Umbraco Web CMS 4.9 Focuses on the Editor Experience, Rich Media

By Barry Levine 

 

The open source content management system Umbraco may have dropped version 5, but the refocus on version 4 has brought some nice improvements and a number of bug fixes.

The free, ASP.Net-based Umbraco is designed for building websites — from small campaign or brochure sites to large media-based sites — and complex Web applications.

Umbraco, which bills itself as a  “priceless CMS at the cost of virtually nothing,” was first released in version 2.0 in 2005, which was also when the first developers conference, called CodeGarden, was held. Unfortunately a turn in the wrong direction resulted in dropping the next major version of the Web CMS to go "back to the basics".

“The early days of Umbraco was the result of a wonderful collaboration between three guys in Copenhagen,” wrote one of those guys, Niels Hartvig, on the Umbraco blog. He added that, “almost eight years later — I’m smiling again” because of the new release.

Focus on the Editor Not the Developer

Umbraco 4.9 features a revised editor, easier integration of third-party videos and images, and a new media library. In addition, the new version includes more than 50 “big” bug fixes, incorporated from submissions by over 20 contributors.

The application now supports HTML5 uploads to the media section, and there’s a new folder content overview that can be filtered and from which common actions can be applied to media items.

The Media button in the Rich Text Editor now supports the oEmbed standard in its embedder, and the code editor for templates, scripting and XSLT templates has been upgraded. Creating and inspecting relation types can now be conducted from the backoffice.

Umbraco 4.9

Umbraco Gets Its Focus Back With a Little Help

Hartvig said, “September 2012 feels like October 2004 on steroids.”

He also noted that, in the past quarter, the number of improvements submitted by external contributors for the Umbraco core is higher “than any other quarters combined.”

Umbraco said that, for this Microsoft platform, it is in the top five most popular server applications and among the ten most popular open source tools. Umbraco HQ is the privately-owned commercial entity that provides support, a bug-fixing warranty and productivity-enhancing add-ons for the open-source product.

Umbraco HQ said the application is used by over 110,000 active websites, including the Davis Cup, Heinz, Peugeot, Hersheys and Microsoft’s Official ASP.NET website. HQ is based in Odense, Denmark, and maintains offices in Bellingham, Washington and Southport, Australia.

Umbraco Drops v5 of Web CMS

By Barb Mosher Zinck (@bmosherzinck

 

I suspect that any amount of time spent building a new version of a web content management system is priced in blood, sweat and tears. But when you realize it's not working, it's time to cut the chord and move on — or in the case of Umbraco, step back.

In the end, the only responsible decision, the only decision that respects the community and the core values of the project was to retire v5.
It is not a decision that has been brewing for months, but a discussion that was started and researched a few weeks back, culminating in an honest and open conclusion made by the community group who attended the weekend's pre-codegarden retreat.  These were not all HQ and core members but an impartial and honest group of both core and community members, new and old.

That was the first thing the blog post stated that speaks of the demise of Umbraco 5. According to Hartvig, Umbraco v5 had become the monster that Umbraco was first created to get away from.

Taking Umbraco From Great to Complex

Version 5 had been in the works for a long time. Released in January of this year, it was seven months delayed but somewhat well received by the community. Hartvig said that when they started creating the course material they realized how complex a system they had built. It is important to note that Umbraco 5 was not built by the community. Due to its complexity, Hartvig said the community would never have been able to be involved in its development.

As it was used, issues arose with performance, and many in the community did not feel it was an improvement over v4 — the result being many still worked with v4.

The Umbraco Go-Forward Plan

We reviewed Umbraco v4 in mid 2009 and the response from the community was great. Even then, there was talk about v5 and how good it was going to be.

The plan is to take what's good from v5 and put it into v4 (a version by the way which is still being actively updated). It will also still support those who made the jump to v5 already, but the recommendation is to not build a new site on it.

Version 5 brought the integration of MVC/Razor and thus the dropping of XSLT and Web Forms. Many in the community are not happy moving backwards, but it's important to note that Razor does work in version 4.7 of Umbraco, and v4 can be extended to support MVC, so maybe all is not completely lost.

The Community Response

The blog post that announces version 5's demise has currently over 90 comments. Many that I read are understanding and feel bad for the team that worked on Umbraco 5 and the developers who were porting their v4 packages over, but there's also a lot of bad blood.

Many had taken courses on version 5 and already ported website over to the new version.

Umbraco 5 Web CMS Dumps XSLT Support, Takes on Razor

By Rikki Endsley (@rikkiends)

The open source web CMS built on Microsoft ASP.NET, Umbraco, is making some changes in how it handles content. Changes many developers will like.

In his Saying goodbye to an old friend blog post, Umbraco founder Niels Hartvig explained the decision to drop support for XSLT:

We've learned that XML doesn't solves all problems, websites have become more sophisticated in their information architecture and new techniques have emerged. Sometimes you have to let go of your darlings to discover something new. And to be brutally honest, XSLT haven't been a happy marriage for most people. In fact, it repeatedly comes out as the number one disliked 'feature' of Umbraco whether you talk to front-end devs or .NET devs."

Reasons for the Dump

Hartvig explained that XSLT is tough to learn and complicated to master, and that it's not in tune with modern website architectures. He also says that because Umbraco 5 no longer stores data in a published XML, XSLT will slow down the CMS. Further, XSLT support is "non existing," and now there are better alternatives.

"The way we've implemented data access in v5 and combined with the razor view engine, means that making anything from basic navigations to complex taxonomy based lists is much simpler than even the most elegant XSLT," Hartvig wrote.

Razor's Edge

As part of the transition away from XSLT, the razor tutorials are now freely available on the Umbraco site to help get users up to speed with the scripting language. The site also has an eight-part blog series on razor features, which covers everything from new functionality to advanced topics.

Courier 2.5

Today Umbraco also announced Courier 2.5, the latest release of the company's deployment tool for sites built on Umbraco. The new release focuses on easy access to performing a deploy directly from the Umbraco backoffice, and keeping track of dependencies and resources needed for a deployed item to function.

Courier 2.5 is a free upgrade to Courier 2.0, which came out earlier this year, and 1.3