Xperience by Kentico Refresh - May 19, 2025

Check out this month's update to Xperience by Kentico. We added content sync - a highly anticipated capability - and valuable improvements to other features, like usage tracking for web pages! But, of course that's not all, so dive in and learn about the updates we've just delivered in Xperience by Kentico.

Content sync

Let's get straight to the point. We asked for feedback on our roadmap and all of you gave it. You want a way to author content in a pre-production environment and then promote it to production when it's approved and ready to go live.

This is important for content governance, validating campaigns and content updates with stakeholders outside of the Xperience administration, and security requirements that limit access to production environments.

We've been hard at work designing a solution that is simple enough for marketers to use without technical assistance but robust enough to ensure content is quickly and securely transferred between environments while also maintaining its connections to other linked content items.

With our May 2025 Refresh, we're thrilled to announce the initial phase of this capability. We're calling it content sync.

Content synchronization is easy to use. Once two environments are configured (typically, QA or Stage and Production), a marketer can navigate to the Content hub, select published items they want to promote, and click the SYNC button.

The Content hub will show an overview of the items being synchronized, including which ones are not supported because of their workflow status.

You might notice the extended "waiting for restoration" period during the content sync operation. This can happen because the content is processed by a scheduled task on the target application instance.

... the content will be transferred to the target instance and restored as soon as possible. The restoration may take up to 30 seconds to start, may be delayed by other content sync operations, and may take some time depending on the size of the synchronized content. You can view the progress in the content sync dialog.

You can read more about the content synchronization process in the documentation.

Additionally, marketers can schedule publishing the synchronized items, making sure their landing pages or campaign content changes all go live at the right time in the future.

You don't need to worry about the related content (including media assets or files), folders, or taxonomy tags for a synchronized content item - Xperience handles it all! Once synchronized you'll find everything in the connected environment.

SaaS support for content sync

For customers using Xperience by Kentico SaaS, configuration of content sync couldn't be easier!

Administrators with access to the Xperience Portal can set up the content sync connections between environments with a few simple clicks. Developers can even use one of these connections to sync content from their local environment (for example, before the project go-live) to QA or even Production!

SaaS STG environments

But, what if you only have QA and Production environments in SaaS and developers are deploying updates regularly to QA for testing? How do you avoid interruptions to your content authoring? How do you avoid impacting the QA testing with content changes?

Thankfully, we now also support a new STG (Stage) environment for any SaaS service plan. The STG environments are purposefully designed for pre-production content authoring and are nearly identical to production environments in most aspects, such as performance, availability, backup policies, and the option to set custom domains. Reach out to your Kentico sales representative if you are interested in adding a STG environment to your Xperience by Kentico SaaS solution to better support your content synchronization workflow.

Web page usage tracking

We released the initial version of usage tracking in our July, 2024 Refresh. Usage tracking helps marketers understand where their structured, reusable content is linked across their Xperience by Kentico application. This could be in multiple places across a single channel (products, images, testimonials, FAQs) or across multiple channels of different types.

With this month's Refresh we've added support for web page usage tracking and we've redesigned the usage tracking interface for better discoverability and visualization. This updated interface is now called "Used in" and applies to both web pages and reusable content items in the Content hub.

When marketers track the usage of items in the Content hub and web pages across all channel types and other Content hub items they will see a nested tree structure, representing the chain of links between the current content item and all others.

Rows at the top level of the listing are immediate connections - items that link directly to the content being viewed. If more distant connections exist, the rows can be expanded to show each additional level of usage. Language variants and action icons for viewing or editing the linking item are also displayed.

We think this updated user experience, along with the addition of web page tracking makes usage tracking in Xperience by Kentico an easy to use, powerful, and standout feature.

Centralized URL management

As the URL management story matures in Xperience by Kentico we found marketers would appreciate a centralized application to manage those URLs.

To that end, we've moved the Former URLs application inside a new application called URLs, and added vanity URL management there as well.

This is mostly an organizational change, but it's being done in preparation for our upcoming feature to support multiple vanity URLs per web page. We have other planned updates for URL management which might also find a welcoming home in the new URLs application.

Of course, marketers can still manage vanity URLs in the URLs tab found on every web page in a website channel.

