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One of our clients has a rather large website, currently build in Kentico 11 / Protal Engine. We are now preparing the transition to Kentico 12 / MVC.

We woul'd like to do this gradually, per section. We have a couple of concerns regarding this:

  • Is it possible to run parts of a website Kentico 12 MVC and other parts Kentico 12 Portal Engine?

  • Is it possible to handle specifice cultures first? So is it possible to have 2 versions (MVC / Portal Engine) of the same page?

  • Are there any best practices concerning a gradual transition to K12 MVC? Since this is a rather large site, we have to do this transition gradually.

Wesley Lenssen
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I would highly highly recommend against mixing a Portal Engine site and MVC site in Kentico (Web Forms and MVC in the same project). While yes, this is techncially possible (see this link on websites that use MVC partially in the portal engine on an older version of Kentico) it is no where near a best practice. There is a performance consideration (overhead of processing requests in both the web forms lifecycle and mvc pipeline), long term maintainablity consideration (hard to rememeber what goes / went where), and overall technical debt to deal with.

I would recommend jumping to MVC for the whole thing when it is time for a redesign as a best choice, or when your version of Kentico won't be supported by Kentico on Portal any longer (see the Kentico MVC transition guide)

If you absolutely need to do this in chunks, consider creating a second site in your Kentico instance at a different subdomain and learning MVC for Kentico there while still connected to he same instance. You could start treating the content as a content model accessible through the Kentico libraries nuget packages in a clean MVC architecture. This site could live at subdomain.website.com while your existing portal engine site could be at www.website.com. Again, this would not be my first choice, but it could possibly make sense in your scenario.

Mcbeev
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There is no easy way of combining the Portal Engine and MVC together. In your scenario, it will be even harder as Portal site is on Kentico 11 and MVC site you are going to build on Kentico 12 I presume. Hence, the only strategy I see is:

  • develop, release and migrate content for a new site section by section
  • host both solutions separately (separate db, separate web servers)
  • set up a reverse proxy that will be routing requests to old or new site based on URL, so that for the site visitor it will still look like a single site

The only challenge in this approach is if you have some functionality that spends across the entire site. For example, it can be my account that is used for e-commerce, favourites, newsletters, etc. In this case I'd suggest considering moving this first alongside with the relevant sections.

Dmitry Bastron
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