What's changed?

We recently made several updates to the Kentico Community Portal to make it a better experience for you.

First off, we are now running on the October Refresh of Xperience by Kentico which is always exciting, especially for us marketers managing things 😅.

Improved Q&A editing experience

Most of the recent updates benefiting Kentico community members have been related to our Q&A discussions, which are becoming more and more active ever day.

When we launched the Kentico Community Portal we needed a way for members to create Q&A discussions because we knew that was a core part of the initial value of a community website.

We selected a technology that would be easy to integrate so we could go-live quickly and support all of you. That technology is called editor.md and is a Markdown based editor experience.

We chose Markdown for editing because it simplifies the options available for discussion authoring and improves security.

The main motivation to change the editing UX for Q&A discussions was to make it easier for non-technical users to participate with questions and answers, provide a more fluid typing experience on mobile devices, and reduce the technical debt of the Kentico Community Portal.

Editor.md's last update was in 2015, so it's effectively an archived project - no bugfixes, performance improvements, or attempts to improve browser compatibility are coming for this project. It also had a dependency on jQuery (more on that later!)

To replace editor.md we selected a popular open-source Markdown editing project named Milkdown. Milkdown had its most recent update on September 10, 2024, has a very active community and maintainer, and provides a much nice user interface for anyone participating in Q&A discussions.

Here's a video showing what that updated editing discussion is like.

Other Q&A discussion improvements

We also added the ability to order discussion answers in different ways.

  • Oldest
  • Newest
  • Accepted answer first, then by oldest

This makes it easier to see the answer at the top if that's what you are most interested in or what members have said most recently if you want to catch up on an older discussion.

There's not much you need to do to get the benefits of this update! When you create a new Q&A discussion or add an answer to an existing one you will use the new Milkdown editor.

If you want to see what Milkdown's editor is like in a sandbox you can try out the Milkdown playground.

We also adjusted the design, calls to action, and general UX of the Q&A discussions experience.

By the way, we have several more UX improvements for Q&A discussions we'll be releasing shortly, with larger updates over the next few months.

  • Email notifications when discussions you participate in are updated with new answers
  • The ability to manage which discussions you receive notifications for
  • Improved search for Q&A discussions
  • Tagging Q&A discussions which can be used in search

Community-lead support form updates

Kentico MVP Liam Goldfinch contributed to the Kentico Community Portal by opening an issue on the GitHub repository, noting that the UX for support request submissions could be improved. So, the support form was updated to display a larger confirmation message when your submission was successfully received.

If you have any ideas to improve the Kentico Community Portal you can send us feedback or if you are more technically minded you can open an issue on the GitHub repository.

Resources and integrations

We added several new community-authored integrations and some that Kentico created but were missing from the Integrations page.

In case you didn't already know, the Kentico Community Portal blog has an RSS feed! We added it to the list of links in the Resource hub and also added a link to our new Q&A discussions RSS feed.

Speaking of RSS feeds, we now have RSS feeds for both product releases and security patches to help keep your teams informed about all the import updates we're releasing for Xperience by Kentico.

Links to those feeds are at the top of our documentation Changelog for Xperience by Kentico.

No more jQuery

Finally, thanks to our October 2024 Refresh (and the replacement of editor.md) we were able to remove jQuery as a dependency of the Kentico Community Portal. Bye bye jQuery, we knew you well 👋!

Wrap up

We hope you like these changes. If you have any issues let us know in the discussion for this blog post or send us some feedback.