Improving version history readability

Recent updates to Xperience made the history of structured content of reusable and web page content items visible to marketers.

However, we knew the UX of the version history dialog could use improvement - specifically, the readability of structured fields.

Previously, this content was displayed with a "disabled" design which makes sense as this is historical information and cannot be edited, but the grey background colors and disabled HTML elements meant the text was hard to read. It could also be difficult to select if a marketer needed to copy and paste the older content somewhere.

Now the structured fields in the version history dialog are displayed as plain text or another "read only" UX variation of a field that makes it easy to read and access the content.

Content retriever caching

Last month we announced our new, experimental content retriever API. This API is designed to help Xperience by Kentico developers author content retrieval code in a fraction of the time required and requires fewer lines of code. This leads to Xperience projects with less code to maintain and fewer bugs.

The content retriever API is still experimental, but it now includes the auto-caching and request context features we were so excited about. Its documentation has been significantly expanded, includes a full API reference, and visuals to help developers understand how the custom mapping functionality works.

We recommend trying the content retriever today, and if you're early enough in a new Xperience project's lifecycle, adopting it across your codebase. We hope to make the content retriever production ready in the next Refresh.

Email Builder content data

Xperience by Kentico's Email Builder went through a preview phase and multiple iterations just like the new content retriever API. The Email Builder has been production ready and supported since our March 2025 Refresh and we've continued to iteratively improve it.

This month we are adding a new capability developers are sure to love - email content type code generation - and full support for content retrieval of an email's structured fields in Email Builder Razor components.

That's right - your email content types can now be represented as C# classes!

Why would you use this feature when you can build a suite of Email Builder widgets that link to other content items or have their own text content fields?

Well, not all emails need the power of the visual, drag-and-drop Email Builder. Many will benefit from having well crafted HTML (or MJML), type safe C#, and a few template properties for design customization. A structured email content type can be easier for marketers to manage and validate while developers handle the email markup and content retrieval behind the scenes.

Both approaches to the Email Builder are valid and now teams have the flexibility to choose the right one for each email they author.

Email Builder Starter Kit

If you are just beginning your Email Builder adoption journey, check out our supported and open-source Xperience by Kentico Email Builder Starter Kit on GitHub. This starter kit includes several widgets, sections, and a starter template. You can use it out-of-the-box with a few CSS and theme customizations or explore the Email Builder technology in the included Dancing Goat example project.

We plan to continue improving the starter kit as a rapid development tool for emails, an educational tool for developers, and as the base for an Email Builder implementation in our Dancing Goat and Kbank demo solutions.

SaaS domain pre-validation

As part of our on-going journey to reduce the downtime customers see in Xperience by Kentico SaaS we've updated the validation process for custom domains.

Custom domain pre-validation ensures custom domains are already configured and validated before a DNS change is made, directing production traffic at the SaaS environment. This significantly reduces downtime and the risk of "launch day" issues.

Be prepared for your customer journey

Xperience by Kentico's customer journeys help marketers realize the impact and success of their digital experiences on customer engagement. This "success" is shown through data and a visualization on the customer journey overview page.

But, up until now customer journey data needed to be recalculated on demand by the marketer when viewing the journey.

This month's Refresh brings scheduled automatic recalculation for customer journeys with a dedicated scheduled task, which can be configured to run in off-peak hours (but before the marketing team starts their day).

Once the scheduled task is enabled marketers can enable or disable scheduled data recalculation for each customer journey in Xperience. All new journeys will automatically have it enabled if the scheduled task is enabled for an application.

Actionable data, at your fingertips, ready when you need it - awesome!

What's next?

As always, check out our documentation Changelog for the full Refresh feature and technical details.

We hope these new capabilities, features, and API improvements unlock solutions for you. Try them out, let us know 👋 what you think.

For the next Refresh... wow, I don't even know where to start!

• Support for multiple vanity URLs per web page, enabling more complex marketing campaigns and content migrations from other platforms.

• Another iteration of digital commerce, with order status management and notifications.

• A conversational interface with AIRA, seamlessly integrated into the Xperience administration UI to support marketers while they use Xperience.

These updates will, as always, accompany a number of UX and developer-focused improvements.

Check back next month for another Xperience by Kentico Refresh review!