I remember that when I first I first started messing around with Umbraco I had more than a few issues trying to get it installed due to not being able to find the right answers about a year or so ago.
There has also been some great movements in pushing Umbraco to the next level and making it easier than ever to use. Now I’m no professional or avid blogger, so don’t expect miracles… The only aim for this post is to try and give anyone looking to get into Umbraco and real life example and reference from someone doing the same thing.
What Is Umbraco?
Well here is what's written on the CodePlex Site..
“For the first time on the Microsoft platform a free user and developer friendly cms (Content Management System) that makes it quick and easy to create websites - or a breeze to build complex web applications. Umbraco got award-winning integration capabilities and supports your ASP.NET User and Custom Controls out of the box. It's a developers dream and your users will love it too. Used by more than 57.000 active websites including Heinz.com, Peugeot.com, NAIAS.com and Microsoft's documentinteropinitiative.org website you can be sure that the technology is proven, stable and scales.”
And here is what Umbraco say themselves..
“Who would believe that there would be an open source CMS based on Microsoft's ASP.NET? A CMS that can support any modern browser and that even allows editing with Microsoft Word. One where designers can create accessible and valid xhtml with their mark-up left intact. Where developers can integrate any .net based control right out of the box. If someone tells you "won’t happen", then they have never used umbraco...”
There has also been some great movements in pushing Umbraco to the next level and making it easier than ever to use. Now I’m no professional or avid blogger, so don’t expect miracles… The only aim for this post is to try and give anyone looking to get into Umbraco and real life example and reference from someone doing the same thing.
What Is Umbraco?
Well here is what's written on the CodePlex Site..
“For the first time on the Microsoft platform a free user and developer friendly cms (Content Management System) that makes it quick and easy to create websites - or a breeze to build complex web applications. Umbraco got award-winning integration capabilities and supports your ASP.NET User and Custom Controls out of the box. It's a developers dream and your users will love it too. Used by more than 57.000 active websites including Heinz.com, Peugeot.com, NAIAS.com and Microsoft's documentinteropinitiative.org website you can be sure that the technology is proven, stable and scales.”
And here is what Umbraco say themselves..
“Who would believe that there would be an open source CMS based on Microsoft's ASP.NET? A CMS that can support any modern browser and that even allows editing with Microsoft Word. One where designers can create accessible and valid xhtml with their mark-up left intact. Where developers can integrate any .net based control right out of the box. If someone tells you "won’t happen", then they have never used umbraco...”
Some Important Bookmarks Before We Start
Please take the time to bookmark these pages, they WILL help you down the line.
- Our.Umbraco Forum - http://our.umbraco.org/forum
A great active community where you can post questions and get answers within a few minutes from Umbraco users in the know . - Umbraco Wiki - http://our.umbraco.org/wiki
The wiki is relatively knew, as it was added with the new our.umbraco site. But its getting bigger by the day and has some AMAZING nuggets of information in it. - Umbraco Projects - http://our.umbraco.org/projects
For me personally, this is my most favourite part of the new our.umbraco site as the projects section is becoming HUGE. Some fantastic FREE add-ons you can use, including the forum project, eCommerce, Twitter and many more. - Stack Overflow - http://stackoverflow.com
This is not specifically about Umbraco, but anyone who hasn’t found StackOverFlow yet then you need to get signed up – You can get answers to any ASP.NET, XSLT & General programming questions (Including Umbraco problems) within minutes! - Umbraco.TV – http://umbraco.tv
Just brilliant for anyone wanting to learn about Umbraco, from the front end user to the developer – I reference it all the time. - Nibble.be - http://www.nibble.be
This is the site of Tim Geyssens, who now actually works for Umbraco. This site is just RAMMED full of fantastic tutorials, mainly more advanced stuff but I would bet my shoes you will find yourself referencing this site throughout your Umbraco adventures (I have multiple times).
other must have bookmarks
These bookmarks are ones you will use when you are a bit more confident, and start playing around with more complex sites (Give it a few weeks and you’ll be using these)
- Setting Up Membership With Umbraco
http://www.mortenbock.dk/setting-up-membership-in-umbraco-116.htm - Setting Up Member Profiles
http://www.aaron-powell.com/blog/july-2009/umbraco-member-profiles.aspx - Working With Members API
http://umbraco.org/documentation/books/api-cheatsheet/working-with-members - Email Newsletters (See I told you Tims blog would be popping up all the time)
http://www.nibble.be/?p=63 - eCommerce / Selling Online With Umbraco
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/commerce-for-umbraco
- Google Checkout For Umbraco - http://www.orcare.com/products/google-checkout-package-for-umbraco.aspx - Forums & Umbraco
YetAnotherForum & Umbraco - http://dawoe.blogspot.com/2009/02/intergrate-yet-another-forum-193rc2.html
uForum - http://our.umbraco.org/projects/uforum-basics (This is the forum our.umbraco is built on!) - Umbraco Debugging Made Easy
http://www.cpalm.dk/blog/2008/01/20/umbraco-debugging-made-easy.aspx - Extension less URL’s
http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/install-and-setup/setting-up-umbraco-for-friendly-urls
Now there are a few options here, but I’ll walk you through how I went about learning from scratch and now have built a few sites, created my own packages and macros, and even understand XSLT
- Umbraco.TV – http://umbraco.tv
First thing I did was went to over to the brilliant Umbraco.tv and got a subscription, I cannot stress enough how much help the site builder & developer videos are when you are first learning. Basically the videos cover 99% of the level 1 training. So by watching them all you get a great understanding of ‘how’ to build a site and what things mean.
> Free Site Builder Video: http://umbraco.tv/documentation/videos/for-site-builders
> Free Developer Video: http://umbraco.tv/documentation/videos/for-developers/foundation/using-net-user-controls - Install CWS 2 - (Creative Website Starter v2 by Warren Buckley)
Once I had a grasp I decided to download and install CWS2, its a fully featured site straight out the box built by an Umbraco MVP! This was great as now I had an understanding from the videos, I started to delve around Warrens XSLT’s & Macro’s (If you watched all the videos you’ll know what an Umbraco Macro is) and see how things really work under the hood. - Human Face To Face Training
Now I wanted to become level 1 certified (And successfully did just that) – So I decided to opt for official training. Umbraco do lots of training course (http://www.umbraco.tv/training) however most of them seem to be in Denmark, and as I am based in the UK I didn’t want to wait (Because I’m inpatient and I was excited) or travel to Denmark. So after some posting I found Doug Robar, based in Cambridge(UK) he is a level 1 trainer and came to our office for two days which was such a great help and made me realise ‘I should really read up a little about XSLT’.
Here is a great little PDF from one of Doug's Presentation’s (Although for it to really make sense you need him sitting next to you explaining the slides):
http://blog.percipientstudios.com/2009/6/22/codegarden-%2709-presentation.aspx - XSLT Basics (Wiki) - http://umbraco.org/documentation/books/xslt-basics
Now after our time with Doug, he pointed me to this GREAT page on Umbraco. I would strongly recommend reading all these pages, as not only will you be able to create your own XSLT but be able to edit and understand everyone else’s – As you will find, majority of people use XSLT with macros for the free projects you can download.
