I done a talk on integrating sIFR into Umbraco with Mark Wubben, who is the brains behind the sIFR project.

For more information on how to use the package, visit this previous blog post.

Download Twitter for Umbraco V1.2.1

Well it’s been a while sine I last posted on my blog and there has been a good reason for it, as I have been squirreling away and working on the NEW Creative Website Starter for Umbraco aka CWS2.

With CWS2 I have teamed up with ex-collegue and great designer Sam Grady of G-72 to give CWS a lovely lick of paint. If you have seen my previous CWS you can tell I was no designer :)

With this new version comes the following:

• A focus for this site to be used to help teach new users to the Umbraco CMS platform.
• .NET usercontrols written in C#
• XSLT & .NET code heavily commented to help understand what is going on.

What’s the plan for the future?

Now CWS2 is released my main focus is to write two documents, the first is an installation and how to configure CWS2 document and the second document is a technical explanation of how the site works and what the code is doing.

Download

You can download Creative Website Starter (CWS2) for Umbraco here on Codeplex.

Feedback

If you have any suggestions for CWS2 please put them here on the discussions on the CWS2 Codeplex project and if you come across any bugs for CWS2 please post them on the issue tracker on Codeplex.

This release is identical as 0.9.8 which is currently in the umbraco package repository, except this version will ONLY work for Umbraco V4.

In addition to this package file and previous versions are now stored on Codeplex. This has been done as I build a new version of the package for V4 (new design, amendments etc..) You will be able to download the source and modify it to your needs.

As before if you find any MAJOR problems please let me know.

Download Creative Website Wizard version 0.9.9

Thanks,
Warren

These videos come about when the great guys and girls from Xeed who I work for asked me to document Umbraco for internal documentation. Instead of doing the normal boring written documentation approach I thought I would try my hand at doing a screencast to cover the same information instead.

So Xeed has let me release these videos to the Umbraco community as well as they will be useful to people new to Umbraco V4. Xeed As based in Oslo, Norway where I work with along with core team member Kenneth Solberg has recently become a company who specialises in Umbraco solutions as we now have 4 umbraco certifications within the company which makes us an official Certified Solution Provider for Umbraco.

These four certified people are as follows:
Warren Buckley/Me - Level 1 Umbraco Developer
Ståle Engen - Level 1 Umbraco Developer
Kennth Solberg - Level 2 Umbraco Developer
Christian Melbye - Level 2 Umbraco Devleoper

So thanks again to the guys and girls over at Xeed to let me release these videos with you all and finally I have never done a screencast before, so please go easy on me with your feedback please ;)

Warren

Continue to watch the other videos on Masterpages in Umbraco v4

Snap a photo of your desk and send it to me, I'm interested to see where you all work

So here are some photos of desks that people sent me.

David Conlisk


I love the fact Dave has most of his computer doing some balancing act.

Morten Bock


A nice setup Morten has here, and gets extra points for having snapped my blog in the photo.

This is how my desk looks on a typical day, a complete mess.

I would be interested in what your desk looks like where you work.

Page Fields

Before
<?UMBRACO_GETITEM field="pageName"/>

After
<umbraco:Item field="pageName" runat="server"/>

Macros

Before
<?UMBRACO_MACRO macroAlias="XSLTNavi" ></?UMBRACO_MACRO>

After
<umbraco:Macro macroAlias="XSLTNavi" Alias="XSLTNavi" runat="server"/>

Child Template

Before
<?UMBRACO_TEMPLATE_LOAD_CHILD/>

After
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="MasterTemplateContentPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

More information

For more information on ASP.NET Master Pages I recommend this site:
http://www.asp.net/Learn/master-pages/

Day 4

Day 4 was the second day we used at the retreat house to do some more openspace meetings. The main topics of interest to me was how we could improve documentation for Umbraco and What can be done to improve the umbraco project.

After all the openspace meetings for the day had finished it was tidy up and the house and get ready to leave. Whilst we was all waiting for the repair guys to come out and take a look at the rental van that had been making some funny noises the day before, we had another kick about.

The "Hohler" was yet again on top form and taking on anyone that would stand his way!
Credit to Douglas Robar for the photo

Some "friendly" football between me and Niels - bloody cheater!
Credit to Douglas Robar for the photo

With football finished and all us exhausted it was a perfect time to BOMB into the pool, to cool off!

 
Per going for the spectacular BOMB !
Credit to Douglas Robar for the photo

With all the work and fun had it was time for us to all pile into the vans and head back to Copenhagen ready for the main event on Tuesday!

OK so we travelled more into the center of Copenhagen and done a canal tour around the sights, which included the "largest indoor golf center" and the little mermaid. So after we done THE TOURIST thing we had some lunch and then went to pick up Paul Sterling from Motus Connect from the airport and made our way to the retreat.

