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v7.18

Ucommerce for Kentico Accelerator Installation Guide

Ucommerce for Kentico replaces the built-in commerce capabilities of Kentico with a richer set of e-commerce features. To use Ucommerce for Kentico it is recommended to set up Kentico without Kentico Commerce during installation to avoid having dupliated e-commerce tooling inside the CMS.

Requirements

  • Using SQL Server 2017/ SQL Express 2017. SQL CE not supported.
  • If you're using IIS, make sure you have the URL Rewrite module installed for your server. This is a requirements for the URLs generated by Ucommerce to work.

Setup How-to

At Ucommerce, we put a lot of emphasis on getting set up quick and without too many manual steps. The following will guide you through step-by-step on how to be up-and-running with Avenue Clothing for Kentico from scratch:

  1. Clone Ucommerce for Kentico Accelerator repository from Bitbucket to a location on your machine from which you want to run the website. If you're going to use IIS, you might want to choose c:\inetpub or similar. If you want to run directly from Visual Studio (using IIS Express), you might put it into your usual folder for Visual Studio projects.
  2. Set up a new site in your local Internet Information Servies. To do so, open the IIS application, right-click the Sites folder and select Add Website. Configure the site with the desired name and as Physical path select the CMS folder of the directory where you have the files of this repository. You should leave the Host name field empty, unless you have a specific Kentico License that allows you to use another domain.
  3. In the repository, under the /database folder, you will find a .bacpac database snapshot file which you need to restore into your database server. The way you do this is by opening SQL Server Management Studio, right-clicking the Databases folder under your server, and selecting Import Data-Tier Application. Follow the wizard, and when prompted to select a file, select the previously mentioned .bacpac file. The .bacpac-file contains the data for the entire website to run.
  4. Now that you have the database restored, you need to set the connection string in the web.config of the site located in the CMS folder in this repository to use this database.
  5. Build the solution by opening the '.sln' file using Visual Studio and build the solution, e.g. by right-clicking the solution in the Solution Explorer and clicking 'Build Solution'.
  6. Browse to the backend of Ucommerce to update the faceted search. You do this by browsing to localhost/admin (replace to 'localhost' to match your hostname). Login with username "administrator" and leave the password empty. In the left hand menu select Ucommerce -> Settings. In the Ucommerce tree, select Settings -> Search and click "Index everything from scratch". This will reindex all products, so they can be filtered through faceted search.
  7. Replace 'localhost' to match your hostname (if necessary) and browse hostname/home.

You're now ready to browse the Avenue Clothing Store on your local environment!

Troubleshooting

When downloading the .zip-file Windows might mark the file as untrusted. If you experience read access denied to files, you could try to unblock the downloaded .zip-file. Right click the file in File Explorer and tick the "Unblock" checkbox.

If you place the content of the .zip-file in your inetpub-folder, the application pool setup in IIS might need to be set to Identity = "LocalSystem" to have write access to the subfolders of inetpub.

How to Use the Accelerator with Kentico 11

The Ucommerce for Kentico Accelerator was built upon Kentico 10. If you want to use the accelerator with Kentico 11 you must follow the following steps:

  • Follow the steps below to set up the accelerator.
  • When you have the accelerator running, use the upgrade tool created by Kentico available from the Kentico 10 to 11 upgrade page.
  • After the tool finished upgrading from Kentico 10 to Kentico 11, you need to manually upgrade the Kentico.Libraries Nuget package to version 11.0.0. You can do this by opening the solution in Visual Studio, right-clicking the AvenueClothing.Installer project selecting Manage NuGet Packages. Then from the Updates tab you have to select the Kentico.Libraries package, select version 11.0.0 on the right-hand side and click Update.
  • When this package is updated, you can build your solution and you should be ready to go.

Troubleshooting

We have made a small modification to the logon.aspx.cs file, which the upgrade tool will mark as custom modified. This change is simply made to automatically prefill the backoffice login credentials. If this happens you can remove the old logon.aspx.cs file and remove the '.new' extension from the logon.aspx.cs.new file.

It is possible that when requesting the website, you will get a white page saying that the website is offline. This is done by the upgrade tool for the duration of the upgrade. If you encounter this, and you have done all the above-mentioned steps, you can simply navigate to your CMS folder and delete the App_Offline.htm file.

Running the site as an IIS application If you'd like to run the site as an IIS application, you have to follow the following steps:

Create an application in IIS. In IIS Manager you need to right-click your website and select Add application. You can choose the name of the application as this will be the URL of your local website in the form of "localhost//". The Physical path of the application must point to the CMS folder in the repository as this is the folder where the website itself is located.

Comment or remove the URL-rewrite section in the web.config-file placed in the CMS-folder. It's surrounded by the -tags.

Verify that the web.config in the root-folder of the website contains the right rewrite-rules (containing the name of your application). So if you in step 1 created an application called "KenticoShop", you need to update your rules to look like: 

    
      
    <action type="Rewrite" url="/KenticoShop/catalog/product.aspx?catalog={R:2}&category={R:3}&product={R:4}" />

There are four rules in the web.config that needs to be updated.

Further Development

For further development when developing in a team, you can use the already-enabled Continuous Integration provided by Kentico. To restore data from CIRepository, you have to open a Command Prompt with administrator privileges (right-click and select 'run as administrator'), then you need to navigate to the bin folder of the website where the ContinuousIntegration.exe is located (for example: cd "c:\Repositories\Avenue Clothing Kentico (WF)\CMS\bin"). And running the following command: ContinuousIntegration.exe -r. You will be notified when the restoration is complete. You can read more about how to use Continuous Integration at Kentico's documentation.