Tim

CodeGarden 09 Open Space Minutes - Space 1: How to sell Umbraco

2009-07-27T22:53:28.737454+01:00

It's taken some time to get here and there's still more to add as I think this is a pretty big topic but I thought I'd get started. I wanted to keep the session more focused on the selling points of Umbraco and how people pitch Umbraco to the clients than selling techniques which on the whole we managed to do.

The first thing I stressed was that I wasn't going to teach you how to sell or selling techniques as I've never found that hard selling works -though I'm not saying it doesn't, I just prefer to educate the client into the most suitable solution (even if that isn't us).

There were a number of questions that were raised and I'll answer what I can here, if you were at the session and I've missed something, please let me know and I'll get it added:

What are the key selling points of Umbraco
How do you pitch Umbraco
Do you tell clients it's open source (or use that as a sales point)?
How do you price Umbraco
Once you've won, what do you ask your client
How do you support Umbraco
How do you get around the question of "What happens if you get hit by a bus?"

What are the key selling points of Umbraco

A couple of the attendees came up with better 30second sales pitches so I'm sure they'll post those up shortly but here's a few I remember:

It's easy to use -you don't need any previous computer experience
You can edit any page's content yourself at any time
It's highly flexible and lightweight
It's search engine friendly
It's open source (this really can be a selling point at the right time)

Do you tell clients it's open source (or use that as a sales point)?

We do and we don't. Again it really comes down to who you're pitching Umbraco to. Where the client has had issues with developers not releasing source etc then it's clearly a selling point.

Generally we do tend to explain to clients that we will base their website on an open source project that we then build on and customise further to suit their needs and that by using best practice methodologies, any developer can in theory pick up the system and continue to develop it (even if they have no experience of Umbraco).

How do you price Umbraco

This question was asked in a couple of different ways throughout the session and it's a topic in itself (see the article I wrote a while ago about pricing your work).

If you look at Umbraco in the right way you'll see that it's actually rather easy to price as there are a few components that you can sell either individually or together:

Installation and configuration
Customisation
Hosting
Support

All you need to do is work out a minimum cost for each component and then that will give you a core system cost.

Once you have your core Umbraco costs (don't forget to factor in your license costs) you can then alter the costs accordingly for your client -and this has to be on a case-by-case basis.

How do you pitch Umbraco

This is easy, there are so many selling points to Umbraco that regardless of what the client is looking for, as long as it's CMS based, Umbraco will have some benefit you can overview to the client.

When pitching Umbraco, we have found educating the user as to the benefits and what the client should be looking for in other systems. If you do this, then the majority of the time, the rest of the competition falls by the wayside.

If the client is a large corporate it's always worth mentioning that it offers much of the functionality that SharePoint does but with little of the cost (or setup pain!).

Once you've won the contract, what do you ask your client

The first thing to do is to get all the information you need to complete your contract (or at least tell your client what you'll need and when). You should know what you'll need already but we tend to ask for:

Design inspiration (websites the client does and doesn't like -and why)
Logos and other source imagery
Text for the website (you'd be best to load the initial content during training but get the client to think about it while you're developing or you'll never get there!)

Next, you'll need to make sure your paperwork is in order. Once you have agreed the general premise of your contract, it's important that you confirm all deliverables (what you'll be doing for the client) in a work order with the client. This avoids an ambiguity on what you'll be delivering and when. This doesn't need to be pages of text (though sometimes it needs to be) but avoids disagreements later.

You should always request signed work order and deposit (we request a minimum of 20% regardless of project spend) at a minimum before starting any work.

Once you have the signed work order (you sign one for the client to keep and keep one yourself), you can start thinking about the project. If it'll take longer than a week to deliver, I recommend you provide the client with rough timescales, this will have the added benefit of helping you focus your mind.

How do you support Umbraco

This is something that Paul Sterling addressed through another session and if he doesn't write up his notes I'll make a few notes in another post.

How do you get around the question of "What happens if you get hit by a bus?"

Although this was asked a couple of times throughout the session, I avoided answering it a little due to a conflict of interest. For the past few months we've been working hard on a new system called Crisis Cover which has been designed to help you with this exact question.

Crisis Cover monitors you to ensure that you're still around and if you don't respond to a number of alerts, it will contact your clients informing there's something wrong.

