Today I am pleased to announce my latest contribution to the Kentico developer community, the Bit.ly Metrics Module for Kentico CMS 7.0. The purpose of this module is to bring everything you need into Kentico CMS when it comes to using the Bit.ly URL Shortening service. The module gives you a way to see all of your Bit.ly metrics, aka user link history, as a custom Tool in the CMSDesk and at the page or document level. The data for each shortened link is stored in a custom table, and it is kept in sync using the Integration Bus component of Kentico CMS.
The Bit.ly Metrics module also gives content editors the ability to shorten any Document URL right from within the CMSDesk. Utilizing this module saves you or your content administrators the time of jumping out and logging into the backend of Bit.ly to see how often your links are being clicked. My favorite part about it is that with one click I can sort the data and compare how often one or more of my links are being clicked.
Modules in Kentico CMS represent groups of functionality in Kentico. They can be a set of web parts, scheduled tasks, custom settings, and just about anything else in the platform. They are a great way to extend the system to allow for custom functionality. They are also easily exportable from one instance of Kentico to another. This module is a result of my presentation last fall at Kentico Connection 2012 about integrating with Kentico CMS. I demo’d the functionality to the audience during my session, but time flies fast, and I did not have a chance to finish it until a few days ago.
