Upgrading from Kentico 12 to 13

Question

I am preparing for my next attempt at upgrading a Kentico 12 MVC site (12.0.102) that I inherited to Kentico 13 and I'm just trying to determine viable paths that I can take.

What I would like to know is, what functionality am I likely to lose in the upgrade process, meaning what functionality do they no longer support that is likely to be an issue, and how can I get around that?

And secondly, is there going to be much of a difference between upgrading to 13 MVC or can I upgrade to the dot net core version without too many issues?

What have people done?

Answer 1

I've done a handful of these already.

Functionality wise, you don't lose much going from MVC to .Net Core, the biggest differences are needing to refactor Controller+action Html.RenderAction into View Components, as well as ResponseCache no longer exists, and you should use the <cache> tags to do partial caching.

I would leverage my MVCCaching to help aid tracking Cache Dependencies.

.Net Core is much nicer with dependency injection and Async (it's everywhere), and Kentico provides some new interfaces (IPageRetriever and IProgressiveCache) to leverage.

I would highly recommend upgrading the solution to .Net core 6.0 when you do upgrade. Sean Wright has a bunch of great articles on best practices, and you can check out Nuget Packages "XperienceCommunity.______" for various extensions, most of which myself and Sean wrote.

Hope this helps, you can also check out the KX13 baseline project on Github.com/HBSTech for a great starting point, although we are working on a revamp to this right now to incorporate nullable checks and making it easier to transition KX13 to Xperience by Kentico (next version).

Answer 2

You'll find a complete list of all API changes here: https://devnet.kentico.com/documentation/api-changes/kentico-13

Here's what I have experienced once I did this: If it is a Kentico 12 Portal Engine Website, you will loose all the Content placed by the Portal Engine. But this is only relevant if you have a Portal Engine Website. For MVC Websites (as recommended by Kentico for years) it is not relevant. If it comes to this, you'll have to find a way to convert this old content to a new content architecture. In my past, it was always easier to do this manually. But there are some approaches to do it programmatically. The Portal Engine has been removed in K13.

With the Portal Engine all ootb WebParts have been removed. You have to write own widgets to replace them. It's a design decission what you will place into widgets, sections, page templates or layouts...

I once struggled about Event Booking. This is also not moved to K13.

The Dynamic Routing could replace custom routing modules. Most of the custom routing modules I have had in old K12 project did not work in K13 ootb.

And I once have had a project which extremly uses the document.documentNamePath. This has been removed, too.