I'll post more information about Crisis Cover, but if you're interested in getting involved with the beta, leave me your email and I'll get one sent out.

In Closing

There is a lot of information about selling and business in general in my previous post "Business start-up advice" which if you're starting out, I really recommend you reading as it should give you a really good start (and includes example Service Level Agreements, Contracts and other useful documents).

CodeGarden 09 Open Space Minutes -Space 2: Exception Handling in Umbraco

2009-07-09T01:23:38.46+01:00

Those of you lucky enough to go to CodeGarden '09 you'll know the format of the Open Space already but for those of you who didn't, Open Space is the time that the attendees are invited to talk about something they're interested in so I proposed two:

Space 1: Selling Umbraco
Space 2: Exception handing and error reporting in Umbraco (and other .net websites/applications)

I'll write up the Selling Umbraco talk shortly but I wanted to put a few resources together for it first so decided to write this one up first.

First of all we had a brief chat about how everyone handles errors in their applications and the various error handling options available. We discussed three options:

I've only had a brief look at ELMAH and found at the time it was a little too much in the way of RSS feeds etc and I just want an email alert, that said, Lee Kelleher has written a good article about integrating ELMAH with Umbraco here and I've written another article about integrating Error Handler v2.0 into Umbraco here so I'll overview how to integrate Exceptioneer into Umbraco here instead.

Wiring up Exceptioneer with your site couldn't be easier, the best bit is that they do all the hard work for you with their "Integrate" section of the site but to give you a quick snapshot of how easy it is, first of all, download the dll and pop it into your bin folder. Then edit your web.config:


          <?xml
version="1.0"?> <configuration> <configSections> <section name="Exceptioneer"
type="Exceptioneer.WebClient.ClientModuleConfiguration, Exceptioneer.WebClient" requirePermission="true"
/> </configSections> <!-- This is where you get to specify your API Key
and Application Name --> <Exceptioneer ApiKey="XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX"
ApplicationName="YOUR APPLICATION NAME" /> <!-- If you're using IIS 6.0 or Visual
Studio's built in web server you'll need to add this bit --> <system.web>
<httpModules> <add name="Exceptioneer" type="Exceptioneer.WebClient.ClientModule,
Exceptioneer.WebClient" /> </httpModules> <!-- If you want to use the
JavaScript handling then add the Http Handler as so --> <httpHandlers> <add
path="ExceptioneerJavaScript.axd" verb="GET,POST" type="Exceptioneer.WebClient.JavaScriptHandler,
Exceptioneer.WebClient" /> </httpHandlers> </system.web> <!-- If
you're using IIS 7.0 you'll need to add this bit too --> <system.webServer>
<validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false"/> <modules> <add
name="Exceptioneer" preCondition="managedHandler" type="Exceptioneer.WebClient.ClientModule,
Exceptioneer.WebClient" /> </modules> <handlers> <add name="ExceptioneerJavaScript"
path="ExceptioneerJavaScript.axd" verb="GET,POST" type="Exceptioneer.WebClient.JavaScriptHandler,
Exceptioneer.WebClient" /> </handlers> </system.webServer> </configuration>

Now, one of the coolest things about Exceptioneer is that you can now also debug JavaScript errors! To debug the javascript errors, just include this script in your templates:

<script src="/ExceptioneerJavaScript.axd?Reporter=true" type="text/javascript"></script>

That's it, you're done. Easy eh? If you want to know more about what it can do, Phil's put together this "lovely" video overview. Exceptioneer have done a great comparison of the main features of comparison Exceptioneer and ELMAH here, the downside though is Exceptioneer is still in beta.

Remember, regardless of how good you think your code is, you should always integrate some form of error handling in your website even if it is just an email to alert you to the fact.

Store common AppSettings in the web.config and an external file (configSource vs. file)

2009-06-27T08:19:19.8784049+01:00

I've started using Rick Strahl's wwAppConfiguration to allow easier access to application constants and one thing that's been bugging me is that it doesn't play nice with configSource -which we update with web deployment projects to specify Development/Staging/Live settings.

The issue is that when you set configSource on the appSettigns node, wwAppConfiguration doesn't correctly set the file's path and instead (when using the default settings) writes the new values within the <appSettings> node. The problem is then that ASP.Net complains that you cannot specify configSource and settings inside the <appSettings> node.

