Kentico Xperience 13 Refreshes: Small steps for the product, a giant leap for Kentico Xperience

The ever-evolving world of technology is a real sink or swim situation. What was relevant yesterday becomes old tomorrow. Logically, the only path leading to success is constant innovation. Knowing your direction and goals should be a matter of course. Having a clear roadmap of how to get there and committing to it is what helps you stay in front of the pack. In this intricate race, only the strongest players can keep up. In Kentico Xperience, we’re fully committed to swimming and to providing the best value for our customers without compromise. Milestones on our roadmap are mapped out confidently—and it’s about time we shared the details with you.

Stronger product, faster delivery, better experience

Taking a glance into the past evolution of Kentico Xperience, we see many game-changing steps taken—each of them modernizing and innovating the product to help businesses excel at digital transformation. A new version of the product would usually be launched every 12–18 months, which was also the case with deploying Kentico Xperience 13. To allow our customers to leverage the most advanced .NET Core technology, changes across the entire platform were necessary, which contributed to longer release cycles. 

While the long release cycles always strengthened the product’s position amongst the market-leaders significantly, they often came bearing fundamental changes, requiring an arduous adoption and adjustment period. Our goal is to keep the innovation-momentum going, whilst removing these challenges. Therefore, we’re setting up new standards for releasing new functionalities, to make the transitions more seamless and natural for the users.

Kentico Xperience 13, released in October 2020, is now looking to undergo a series of updates—called Refreshes—released on a quarterly basis. Every Refresh includes an addition of a few new improvements, technical as well as business related, expanding the product’s functionality with the intention to bring greater value to our customers faster.
 

What does it mean for you? We are working towards removing laborious transitions and avoiding incompatibility. Our mission is to remove any further versioning of the product. The future of the Kentico Xperience digital experience platform will enable you to leverage full power and potential of the most up-to-date technology, seamlessly, to further improve your performance and boost your success.  

The anatomy of Refresh 1

As we’ve already brought our future intentions to you when introducing the product vision—we’re now about to take the first step on this new journey of iterative improvements. Standing on the horizon, March is the month we’re going to welcome Kentico Xperience 13 Refresh 1 with all its cutting-edge bells and whistles. Let us walk you through some of its highlights and zoom in on what you can be looking forward to.

Content Personalization using Recombee AI 

As an investment into future-proofing our product, Kentico Xperience added an integration with Recombee. It will help you display most relevant content for your users by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, while saving time to your content editors. It is an equally powerful alternative to the classical content personalization using Personas, where you configure your own rules, segments and behavioral patterns manually.

Bynder Selector

This clever integration with digital asset management system Bynder enables users to utilize the same media sources for all possible purposes. Selecting digital assets in Bynder and adding them directly to Kentico Xperience web pages becomes seamless and effortless. Once you’ve uploaded your images in Bynder, they can be used in Kentico Xperience too, without the need of duplicating them. Any changes in Bynder will appear automatically in your Kentico Xperience page. It’s even very helpful in case you’d like to use the same type of media sources for your website, as well as for any printed materials.

New Search Index

We have improved the already existing concept of Search in Kentico Xperience to make your content more available. Web administrators can now use a new, combined index, which allows them to simply search through both structured data and fulltext on the page. Content can be retrieved either from page fields for structured content or scraped from the page markup in case the content is built using Page Builder and its widgets. These two combinable approaches are developed in a way to support Azure search, enabling developers to create just one new search index for all the content types.

.NET Core Debug

Following the trends in building modern websites, the .NET Core technology remains one of the main innovation focus points for Kentico Xperience. Therefore, we keep expanding new functionalities within this technology and creating new features to support it. This built-in debug tool will enable an easier debugging of running websites, as now you’ll be able to see SQL queries of your live site in the Debug application.

Other added features include

• Cache Tag Helper – a technical feature for increasing performance of a website ran on Kentico Xperience 13, by solving cache dependencies.
• Object Selector – a technical component that enables any Kentico Xperience objects to be selected and used as part of the widgets' configuration.
• Legitimate interest activity logging – a technical feature that gives you better oversight of visitors’ consent for tracking of their activity. For instance, visitors who fill in a form, on which the request for consent is included, won’t be prompted to enable any other tracking, whilst retaining the same level of peerless security.
  
  

Boldly stepping into the future

Summing up these valuable additions, it’s worth reminding you that this is only the first of four Refreshes planned for Kentico Xperience 13. The following Refreshes are coming in June, September, and December 2021, slowly but steadily paving the way for the next chapter of Kentico Xperience’s ongoing development—Odyssey—a codename that stands for the next generation of our DXP. Within it, new additions will be integrated in the form of regular Refreshes, in increasing frequency, fully removing any further versioning of the product. 

If you’re interested in getting a closer look at what the long-term product vision has to offer and want to learn more about the new features, we’re hosting a series of webinars, exploring this exciting journey. Join the webinar in the EMEA, North America and APAC regions and stay tuned! 

You can also download the complete Kentico Xperience 13 Refresh 1 infographics: