrich the current front-end development tutorial with a basic business introduction. Whether you are an evaluator or you just want to find something about working with Kentico, you'll find a new section in the tutorial.

The so-called business part of the tutorial will guide you through the interface, working with the new Page Builder, and explains how to use files and set up the structure of your content.

This tutorial extension is expected to be public during December 2018.

Did you know?
The most dangerous dinosaur in Jurassic Park isn't a velociraptor. It's actually an assumption from the 90s of what deinonychus looked like. However, their name didn't sound scary to the film crew, so they used a different dinosaur name. Have I broken your childhood too?

No More Developer Essentials?

"What about the 'old' courses for Portal Engine?", you may ask. Yes, even those are to be updated for Kentico 12. You'll find them in our offering during January 2019 under their new names—Kentico Portal Engine for Developers and Kentico Customization for Developers.

As before, the main reason behind the courses is to teach developers to use Portal Engine and customization, not to teach programming, generally. This expectation of non-technical people happens to us, unfortunately, more and more frequently.

Fun Fact – Remember the SUV glass roof being broken by the T-Rex?
At the beginning, when the T-Rex gets out of his cage and his jaws go through the glass roof. That wasn't part of the plan so the kids' screams are real.

Finally, and this is probably the most important thing. Similar to Disneyland, our dinosaur doesn't eat customers if Kentico breaks down. So what's there not to like?

By Tomas Nosek in MVC