After a little digging, it turns out that you can use "file" in place of "configSource" for the appSettings node (and sadly only the appSettings node) and it allows you to define values within the <appsettings> node and then override them with your external file. This is fantastic because you can store your "default" values in the web.config and then override some or all of them for your various environments.

The next issue you may run into is if you use web deployment projects, in which case you may get the following error:

web.config(2): error WDP00001: section appSettings in "web.config" has 7 elements but "config\STAGING-appSettings.config" has 19 elements.

To work around this, you just need to untick the "Enforce matching section replacements" checkbox within the properties section and you're good to go!

I hope that helps someone!

C# FileInfo.MoveTo Cannot create a file when that file already exists exception

2009-05-12T20:39:35.1672421+01:00

This was one of those irritating errors that you get when you're trying to do something quickly before you go home and you can't for the life of you fathom the issue.

I had the following code (simple enough):

FileInfo f = new FileInfo("## File's Path ");
try

{
f.MoveTo("## DROP OFF DIRECTORY ##"));
}

catch (Exception e)

{
//Log the exception here
}

The fix was simple, you just have to remember to specify the new filename too. (DOH!). Here's the "correct" code.

FileInfo f = new FileInfo("## File's Path ");
try

{
f.MoveTo(Path.Combine("## DROP OFF DIRECTORY ##", f.Name));
}

catch (Exception e)

{
//Log the exception here
}

Hope that helps you out ;)

Fix missing JavaScript file when you rename the Umbraco admin directory

2009-04-28T18:49:48.2190434+01:00

The Error

For those of you who have tried to rename your Umbraco installation directory to something other than the default /umbraco/ you'll have found that TreeInit.aspx throws a JavaScript error along the lines of:

Message: Object expected
Line: 1
Char: 4236
Code: 0
URI: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/youradmindirector/js/xloadtree.js

As this only really affects the refresh of the tree/close of a couple of dialogues I've not bothered fixing it but basically the issue is outlined well here: http://tinyurl.com/cx9atv

The Fix

If you're using extension less URLs already then it's easy as pie to sort:

Open your UrlRewriting config file (/config/UrlRewriting.config)
Add this above "</rewrites>":

< add name = "missingjs"
    virtualUrl="^~/## YOUR ADMIN DIRECTORY GOES HERE ##_client/ui/(.*).js"
    rewriteUrlParameter="ExcludeFromClientQueryString"
    destinationUrl="~/umbraco_client/ui/$1.js"
    ignoreCase="true" />

If you've not already using extension less URLs don't panic, that's easy to setup you can read all about it here. Alternatively you could just copy the js files from one folder to another ;)

The Why

I don't know how many people already rename their admin dir from something else but as Umbraco becomes a more popular choice of CMS you really should consider hiding the folder (the more popular it becomes, the more people will become more familiar with the default admin directory of /umbraco/).

Although there hasn't yet been a breach ( AFAIAA ) if a vulnerability is found, the first step in prevention is obfuscation -hide your admin directory! A quick Google search will show you how easy some developers have made it for you to find their admin sites.

Maplin loses it’s way with it’s GPS

2009-04-25T12:17:48.5058815+01:00

This came through in my email today and it made me smile:

Quick ASP.Net tip: Half your page size in ASP.Net instantly

2009-04-17T15:53:05.1996566+01:00

Ok it might be a little less than half side but it's near enough. I've been sitting on this for a while and needed to reference it for someone so I thought I'd post quickly about it. One of the most common complaints about .Net is that you have a lot of hidden "content" by the way of hidden inputs and the likes throughout your site. This can easily get corrupt on postback/slowdown the page load times etc.

Really you should be optimising each control on the page (enabling/disabling where relevant) but if you want to cheat (lets face it, we all do):

Download the files: PageStateAdapterv1.0.zip (3KB)
Put PageStateAdapter.browser into your /App_Browsers/ folder (or create one and add it)
Put TSDPageStateAdapter.dll into your website's /bin/ folder
Load up your website and checkout your ViewState :)

Incase you're interested in the source for it:

PageStateAdapter.browser

< browsers >
    <browser refID="Default">
        <controlAdapters>
            <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.Page" adapterType="TheSiteDoctor.PageStateAdapter.PageStateAdapter" />
        </controlAdapters>
        <capabilities>
            <capability name="requiresControlStateInSession" value="true" />
        </capabilities>
    </browser>
</browsers>

PageStateAdapter.cs

using System.Web.UI;

namespace TheSiteDoctor.PageStateAdapter

{
public class PageStateAdapter : System.Web.UI.Adapters.PageAdapter

{
public override PageStatePersister GetStatePersister()

        {
            return new SessionPageStatePersister(this.Page);
        }

}

The best example of how much this reduces ViewState by is when you add a large DataGrid to your site.

Post files: PageStateAdapterv1.0.zip (3KB)

Update: Apologies to those of you who downloaded and found it wouldn't compile, the .browser file was a little off (missing the second "PageStateAdapter"). I've updated it and changed the zip file download. Enjoy!

Visual Studio Tip of the day: Open files/folders in Windows Explorer

2009-03-02T11:09:25.7018627+00:00

A little irritation/time consuming process when you're working with multiple projects on multiple drives/SVN repos/directories is to open the current file's location within Windows Explorer. If you weren't already aware, you can do this from most projects/files by right clicking on the project in the solution browser:

Problem for me (and my mate Chris) is that not only is it just for the Project Item but more importantly it means using the mouse -which is something I'm trying to avoid as much as possible. Then I stumbled across a couple of posts which suggested opening Windows Explorer with Visual Studio's External Tools dialog.

They're both great ideas but you still need to use the mouse so I thought I'd take the final step and wire up some keyboard shortcuts. I'll recap the process here as I've added/grouped a few of their settings.

Creating the "External Tools"

There's a little productivity tip here for setting the folder in question the root of Windows Explorer, this encourages you to focus on just the work in question (though it can be a little irritating sometimes so I may "undo" this change later.

Custom #1: Open the current solution item in Windows Explorer

Title: Windows Explorer - Item
Command: explorer.exe
Arguments: /select,"$(ItemPath)"

Custom #2: Open the current Visual Studio project in Windows Explorer

Title: Windows Explorer - Project Directory
Command: explorer.exe
Arguments: /root,"$(ProjectDir)"

Custom #3: Open the current Visual Studio solution in Windows Explorer

We've got a number of projects that have useful files/folders stored in the same folder as the solution file so this one's useful to get quick access to them, I think I'll use this one a lot when dealing with SVN.

Title: Windows Explorer - Solution Directory
Command: explorer.exe
Arguments: /root,"$(SolutionDir)"

Custom #4: Open the current solution's binary (bin) directory in Windows Explorer

Useful when you want to get access to the dll i.e. to copy to another folder/upload just the dll to a website.

Title: Windows Explorer - Binary Directory
Command: explorer.exe
Arguments: "$(TargetDir)"

Custom #5: Open the current solution's target build directory in Windows Explorer

This is useful when you have a project that builds to another directory (i.e. a common DLL directory, I'm not sure how many people do this but I've got a couple of projects that do this so I thought I'd share it).

Title: Windows Explorer - Target Directory
Command: explorer.exe
Arguments: "$(BinDir)"

In all instances you can leave the Initial Directory field empty.

Note: On a couple of the directory related commands I've set the "/root" argument, this is a useful little productivity tip I learn a while ago to stop you navigating away from your work. Irritatingly I've not found a way of using the /select and /root commands together. It would also be nice to say "Open the bin folder and set the root to the project folder" but again I've not found a way.

If you're interested in the arguments I'm using there, check out the Microsoft Support article about How To Customize the Windows Explorer Views in Windows XP (these also work in Vista). Alternatively you can read more about the Visual Studio macros for build commands here (some of which are global I believe). I'm interested to see the use of $(TargetDir) as although it'll be useful for non-web projects, however using Web Deployment Projects might make it irrelevant for you.

You should now have 5 new items in your Tools' toolbar:

Wire up the keyboard shortcuts

As mentioned earlier, I want keyboard shortcuts but if you want toolbar icons, you should checkout the end of this post.

Open up the Keyboard settings within the Visual Studio Option dialog (Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Keyboard) -you may need to select the "Show all settings" checkbox in the bottom left of the Options dialog to see the Keyboard option.

In the Show commands containing field enter "Tools.ExternalCommand" to list the set of commands, irritatingly it just labels each command as "Tools.ExternalCommand#" for each command so this bit will require a little thinking on your behalf. My commands are #2-6 (#1 is the Dotfuscator Community Edition command).

