The Past

Here at Kentico, we've been working on the Community Portal for awhile. We started building it on the early betas of Xperience by Kentico as a proof of concept implementation for our new product - a way to validate that what we were building would handle the kinds of solutions our customers and partners were building. We were "drinking our own champaign" as it were 😁.

We also used the portal project as a way to test deployment automation and hosting in our SaaS environment way back in 2022!

The Kentico Community Portal has been a great learning experience for us.

We used it as a way to see Xperience by Kentico in action and get a hands on understanding of the new multichannel, reusable content, and modern technology mindset it brings.

It was also an initiator for feedback to our product team when we identified missing capabilities or areas for UX improvement. It's an important reminder of the value that comes from being your own customer 🧠.

The Present

So, what is the Kentico Community Portal today? Let's start with what it's not.

It's not a replacement for DevNet our original gathering place for technical folks using our products going back over a decade. DevNet will continue to be the place to go for resources, blogs, and Q&A for Kentico Xperience 13 and older versions of our products. It will live side-by-side with the Kentico Community Portal, which will focus exclusively on Xperience by Kentico and any new creations we bring your way in the future.

It's also not DevNet 2.0. The Kentico Community Portal is meant to be a gathering place for digital strategists, marketers, content managers, administrators, SEO specialists, and of course, software developers. We want to encourage collaboration of ideas and solutions between all these personas when it comes to the world of Xperience by Kentico. This is why we're calling it the "Kentico Community Portal" and not "Xperience by Kentico DevNet".

So, then, what is it?

Well, the Kentico Community Portal is the place we hope you associate with updates, knowledge sharing, problem solving, and - of course - community when it comes to Xperience by Kentico.

Today, people can anonymously browse the site and hopefully get useful information from the main areas we've authored.

But, we welcome you to register an account so that you can join in to either ask questions or answer them in our Q&A area. Having a member account in the portal will also qualify you to contribute to our growing list of blog posts. If you're interested, reach out! We'd love to have more authors and voices here.

We also have a fantastic set of resources that we will continue to add to.

If there's a topic you'd like us to cover in a blog or resources you'd like to see added to the Resource Hub, let us know!

It's humble beginnings, for sure, but we have many plans for this space. That leads us into our final topic - the future.

Future

We really want to emphasize "Community" here and even have a placeholder landing page for it.

Some of the planned improvements include

  • Community Spotlight blog posts about individual members of the community.
  • A customizable account profile so the community can learn something about you and see your contributions (answered questions, blog posts, Spotlight blog posts about you).
  • Connecting team members of the same Kentico partner or customer so folks can know you work together.
  • A Kentico Community Newsletter featuring updates from Kentico and contributions from the community.
  • Managing email notifications about Q&A updates.
  • Content tagging to make finding blog posts, questions, and answers easier.
  • RSS feeds

We're also considering some fun features for members of the community (people with registered accounts).

  • Vanity badges (ex: a Member for 3 years!)
  • Polls
  • Special promotion for meetups and events

But, we'd also love to hear what you'd like to see and your ideas on how we can improve the Community Portal!

Just the beginning

I want to say "Welcome! 👋" to everyone visiting the Kentico Community Portal. I encourage you to make an account, sign up for the Community Newsletter, and explore our resources.

Cheers!