Xperience by Kentico Refresh - October 16, 2025

Xperience by Kentico’s October Refresh includes new in-preview digital commerce updates, a SaaS deployment speed-up, and an MCP server to help you build Xperience projects even faster, plus several other helpful improvements for marketers and software developers.

Easy email audience segmentation

Marketing is based on the idea that people will engage, convert, or buy if they see the right message, at the right time. Digital-focused marketers also rely on the message being delivered through the right digital experience, or channel.

Xperience by Kentico's Email Builder gives marketers the ability to easily personalize the presentation and message of specific areas of an email using widget personalization and contact groups (audience segmentation).

But what if a marketer wants to send emails with completely different messaging and design to various segments of their email recipient list, using the same contact activity signals that define contact groups?

Now, thanks to email audience segmentation, marketers can target a specific segment of an email recipient list using a combination of inclusion and exclusion contact group rules.

Getting the right email to the right contact is as simple as selecting contact groups from a dropdown list in the email's properties!

Keep track of your forms across pages and channels

Marketers love Xperience by Kentico's content usage tracking. It helps them discover and validate where and how their content is used across the Content hub, web, email, and headless channels. With tools like these, marketers can react quickly to changes in content marketing strategy with confidence.

But structured content and media assets aren't the only things marketers reuse across websites, so October's Refresh brings this reuse tracking feature to the Form Builder!

When viewing any form in the Form Builder, marketers will see a new "Used in" menu item to the left of the builder interface. Clicking this displays the list of pages using this form with the Form widget.

This list includes the same helpful information as shown in usage tracking for web pages and reusable content items - language, channel, content type, and even related items linking to those pages.

Digital commerce updates

Since Xperience by Kentico's digital commerce capability was released in July we've been hard at work delivering improvements to help you get your commerce solutions to market faster.

This month's Refresh is no different and includes several new APIs we're releasing as a preview, so you can provide us with feedback before everything is finalized.

These new APIs focus on price calculation and order creation.

Price calculation

Businesses adapt product packaging and pricing to fit industry norms, regional laws, and customer expectations. They localize names, adjust for taxes, shipping, and regulations, and offer exemptions where applicable. Product variants - economy, premium, or region-specific - align with local preferences and budgets, while services like free shipping or tailored support are built into pricing to stay competitive and meet customer expectations.

Development teams are challenged to accommodate the wide range of requirements and business rules based on a business's commerce strategy. Some built-in commerce features might be used as-is while others need to be highly adapted or completely replaced.

Xperience's price calculation API was designed to help developers move quickly while also offering total control when needed by combining the following C# types.

• IProductDataRetriever - Data Source Abstraction

  • Retrieves product information (prices, SKUs, names) from any data source (pages, Content hub, external APIs, databases)

  • Called automatically by the pipeline to bulk-load product data for all items in a calculation request

• IPriceCalculationService - Orchestration Engine

  • Coordinates the entire pricing pipeline by executing calculation steps in sequence

  • Transforms PriceCalculationRequest → PriceCalculationResult through a series of processing steps

  • Handles the flow from initial cart data to final totals with taxes, shipping, and discounts

• IPriceCalculationStep - Modular Calculation Logic

  • Individual processing units that perform specific calculations (unit pricing, tax, shipping, discounts)

  • Execute sequentially, each building upon previous step results

  • Can be customized/replaced to implement business-specific pricing rules (e.g., ITaxPriceCalculationStep)

The entire price calculation processing pipeline and its customization points are detailed in our documentation and include helpful visuals.

Because Xperience treats products and their content as part of a business's marketing message, teams can model their product lines using web pages or reusable content in the Content hub, defining fields and data points that are relevant to them and their customers.

Each product and pricing API can be extended, rearranged, or replaced - no more unused fields or locked down logic!

Automatic order creation

Order creation is less focused on customization and more focused on handling the customization of product packaging and pricing, ensuring everything the customer sees during checkout matches the final invoice.

The new digital commerce order creation APIs help a developer manage this customization while also speeding up the implementation process.

• IOrderCreationService - High-Level Order Orchestrator

  • Automates the complete order creation workflow from shopping cart data to persisted order
  • Handles customer/address management, price calculation integration, and order record creation
  • Coordinates multiple steps: customer creation → price calculation → order persistence → notifications

• OrderData - Order Information Container

  • Data transfer object containing all order details: customer info, order items, addresses, payment/shipping methods
  • Includes OrderItems with ProductIdentifier and quantities, plus BillingAddress/ShippingAddress as AddressDto objects
  • Supports both authenticated users (via MemberId) and anonymous customers

• IOrderInfoMapper - Custom Order Field Mapping

  • Extensibility point for adding custom fields to OrderInfo database records
  • Maps from OrderData and PriceCalculationResult to populate additional order properties
  • Allows business-specific order customization (discount codes, special instructions, etc.)