I would then wire up the following shortcuts (I've set them up Globally for convenience):

Tools.ExternalCommand2 (Current Item): Ctrl+E, I
Tools.ExternalCommand3 (Current Project): Ctrl+E, P
Tools.ExternalCommand4 (Current Solution): Ctrl+E, S
Tools.ExternalCommand5 (Bin dir): Ctrl+E, B
Tools.ExternalCommand6 (Target dir): Ctrl+E, T

To enter these shortcuts simply press the first combination (in this case Ctrl+E), then press the second key (I -item, P -project, S -solution, B -binary, T -target). I found that a couple of these were already wired up to ReSharper and Pex which is a pain but I don't tend to use those particular shortcuts so I just overrode them

Now you should be able to press Ctrl+E followed by I and get your current item in Explorer.

It'd be nice if I could get it to use a single instance of Explorer and just refocus the items (on another key combo as that's not always the desired action).

Update: After using it a little, I've noticed that in my projects, I had the Bin/TargetDir the wrong way around (now corrected).

Advanced Error Reporting in Umbraco, dasBlog and other ASP.Net sites

2009-02-27T15:51:13.4818106+00:00

If you've been following my blog you'll know that I've been raving about error reporting within ASP.Net (you can see my ASP.Net Error Reporting category for a couple of them if you like) but until now it's been limited to those sites that you have access to the global.asax file.

One of the irritations I've found with Umbraco and dasBlog is that I don't get notified of errors as they're just logged to a text file/database somewhere. This is fine if you run 2 or 3 sites but we manage too many to check them all everyday. Instead we rely on email error notifications which until today have been a PITA to integrate into Umbraco.

Today I'd like to introduce to you Error Handling v2.0 which instead of relying on the global.asax file for the error hooks, uses a HttpModule which means you can install it into any existing/pre-built application such as Umbraco and dasBlog.

Adding it into the site is simple, you'll need to install the module into the web.config file and add the configuration section a sample (cut down) web.config is below:

< ?xml version = "1.0" ? >
<configuration>
    <configSections>
        <section name="tsdErrorsConfigSection" allowExeDefinition="MachineToApplication" restartOnExternalChanges="true" type="System.Configuration.NameValueFileSectionHandler, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />
    </configSections>

    <tsdErrorsConfigSection file="ErrorHandling.config"/>

    <system.net>
        <mailSettings>
            <smtp from="you@yourdomain.com">
                <network host="127.0.0.1" port="25" />
            </smtp>
        </mailSettings>
    </system.net>

    <system.web>
        <httpModules>
            <add name="ErrorModule" type="TheSiteDoctor.ErrorHandling.ErrorModule, TheSiteDoctor.ErrorHandling" />
        </httpModules>
    </system.web>

</configuration>

Then you'll need to check all the settings -I recommend storing these in another .config file for clarities sake. Make sure you've configured your SMTP settings and you should be good to go.

If you want to test your settings, I've included a test page for you that will check your settings and show you the defaults if you've not set them. I've got this running now on a couple of Umbraco and dasBlog installs without an issue.

There's also a useful logging system in it which I'll look to overview in a later post but if you want to see it, check out the included aspx file.

Download ErrorHandling_v2.0.zip (25Kb)

If you do use this code I'd be interested to hear how you get on, I think it requires a little more refinement un some areas but it's pretty robust.

Enjoy.

No hidden charges

2009-02-25T18:36:42.0188213+00:00

I've had a couple of situations recently where clients have suggesting "tricking" the user into either remaining subscribed to a service i.e. a mailing list or rammed some sales info down their throat whereas we advise to go the oposite direction -if someone doesn't want to read your email, why pay to send it to them? Just because you send it to them, doesn't mean they're going to read it.

Then while booking some tickets this evening I came across FlyThomson's take on it. I was going to blog how I thought their prices were reasonable, or how their checkout process upsold well etc but instead I get to the very last stage and after having "Still no change, the seats are the same price"!"/"The price you see is the price you pay" throughout I noticed that when selection any form of "grown up" payment card I get charged £10!!

The only cards it turns out that don't charge you are Solo and Visa Electron. So much for the "Still no change."

Why try and bamboozle your customer? Ok I had to pay it but I wouldn't now recommend you.

Thanks. Why didn't you state that at the start?