Kentico 12 Service Pack: What’s New?

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Senad Bahor
July 05, 2019 3 min read
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UPDATE: Kentico released the latest version of their Digital Xperience platform in November 2020. Find out what's new in Kentico Xperience 13.

Last week’s big news in the world of content management systems was the launch of the Kentico 12 Service Pack. In a bid to speed up releases, Kentico has strayed away from their usual 12-month product release cycle to launch a bunch of new features in MVC that should get marketers excited.

Let’s take a look at some of the Kentico features that you can expect to see in the latest service pack:
 

A/B Testing for MVC is Finally Here

After a long wait, you will now be able to conduct A/B tests in Kentico MVC. The Kentico Development Team have openly admitted that it’s not ground-breaking (we all know A/B testing is nothing new!), however, it is a slightly upgraded A/B test application than what could be found in Kentico Portal Engine. The service pack has made it a lot easier to manage the whole A/B test process right from within the page application. What’s even better is that with a single click, Kentico automatically promotes the winner to the page tree and finishes the test. Marketers should be encouraged to split test as many variants as possible and we’re delighted that they can now do so in MVC.


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MVC Page Templates to Save You Time

Marketers are always looking for ways to save time when launching new campaigns, and the new Service Pack should go a long way to helping with that. Instead of having to work with developers to create a page for each and every new campaign as and when needed, users of Kentico 12 can now develop a library of templates in advance. These can then simply be copied and customised to your liking as many times as you want.

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Alternative URLs For Your Campaign Pages

Again, another feature which Kentico has said ‘is not going to set the CMS world alight’. However, we do believe that the addition of alternative URLs is a great little feature in the latest service pack. Marketers can now create multiple, alternative, short, attractive, campaign-ready URLs for existing pages. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s much better than long, boring URLs for your campaign pages!

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Easy Management of Your Media

It should also be mentioned that the Kentico 12 Service Pack includes two new selectors which should make day-to-day use of the platform easier. The first is a new path selector, which simply put, enables you to select the relevant path you want to use to link to other content pages directly from the page tree. The second update is the new media selector. With this, you’ll be able to easily select a new media item like a picture or video directly from the media library, without having to upload it each time.
 

Some More Extras

There are a few less significant updates that can be found in the service pack:

  • You can view consent agreements for a chosen consent in the Data Protection application
  • You can view plain text as well as rich text for the body of emails in the email queue
  • MVC preview can be opened in a preview tab

The Future of MVC

Although users would already expect to see some of these features in MVC ahead of this service pack, it is great to see Kentico’s commitment to future development and making marketers more independent in their use of the platform. Development of MVC is clearly a priority for Kentico, even more so after it was announced that sites running Kentico 12 on Portal Engine will only be supported until 2022.    

Everyone at GRM Digital is looking forward to seeing what new features we can get our hands on during the next release.

To find out more about Kentico and whether it’s the right fit for your next CMS upgrade, please call our web development experts on +44 (0)203 397 4155 or email [email protected]..

Find out how we became Kentico Xperience Quality Experts.    

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Written by Senad Bahor

Principal Consultant