Having worked with Kentico since version 4 I've found many things just come easy now.  That is, with the exception of the Lucene syntax used in Kentico's Smart Search.  I've heard many people talk about looking into the Lucene data and finding what's actually in there but until a few weeks ago, I've never done it as I've always been able to work through it.  Read more to find out how I've resolved an ever mind blowing problem with dates in Kentico's Smart Search.

Ever had random errors show up when performing an upgrade?  Maybe the upgrade won't succeed or it succeeds but gives you some random errors later on?  Read on to find out what problems I experienced and how I found the root cause to a "successful" upgrade which actually failed miserably.  

Ensuring your Kentico instance is setup properly starts with the installation and configuration of your site on your local machine and the server(s).  To fully embrace the functionality of Kentico you need to set permissions properly on folders within the Kentico install.  This article will discuss more about what folders need what permissions and more importantly, why.

More and more of our clients are running their websites in the cloud.  Some are harder to convince to make this leap and some just want to go all in.  Far too often there are issues that come up which cause clients to rethink their move.  We're here to help with those shaky times and make the transition as smooth as possible.  But there are going to be times when you just throw your hands up in the air and scream.  This, was one of those times.

Kentico 10 was recently released and we've had the joy of upgrading a few sites to Kentico 10 already.  Here I'm going to share our experience with you all and some of the easy pieces to the upgrade and some not so easy pieces and recommendations when upgrading your site.    

This quick tip will show you how to enable your transformation to take full advantage of Kentico's navigation options.    

Kentico offers many settings, configurations and suggestions on how to improve your websites performance.  Configuring Kentico correctly, you can realy optimize your website BUT there are still a few items which are not resolved like combining scripts and stylesheets into a single request.  In this post I'll share my experience implenting a module created by Kentico Gold Partner PMC-Digital which combines scripts and stylesheets into a single request and caches them for you.    

Over the last few months we've been working through some enhanvements and bugs with one of our clients and during some of the research on the bugs we found some issues with how the environment was setup.  Having only worked with Azure Web Apps a few times, and each time was significantly different, I wanted to share the problems and solutions along with best practices to setup your Kentico instance in Azure Web Apps for storing your files in Azure and Blob storage.  

You've installed Kentico, have your site up and running locally and now you need to deploy it.  You look in your file system and see there are thousands upon thousands of files in the root directory.  Yes, Kentico is a large CMS and in order to run it you do need a lot of files but what I'll show you today is how to clean up your installation for deployment.    

In my previous post I talked about an issue with enabling SSL and tracking Contacts in Kentico.  The short story was simply disabling monitoring of on-line users.  Now a new issue has come up, I have thousands of contacts I need to clean up.