Whether your are a Kentico veteran, having worked with Portal Engine and Kentico Xperience 13, or you are completely new to Kentico, you can learn how to build amazing digital marketing solutions with our modern DXP, Xperience by Kentico, as long as you know all of the resources available to you.

Oh, what's that? You don't know all the places to find technical knowledge, guidance, and examples? Well, let's fix that!

Documentation, Tutorials, and Training Guides

Docs

The Xperience by Kentico documentation is the most comprehensive resource for Xperience, covering its full breadth of features. The docs approach these features from the perspective of "what is this and how does it work?". I always recommend starting there and doing a quick search for the topic you'd like to learn more about.

If you don't know where to start, the Developers and Admins landing page has a high level overview of the different documentation sections and the Installation guide is a solid place to begin your Xperience learning journey.

The documentation is great if you are an exploratory learner, charting your own path based on what interests you or what features you need to leverage in a project.

Tutorial

However, for those of us that want a more guided path, the developer tutorial is a better starting point. It covers project installation, setup, and how to leverage core product features but without all the minutiae and distracting details when you are new to Xperience and a bit overwhelmed.

Training Guides

Our Training guides are an alternative way of learning Xperience by Kentico. I introduced these in a blog post earlier this year. But, how are these guides different than the main documentation and the tutorial?

To quote the Training guides...

We are introducing a new type of educational materials – the Training Guides. These guides provide step-by-step instructions and insightful tidbits along the way. Whether you’re a marketer, a project owner, or a developer, they’ll give you valuable content tailored to your needs.

Training guides answer the question "when and how would I use this feature?" and documentation answers the question "how does this feature work?"

Training guides appear as one of three types - Concept, How to, and Tutorial - and are organized into several categories - Digital Marketing, Configuration, Development, and Architecture.

It's also worth noting that the Training guides are being updated weekly and you can track any additions to them in our documentation changelog (yes, we have a changelog for docs!)

Finally, I should mention that the Training guides are the beginning of the future Xperience by Kentico training and certification that we'll be offering this year, so definitely check them out.

Kentico Community Portal

Question and Answer discussions

While it might be obvious to some, not everyone knows that the Community Portal itself is a key learning resource for Xperience by Kentico. You can ask technical (or marketing strategy) questions on the Q&A discussions, which are quite a bit more active than when we first launched them in October 2023.

Blog posts

You can also read technical articles and guides on the Community blog. Each blog post has a link at the bottom to discuss it further in the Q&A discussions, so if you have questions about a technical topic or code sample we mentioned in a post, go ahead and ask about it!

Resource Hub

The Resource Hub includes helpful links to many other places you can learn about Kentico and includes a link to our Integrations page which is continuously updated every time we release a new Xperience by Kentico integration (or someone from the community shares a high quality integration with us).

Support

If you get stuck in your learning journey while trying out something in Xperience by Kentico, you can fill out the support form and our support team will help unblock you by pointing you to the right documentation or letting you know if you found a bug 🐝.

Open-source code

Labs

Kentico is very active on GitHub where we share lots of code developers can learn from and we are working on releasing more code samples under our "Labs" projects. Labs are projects or code samples that we think will be helpful to developers, but don't quite reach the bar of or make sense as an integration that we're supporting as part of the product.

A great example of a Lab is the custom data types example repository which shows how developers can create their own domain-specific data types and UI form components to improve a marketer's content management experience.

Integrations

We also publish and develop many open source, fully supported integrations on GitHub. Developers can, of course, use these in their projects, but they can also dive into the source code to see how we create reusable libraries and use the internals of Xperience to build powerful customizations, like our Lucene.NET search integration.

Did you know Xperience by Kentico includes an in-memory queue service you can use to process work in a background thread? There's a lot to learn from our open source integrations!

Kentico Community Portal source

Yep, that's right. The website you are reading this blog post on is a fully open source repository on GitHub that is continuously updated, leveraging many of the new features in Xperience by Kentico every time a new Refresh is released. Whenever we deploy a new version of the Community Portal to its production environment in our SaaS service, we update the GitHub repository with the changes and version them to help you keep track of what we've changed.

Check it out, you might find some interesting techniques to using Xperience's features in a real-world scenario.

Other channels

We also have some helpful resources in other channels, like YouTube where we have multiple on-going video series. Product Insights feature our product team describing the new updates we've released in Refreshes, and Technical Spotlights focus on aspects of Xperience from an introductory technical level.

For those of you who have social media accounts, you can follow me on LinkedIn where I promote content from our Kentico MVPs and other community members when they author blog posts, share strategies, or create open source tools.

Last, but not least, is the Kentico Community Slack group where you can watch developers talk about a variety of topics and ask the Kentico community Xperience by Kentico questions (though, I'm a bit partial to our Q&A discussions since they're easier to search and share).

Wrap Up

We have plans to share more technical guidance and assets soon, so keep an eye on the blog for any announcements.

Rest assured, we continuing to work on delivering Xperience by Kentico developer training, but getting started with the learning resources above will not be in vain, because... the Quickstart guides and many of the other resources mentioned above will be the foundation of the future training certification!

Am I giving you a clue about what is going to be on the certification exam? Maybe... but let's keep that between you and me 😉.