Quick Take Review: Umbraco Web Content Management System III

Workflow

Workflow is an interesting topic for Hartvig. He quotes James Robertson and Tony Byrne saying "workflow doesn't work in practice". That being said, you can implement workflow.

Out of the box, Umbraco includes the basics including the ability to restrict users and get notified on actions. Workflow is based on the permission modelyou set up in the Users section. For example, if you don't allow Writers to have Publish permissions, then the Writer only has the ability to Save or Save and Send for Approval:

Umbraco — Simple Workflow Options

Note that the article has a little orange star, indicating it has not been published. As well, the right click menu does not offer the option to Publish, but to Send To Publish, which means sending for approval. There is also a button in the main window that you can click to send the article off for approval as well.

Notifications

The system does not automatically send out workflow notifications. One must subscribe to specific system events in order for this to happen. You can do this on a Site level, Section Level or Page level. You can also select which types of changes you want notification on (see list below).

Umbraco — Configuring Event Notifications

Notifications come by email:

Umbraco — Email Notification Example

This is a fairly straightforward and basic approach to providing workflow for your content. In addition, the event model is exposed which is meant to enable third-party integrations (e.g., workflow systems, translation automation, etc.). In speaking with Niels, he generally discourages the use of workflow unless it is absolutely needed. With that said, there are cases where it is absolutely needed.

Multi-Lingual Support

Umbraco ships with 15 languages for a localized back office user interface (UI). You can also add additional language if required.

The Umbraco UI text is stored in an XML file. This enables you to take a copy of the file and translate it for a new language. Once done, the language is automatically available.

Current languages include: English, French, Spanish (with variants), Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Greek.

There is a menu item on the Content Menu to Send to Translation. You must have a user assigned to the Translator role for this to work. This will send an email to the Translator.

Umbraco — Send Content for Translation

Editorial Capabilities

Umbraco refers to their Administration site as the Back Office. In the Back Office you can do a number of things, depending on your role and permissions: Manage Content, Media, Users and Members.

You can also manage Settings like style sheets, templates, scripts, dictionary, languages, media types and document types. Finally, there's a developers section where you can do things like browse cache settings, manage data types, create and manage macros, packages, XSLT files and phyton files.

When you first log in, the opening dashboard is empty, but you are able to modify what is displayed in the dashboard through the use of dashboard controls.

These dashboard controls are basically .NET user controls that are added to the /config/dashboard.config file. There are a number of free community controls for things like New Content, Last Modified Content, Search, Viewing Log Files, etc.

You can even create tabs to organize your dashboard better.

Umbraco Back Office — Main Dashboard

Content Section

The content section is where your editors are going to live. Other than possibly the media section, it's the only section they will likely have access to. It's here that they can manage the website pages and content.

The tree structure in the left pane represents the structure of the website — the navigation. To create a new page you can simply right-click on the navigation item where you want the new page to live (i.e click on Home to have it live under Home) and then fill in the sections in the main window.

Note that depending on how you set up the Document Type the new webpage is based on, there may be multiple tabs to complete. You can save your new webpage, Save and Publish or Preview it.

Umbraco — Creating Content in the Back Office

When you create a new piece of content you can publish immediately or set a date sometime in the future. You can also set an archive date (Remove On).

In addition, you can change the default template that the content will be rendered in. Remember that you can only select a template that has beendefined as allowed for that Document Type. These properties are automatic with every piece of content created.

Other options that can be added include hiding the page in navigation, setting up an Umbraco alias and set up redirects to another page. Again, these many of these are properties you have to set up.

The right-click menu in the Content Section gives you a number of options:

Umbraco Back Office — Content Right Click Menu

One option is to Edit in Canvas. This options enables you to view the website and edit in context:

Umbraco — Editing in Canvas Mode (In-context Editing)

External Blog Editor Integration

If you prefer to develop your content using an external editor, you can do that with Umbraco. Out of the box, Umbraco supports both Word 2007 and Windows Live Writer, but you can also use just about any blog editor that works with the MetaWeblog API.

There is a small catch to this capability and that is that you can only grant access to a specific section of your website using the Content Channels functionality.

Umbraco — Setting Up a Content Channel

Content Channels are set up for Users. You can only have one content channel per user.

The start node indicates at what location this users articles will be published to. The description field is usually the bodytext part of the Document Type you are creating. This is the main part of the content and usually is associated with a rich text editor control.

It is this channel that you connect your blog editor or Word 2007 to. You can view current content in the section and add new content. Of course you don't have the ability to add the other properties that may be associated with the Document Type, like Metadata. For anything other than Description, you need to come into the Back Office and edit there.

Media Section

The Media Section is where all your digital assets are stored. You organize this section any way you like. The types of media you can create are predefined in the Media Types under the Settings Section.

Umbraco — Media Library

Usually you would give your writer access to the Media Library in addition to the Content Section.

When you want to add images or other things to a content page, you first can select from the Media Library. You also have the option of adding something new to the Library.

Umbraco — Using Media Library

Social Media Capabilities

There is a blog package for Umbraco that includes all the typical blogging capabilities:

• 
  
  Posts with paging and filter on category
  
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  Comments (custom usercontrol)
  
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  Datefolder Categories (using tag datatype)
  
• 
  
  Archive (collapsable, only showing latest months)
  
• 
  
  Latest comments
  
• 
  
  Blogroll (using related links)
  
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  Gravatar (global avatars)
  

Customizability & Integration

Umbraco is completely customizable to your needs and integration is something it does very well. You can extend it without modifying the source code. You can add new applications, new trees and new dashboards (shown in the right side of the back office website), new data sources and more. And you aren't limited to .NET systems.