Credit to Douglas Robar for the photo

So after some informal introductions outside in the glorious sun, we chilled out and discussed our background and experiences with umbraco and had some dinner at a local steak restaurant, we came back and chilled, but hey that was the first informal day over so we could get to know one another.

I have started writing this post from home this morning whilst I am finishing up packing I've checked that I have got all my cables for my laptop and checked my e-mail for my boarding pass, so now I am good to go!

OK I landed in Copenhagen and met the gang at the Metro station dropped off my stuff at the hotel (which I have 4 beds to choose to sleep from tonight - including a top bunk) and was discussing some different things with umbraco and stuff in general, but the coolest thing to me was that Niels made a change to the latest source that allows me to improve the performance of my XSLT macros to external services such as twitter etc in a matter of minutes !! Niels has improved the XSLT extension umbraco.library for GetXMLDocumentByURL which supports caching by providing a value in seconds for the cache time.

no I haven't had botox or gone under the knife but instead my site Creative Web Specialist has gotten a major facelift with thanks to ex-collegue and friend Sam Marks who is a great designer. A few months ago I met up with Sam to see how things were going and after a chat we decided to do a little partnership. What we agreed on was that I would help build his XHTML templates and put it onto a CMS for him, of course I recommend my favourite CMS Umbraco. In exchange he would design me a slick identity and a redesign to fit the new ident and so he did !

With this redesign I wanted an entirely new site not just some XHTML and CSS changes, so with this I took on the development task of putting this blog onto Umbraco. This has been quite a long task mainly due to moving the old blog posts and comments over to the site, but the effort was worthwhile doing in my opinion.

Before and after

Lets take a quick look at a before and after screenshot and take a look at how much better the overall site is.

For example:

check out this site http://google.co.uk Nice design @warrenbuckley

would now become

check out this site
http://google.co.uk
Nice design
@warrenbuckley

This has been made possible with a new function in the XSLT Extension CWS.Twitter called FormatURLS.
So to format your tweet use this syntax in your XSLT.

His request was as follows

@warrenbuckley just tried the twitter package for umbraco.Great!Is there any way to display people you follow,instead of just your own feed?

I decided this was so easy to implement, I would make this quick update to my package and release it as soon as possible.

I have reposted the instructions below for people who didnt use my previous version.

This package installs the following files:

• bin/CWSHelperTwitter.dll
• xslt/CWS_twitterStatus.xslt
• /usercontrols/Installer/CWSTwitter/cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx

The installer usercontrol cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx is used to modify the /config/xsltExtensions.config
to setup my custom XSLT extension to allow us to modify the strange format of the twitter date format.

The actual package installs the following into umbraco:

• Macro: [XSLT] CWS:Display Twitter Status
• XSLT: CWS_twitterStatus.xslt

Me and Sam used to work together for a few years at a company called Momo Web Communications and after both leaving there and progressing our careers we recently got back in touch to do a great skill swap. What we decided to do was that I would build the XHTML, CSS and put into onto a CMS platform (obvioulsy Umbraco) for him to easily update and edit his site, in return he agreed that he would redesign my blog for me. So watch this space very soon for my site update - all I can see its going to be very different from what it is now!

So heres a very quick rundown of what I done in this project

• Handcode the XHTML templates and the appropiate CSS required from the Photoshop design Sam gave me
• Use jQuery to create a semi-transparent image caption that slides up when you rollover the image
• Use jQuery to create a feature slider, which slides panels horizontally to view new content
• Use the Umbraco opensource .NET CMS solution to allow Sam to update his site easily with new content
• Create an XSLT script to use in Umbraco, to show Sams latest tweet from Twitter

If you haven't heard of Gravatar before, it is a service that allows you to upload an image so you can have a globally recgonised avatar on the web that is associated to your email address. The most useful scenario is on your Umbraco blog to display Gravatar images of visitors who have left comments, but you may think of some other creative scenarios you may want to use it in.

This is my Gravatar

OK first of all create a twitter account , if you dont know what twitter is, well its a service that is used to tell people what you are upto, just like the status section in Facebook.

Once you have created your Twitter account the next thing to do is to add an appliaction to your Facebook profile that allows you to update your Facebook status whenever you post an update to Twitter.

This application is called TwitterSync, simply follow the instuctions for TwitterSync and you will have this working in no time.

Now you have your Facebook Status syncronished to your Twitter status, you can post from your mobile phone to twitter using m.twitter.com or desktop widgets or whatever you prefer.

For example here is my twitter page where you can see what upto or thinking.

This package installs the following files:

• bin/CWSHelperTwitter.dll
• xslt/CWS_twitterStatus.xslt
• /usercontrols/Installer/CWSTwitter/cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx

The installer usercontrol cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx is used to modify the /config/xsltExtensions.config
to setup my custom XSLT extension to allow us to modify the strange format of the twitter date format.

The actual package installs the following into umbraco:

• Macro: [XSLT] CWS:Display Twitter Status
• XSLT: CWS_twitterStatus.xslt