Introducing
Kentico CMS 6

Achieve instant marketing results with Kentico EMS, the integrated Customer Experience Management platform.

Kentico CMS 6 makes developers even more productive and allows them to do more with less code. It brings support for the latest technologies and delivers many features you were asking for, including Web Application project type, easier upgrade process, complete Windows Azure support, MVC, LINQ, REST, better API, even more detailed documentation and many others.

Also, with the new Kentico Enterprise Marketing Solution (EMS), developers can create highly available websites and help marketers deliver dynamic customer experiences.

Increase Your Productivity with Latest Development Technologies

Kentico CMS 6 supports the latest technologies that make developers more productive, including:

.NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4.0 (.NET 2.0 is no longer supported in version 6)
HTML 5 – rendering of HTML 5 video and audio elements
LINQ – easily query Kentico CMS data and use it in your code
REST and OData – access Kentico CMS data from external applications
MVC – create website pages with model-view-controller architecture
Web Application Project – with version 6, you can choose from Web Application Project, Website Project and Windows Azure Project
Modern API with a complete business layer, typed collections and other API improvements
Improved customization model

Full Support of Windows Azure

While we've been supporting the Windows Azure platform for almost one year and have numerous clients running on Windows Azure, we are now providing a more complete cloud experience to anybody who is looking for an elastic platform for a website:

Install Kentico CMS as a Windows Azure project and install Kentico CMS database directly into SQL Azure
Run Kentico CMS on multiple Windows Azure instances for scalability and higher availability
Store uploaded files in Windows Azure Storage
Store application settings in the service configuration file

The new Kentico EMS features will also be supported both on-premise and in Windows Azure.

Easier Upgrades, Hotfixing and Installation Management

The new Kentico Installation Manager makes it easier for you to upgrade websites and apply hotfixes. It automatically downloads the updates and lets you install them with a few clicks.

New K# Macro Language and Intellisense

K# is the new macro language. If you're familiar with Kentico macros, you know how powerful they are and how they reduce the need to write customization code. Now imagine that you can write not only simple macros, but also more complex code structures – that's K#.

K# empowers developers with many new structures:

collections (IEnumerable objects)
if-else conditions
while, for and foreach loops
lambda expressions
code snippets in macros
and others...

Moreover, you can now write macro expressions using the new editor with intellisense!

System Integration Bus

The new System Integration Bus allows for efficient synchronization between Kentico CMS and any 3rd party systems, such as CRM, ERP, user databases and others.

Better Documentation and New API Examples

We listen to your feedback and we invested huge efforts to provide you with a better documentation. Among others, we prepared a new API Examples site that shows you how to use the API in each module.

Quickly Build New Layouts using Layout Webparts and Widgets

Now you can define layout of your page templates without writing HTML layout code. Just choose one of the built-in layout webpart:

multi-column layout
multi-rows layout
table layout
collapsible panel layout
tabs layout
accordion layout

Syntax Highlighting and T-SQL Editor

With Kentico CMS 6, writing code gets much easier with new syntax highlighting support for CSS, HTML, XML, ASPX and T-SQL code. You can even edit stored procedures and views from the Kentico CMS Site Manager!

Version History and Rollback for Page Templates and Other Objects

No more worries about making changes to page templates, transformations, CSS stylesheets and other development objects! With version 6, you can easily roll back to a previous version and restore deleted objects from the recycle bin.

Additional Enterprise Features

Kentico CMS 6 also adds more enterprise features for mission-critical deployments:

health monitoring
multiple SMTP servers
Windows Service for execution of scheduled tasks

Performance Improvements

We try to improve Kentico performance with every new release and version 6 is not an exception. You will benefit from:

storing cache items in the file system – a new caching option for pages that do not load often enough to be stored in the memory
improved paging in web controls that loads only data displayed on the given page
substitutions of parts of the web page when using full-page cache
JavaScript and CSS compression and minification
configurable client cache