This architecture separates order data preparation from order processing, allowing customization at multiple points while maintaining a consistent creation pipeline.

Review our digital commerce documentation or create a sample Dancing Goat application to get started.

Ctrl+click UX navigation improvements

Xperience by Kentico is an evolving platform, continuously adding new capabilities and improving existing ones. It also receives quality-of-life UX improvements that are sometimes missed through the bright light of anticipated features like content sync and AI content translations with AIRA.

But we want to call out a recent UX improvement that just might bring a smile to your face.

Now, users can interact with more parts of Xperience's administration as links.

This means for a variety of UI elements (ones that would normally cause a browser navigation with a click) now support the following:

• Ctrl+click or middle-mouse click to open in a new tab.

• Right-click, then select "copy link" in your browser to paste a URL into a new tab or share through email or chat.

Enjoy!

Context engineering with Kentico's documentation MCP server

At Kentico we believe that AI is changing how digital marketers work and want to empower them through AIRA in Xperience by Kentico.

To provide similar support to developers using an agentic software development approach to building Xperience by Kentico solutions, we're now hosting the Xperience by Kentico Documentation MCP Server.

We've written about the benefits of MCP servers - how they expose AI agents to more tools and information. Our new documentation MCP server gives AI agents access to the documentation and guides in the Kentico Learn Portal.

This means AI models driving the agents do not need Xperience by Kentico's latest APIs and features in their training data to be useful to software developers! Agents can use the Xperience documentation MCP server to search across the entire, always up-to-date knowledge base for the product.

• Want your AI agent to help you build an implementation using the latest digital commerce APIs released this month? No problem, just give it access to the MCP server!

• Tired of general purpose LLMs confusing Kentico Xperience 13 with Xperience by Kentico's APIs and features? Use the MCP server to do some context engineering and keep your agent on track.

The installation guide in our documentation has instructions for the most popular AI-enabled IDEs and includes example prompts for you to try.

Adoption of .NET logging standards

One of Xperience by Kentico's most important architectural strategies is being built on top of ASP.NET Core. Instead of creating our own framework or way of accomplishing common DXP project tasks, we rely on standards established by .NET and the .NET community. This ensures developers familiar with .NET will be highly productive with Xperience.

To that end, Xperience by Kentico now uses the native .NET ILogger as its primary logging interface and is backing the commonly used IEventLogService with the ILogger interface.

This helps further align Xperience's patterns and practices with those used by Microsoft for .NET and the broader .NET ecosystem. It also enables support for custom logging providers, like .NET Aspire.

You can review the full extent of this feature, API deprecations, and recommended changes for your applications in the Changelog.

We also have completely updated documentation on using ILogger in your Xperience by Kentico applications.

SaaS deployment speed-up

Recently we announced planned improvements to Xperience by Kentico SaaS deployment speed, switching from classic backups to restore points.

The first phase of these updates was completed in July, which covered databases. This month's Refresh brings that same update to Azure App Services, which drive the Xperience by Kentico applications hosted in our SaaS offering.

This update decreases deployment times, helping teams iterate faster, reduce time to market, and eliminate downtime for customers.

Phase 3 of these deployment speed updates, focused on file storage, is planned for November, along with another anticipated SaaS improvement - zero-downtime deployments.

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 November Refresh... we're bringing some exciting content management and operational improvements!

• Recycling Bin - removing outdated content items with option to restore, enabling content managers to apply more restrictive governance processes around their content so they can 'archive' and then restore content from Recycling Bin.

• Apply read-only mode to Admin UI during deployment outages, ensuring customers' websites stay active for visitors during production deployments for zero downtime in Xperience by Kentico SaaS and private cloud instances.

• Forms - Validation rules, allowing marketers to specify validation rules for form fields in order to define constraints on user input.

• Smart Drag&Drop Asset Upload, making it simple for editors to upload files within channel editing experiences without needing to navigate to the Content Hub.

• XbyK .NET 10, ensuring our platform is fully ready for .NET 10, the newest Long-Term Support (LTS) release from Microsoft, providing improved performance, modern features, and long-term stability.

• Reusable Content Cloning, allowing users to quickly duplicate individual or multiple content items to speed up the content creation process.

These updates will, as always, accompany a number of UX and developer-focused improvements including SaaS deployment speed improvements and enhanced logging capabilities.

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