Andy Thompson, Get Started CTO, shares first experience and practices they gained with Kentico Cloud headless CMS recently. Get more familiar with all resources available for Kentico Cloud. users and get a use of various best practices: - Search as a Service - Content Type based navigation - Modular Content - Content Personalization

1. Kentico Cloud
Best Practices
Andy Thompson
... So Far

2. Hi, I’m Andy

3. My Wrist

4. Best Practices?
With so little practice, how do we know what’s best?

5. There are plenty
of projects being
built already
I’ll go through some of the stuff we’ve worked on in the last 11 months.

6. Best Practices are
emerging already
I’m going to highlight a few of them.

7. Plenty of resources
are available already
I’ll give you a list of places you can go to keep up to date.

8. Anything else?

9. Plenty
of Projects
You’ve just heard about some, here are some more.

10. Roadshow 1.0
Six months ago:
● Kentico Cloud is not Kentico EMS
● Project process changes
● Devs are gonna love it

11. First Site on
Kentico Cloud
It’s fair to say there were no
Best Practices at this point.
● By Emmanuel Tissera
https://twitter.com/damazingnut
● Within two weeks of launch
● Content + ecommerce
● Also printed the Kentico Cloud t-
shirts
● Proof that devs love it!

12. Leak Week
Marketing Microsite
● Short timeframe
● Agile development model
● Back-end before front-end!

13. McDonald,
Slater & Lay
Professional Services
● Strict content review process
● Contact form
● Azure search
● Contact tracking
● Basic personalisation

14. The Farmer
and the Cook
Food Blog
● Very low budget
● Quick to spin up
● Rich content pages
● Taxonomy
● Azure search
● Not live yet (don’t Google it)

15. Australia-wide
Law Firm
Large Content Site
● Over 5000 pages
● (Content Management API)
● Multi-lingual
● Complex filtering
● Azure Search
● Not live yet (don’t Google it)

16. ASP.NET MVC
Boilerplate
New hotness in a language
you already speak
● Conceived by Get Started
● Based on code from our early
projects
● Taken 5 times further by the
community
● Fully managed by Kentico
● Fully open source

17. Emerging
Best Practices
(Or at least some that are looking pretty good so far!)

18. Search:
Azure Search
Search as a Service
● Pioneered by Bryan Soltis
● Free tier probably enough
● Indexer Azure Function
● Webhooks to trigger rebuild
● Handle results server-side (.NET)
or client-side (JavaScript)
content search
webhook index

19. Navigation:
Content Type
Build yourself a content tree
● If you’re building a website
● 10 years of Kentico CMS can’t be
completely wrong
● Generic item with properties
and child items
● See Jan Lenoch’s blog post if you
want to turn this up to 11

20. Settings:
Content Type
Build yourself a settings
module too
● Simple settings content type and
a single item
(or one per channel?)
● Common settings you might
miss such as Page Title prefix
● Master page content/settings
● Allows for easy localisation, and
versioning support

21. Gotchas
Things that are not best practice, that you should avoid.

22. Gotchas
Name your items simply
● Don’t adopt a prefix pattern like
[type] - [name]
● There’s already another field for
type
● Keep them short, sweet and
descriptive
● Rely on the search and filter

23. Gotchas
Rich text: WYSINWYG
● What you see is not what you
get
● Remember the CMS is not in
charge of how your website
looks, just what it says
● For more stylised content, look
to inline modules (equivalent to
widgets)

24. Gotchas
Contact tracking only shows
tracked Contacts
● Analytics are still being gathered
● You need to collect some
personal data to make them
contacts (hint: forms)
● Segments, personalisation all
still work for anonymous visitors

25. Hot Tips
Not quite best practices, but good advice nonetheless!

26. Hot Tip
Use Preview URLs
● Lack of WYSIWYG is quite jarring
for people used to a “headed”
CMS
● Features have caught up
● MVC boilerplate allows you to
set up a preview version easily

27. Hot Tip
Use Modular Content
● Structured content is the key to
success on a headless CMS
● Like widgets on steroids
● Don’t be afraid to create LOTS of
content items
● Limits on how many nodes you
create don’t exist in Cloud like
they did in EMS
● Searching and filtering do a
great job of finding items

28. Hot Tip
Personalisation doesn’t need
personas
● Basic personalisation can be
easy
● Kentico Cloud does support
segments, but they’re not
required
● Personalisation SDK allows you
to check basic activity
● Example source code available
for .NET, e.g. form submission

29. Keeping Up
How do you keep up with this ridiculous pace?

30. Kentico Cloud
Blog
Subscribe. Now.
● https://kenticocloud.com/blog
● Regular posts
● Really high quality content
● Not just marketing!

31. Kentico Cloud
Forums
Live on the bleeding edge
● https://forums.kenticocloud.com
● Direct access to developers
● Get previews and provide
feedback on upcoming features

32. Kentico Github
Projects
Copy and paste! ;)
● https://github.com/Kentico
● Open source!
● Sample sites
● SDKs
● Boilerplates (starter kits)

33. Kentico
Evangelist
Bryan Soltis
Big fan. Big content.
● @bryan_soltis
● Blog posts
● Tweets
● Code Samples
● Experiments

34. Kentico MVPs
Like me, turned up to 11.
● Follow us on Twitter
● Read our blogs
● Send us emails
● Find us on Slack community
● Talk to us at events!

35. Build
Something
Yourself
It’s easy!
1. Create a free account
2. Copy a free sample site
3. Profit

36. Big List of Links
Ask me for this!
(and give me more)
Search
https://devnet.kentico.com/articles/integrating-azure-search-with-kentico
https://kenticocloud.com/blog/using-an-azure-function-webhook-with-kentico-cloud
Navigation (extreme deep dive)
https://kenticocloud.com/blog/managing-navigation-menus-in-kentico-cloud
Personalisation Example
https://github.com/Kentico/personalization-sdk-net/wiki/Creating-personalization-variants
Kentico Cloud Blog
https://kenticocloud.com/blog
Kentico Cloud Forums
https://forums.kenticocloud.com
Twitter
http://twitter.com/kenticocloud
https://twitter.com/bryan_soltis
https://twitter.com/andythompy
SDKs
https://github.com/Kentico/delivery-sdk-net
https://github.com/Kentico/delivery-sdk-php
https://github.com/Kentico/delivery-sdk-java
(and so on with other languages...)
Github projects
https://github.com/Kentico
Another awesome list of references from Bryan:
https://kenticocloud.com/blog/kentico-cloud-tools-for-developers

37. Kentico Cloud Best Practices
There are plenty of projects being built already.
Best Practices are emerging already.
Plenty of resources are available already.

38. All ready?
Give it a try.

39. Questions
and ?Answers

40. Thanks for listening
Andy Thompson
@andythompy
getstarted.com.au/andy