There's a complete .NET API for manipulating Umbraco objects and a SOAP API.

Umbraco API

In addition to integrating with Umbraco, you can also expose Umbraco data to other systems, such as a SharePoint WebPart displaying Umbraco content.

You can extend Umbraco by adding Macros that include .NET User Controls or .NET Custom Control.

Packages

Packages are bundled applications that add additional functionality to the CMS or your website. In the Developer's Section of Umbraco, you can upload new Packages. Umbraco offers a number of free packages including applications for collaboration, site utilities and more.

Umbraco Packages

You can create your own package and view currently installed packages (you also remove installed packages from this section).

Creating your own Package enabled you to package up your site and related content and move it somewhere else, such as a Production environment

Content Delivery Architecture

Umbraco supports caching by default. Caching is configurable, but you do not have access to 100% of the settings. All published content nodes are loaded in the Umbraco.config file and then into memory for faster access. Static files are cached by IIS and templates, xslt and user controls are cached using ASP.NET cache controls.

Umbraco has built in load-balancing support. It can scale from a web hosting solution to a web farm out of the box. DNS Round Robin and Hardware solutions are both supported in Umbraco as is using a High Availability Service. There is a ten minute video on Umbraco.tv that walks you through the process of setting up Umbraco for load balancing.

Umbraco can support up to 200,000 published pages (2 million published properties). It has been tested to scale to 830 page requests/second or 35 million Umbraco page views a month. (Wired.co.uk did extensive testing when they decided to go with Umbraco.)

Similar Products

Hartvig says Umbraco has been used in the same market as solutions like Ektron,Sitecore, and occasionally SharePoint (when used incorrectly). Sitecore and Ektron are suited for mid to larger enterprises.

Other web content management systems to consider in the SMB space includeKentico and Sitefinity. Both of these systems are .NET based and developer oriented.

Summary

Here's a summary table of the review (rating is 0.0-5.0 with 5.0 being the best):

Feature	Description	Rating
Product Core Technology	ASP.NET, IIS, Windows, AJAX	5.0
Content Entities	Document Types	4
Editorial Features	Dashboard, Notifications, Canvas Editing, RTE	4
Content Versioning	Unlimited versions, review and rollback	4
Content Workflow	Basic Workflow based on permissions and notifications	3.5
Multi-lingual Support	Supports multiple languages out of the box	4.5
Social Media Capabilities	Blogging Package	3.5
Security	Basic, Single Role, Manage granular permissions	3.5
Content Delivery Architecture	Built in Load balancing, EC2, hosted or web farm	4

Umbraco in some ways stands alone because of how it's been designed. It is not a plug and play solution and this is what many web content management systems strive for today. It's not enterprise level, although it may be used for very large websites.

The biggest drawbacks to Umbraco from an enterprise content management standpoint are with it's workflow and users. The workflow is very simple, and although you can hook in 3rd party workflow solutions, it would be nicer to see more flexibility out of the box.

In addition, a user can only have one User Type — or Role — assigned to them. In many cases a user may fulfill multiple roles for different content. It may be possible to extend Umbraco to allow multiple roles, but this capability should be out of the box as well.

Documentation, Documentation, Documentation

Simply stated, the Umbraco documentation is lacking in structure and focus.

There is a lot of documentation on the website, but some of it is for version three and not version 4 and it's hard to know what you are supposed to be looking at. There's no defined reading path for learning how to use Umbraco…unless of course you subscribe to Umbraco.tv.

Download and install this web content management system and you may take one look at what's there and get concerned. Umbraco.tv will take that concernaway and is well worth the 19 EUR per month they are asking for.

That being said, there also needs to be some free documentation that helps you out as well — in a well structured format.

The good news is that Umbraco will have a book out at the end of 2009/beginning of 2010, so developers and designers and probably end-users will
have a much better idea of how this Web CMS really works.

Hartvig says that many of his community members say Umbraco is the best kept secret in web content management. This may likely to be true. You really don't get a good feel for the full capabilities that this solution has from looking at it. In some ways, we feel like we have just scratched the surface of what this Web CMS is all about.

Built for Designers and Developers

If you are looking for a web content management system that, once installed, your marketing team or non-technical users can use immediately, Umbraco is not
for you.

Umbraco is really designed to be used by a developer or development team. They have a lot of work to do before the writers and editors of the website even get started. That's not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind as you consider this CMS.

Again, we feel we must mention the steep learning curve. This, we believe, is primarily related to understanding how the Document Types work. If you get that under your belt, then you are a long way along and can likely have a website up and running pretty quickly.

The Content Section where you create your content is very easy to work in — a big plus for the non-technical users — and if you have defined your content types properly, will be a breeze to use.

Our Final Take

Overall, we like the CMS that Niels has built. This is partly because there is a developer in us and partly because you can create your HTML design in any tool you want, and cut and paste it into Umbraco to get your website up quickly.

Another nice aspect is that if you're already a .NET developer, you don't have to learn new technologies or templating languages. As such a developer, you should be well versed in creating the .NET controls which, along with XSLT, are key to developing an Umbraco solution.

If you are a .NET-focused operation looking for a web content management system to create dynamic websites for your customers, we recommend taking a close look at Umbraco.