umbraco Blog

Umbraco Contour RC1 is out

Per Ploug Hansen — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:43:01 GMT

Thanks to our fantastic team of beta testers, we have crossed off a huge amounts of bug-fixes and enhancements on the Umbraco Contour todo list.

So today we're releasing the first RC of Umbraco Contour (the software formerly known as Umbraco Forms)

The RC will have same availability as the betas: only people in the Contour Beta Program and Pro Subscribers can get a valid beta license.

The list of changes can be found here as well as a list of nightly builds

To update you current Contour installation, you can use this zip file which should just be unzipped to the root of your website (it is not a package)

And to start from scratch download the Umbraco Contour RC1 package here

You still need a license key to try this out, all Pro subscribers can get a key instantly by contacting us.

Again, thank you all for the bug-reports and feature suggestions

Tim, Niels and Per

edit: typos and clearifying availability

Umbraco 4.1 Beta 1

Aaron Powell — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:09:04 GMT

Well a few months ago the core team had a discussion, and we decided to set ourselves a deadline for the Umbraco 4.1 Beta 1 release.
There was a lot riding on this release, Niels was going to have to listen to Ole Erling if the commitments weren't made.

But more importantly it would have been another delayed release, something which we didn't want.

So with some hard last minute work I'm proud to announce that Umbraco 4.1 Beta 1 is available for download and testing.
*pauses for dramatic effect*

Grab a copy and get your testing on! (Usual disclaimer about don't use on a production site applies)

If you haven't been following our twitter feeds and are unsure what to expect from this release I've compiled a list of new features/ imporved features which are available in this release:

.NET 3.5 SP1 Framework required
Umbraco tree replaced with jsTree 0.99a
Umbraco tree state remembered across applications
New client & server API for interaction with Umbraco and the tree
Client Dependency for JS and CSS
Umbraco Examine as the default back of office search provider, using Lucene as the indexer
Syntax highlighting editor for CSS, JS, Templates, Python and XSLT
Improved data layer with child node interaction
Removal of a lot of legacy items (classes, old data types, unused pages)
LINQ to Umbraco with NodeDataProvider
Improved Media Picker data type
Image Cropper data type
Media recycling bin
New event fired before a document is created (Newing event)
Improved Document API with an OptimisedMode constrictor (new Document(bool optimisedMode, int id);) which allows for the Save method to cancel a save before database writing occurs (not implemented on the editContent.aspx page though)
Documents can now be interacted with via named arguments (eg: myDoc["property_alias"])
Dynamic Tree proxy for dynamically creating Umbraco Applications
Macro Container Data Type
Umbraco now launches from /umbraco/

We are all very excited about this release, there's some awesome new features in it and some existing features have been drastically improved.

When you're testing if you find any questions ask them on the Umbraco Forum in the 4.1 section and if you find anything that is an out-right bug feel free to post it straight to the Umbraco codeplex site.

Happy testing :)

Update - Forgot one feature, TinyMCE now has a spellchecker. This is now part of the core not a package like it use to be.

Another day at the office

Chris Houston — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:41:27 GMT

I love getting feedback, but why bother spending time getting in touch when being anonymous. It's like the person sending this almost knew that (s)he was asking a little too much ;-)

The irony however was that the person missed the opportunity of getting free umbraco.tv forever with just twenty minutes.

If you'd like to get some free umbraco.tv content, there's always the videos on Document Type basics or User Control basics.

Awesome guide for Umbraco newbies

Chris Houston — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:18:17 GMT

I love when people act. It's not the easiest thing in the world. In fact it seems like the current trend these days is not even bother to tell someone that you're unsatisfied but rather just tweet "xxxxx sucks bigtime". Which is kind of odd as - I like to think that - most people don't do things to annoy you. So when something isn't right, there's a big chance that being constructive and friendly will get you much further than an angry tweet.

So when I opened up my laptop this evening and saw a ton of retweets of Lee Messenger's announcement about of a newbie guide to Umbraco I got really excited. When I followed the link and read his work it made me really happy. What a great resource and what a wonderful, constructive way of helping others. I'm sure that already by the time you read this, the effort made by Lee has helped people save more hours than it took collecting and sharing the information. Even though it's a lot.

Imagine what could happen if we all took the time to follow Lees example. If we wrote the tutorial we missed a couple of months back, if we submitted a great bug report, shared a cool project or took the time to help others in the forums the way we got help last year. Of course we'd disappoint the number of people who still like to say that Umbraco has a steep learning curve and that there's no documentation - even more than the disappointment they'd feel if they read Lees post.

But that's a tradeoff I can live with. Let's get to work - there's karma waiting!

Umbraco Concierge 2.0 Released

Chris Houston — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:05:35 GMT

Today we're releasing the new version of one of the tools in the Umbraco Pro bundle: Concierge. This is a major upgrade to the tool helping you keep track of your website.

Get an overview of what it does on umbraco.tv

Tracking changes and dependencies

Concierge is a tool for keeping track of the different components in your website. It helps you keep track of which components are currently not in use and can be safely deleted. It spots the connections between components and helps you determine if a change might break an existing page and see what areas needs testing after a change is made.

Reporting and logging

Concierge helps you digest the statistics and data surrounding your website. Search the application log for details on the health of the website. Or use the reporting capabilities to build a view of specific data about your website.

Check-in and Check-out

Concierge can help your editors workflow, by enabling locking of content and media items. Any editor can lock a document for exclusive editing and ensure that ongoing work isn't edited or deleted. Concierge also provides a central overview of all components currently locked for easy administration

Make it your own

Both the documentation section and the reports can be extended to include your own data. Concierge 2.0 comes with an API for adding any source of data to your documentation or as a report.

Available today

Our pro customers can download Concierge 2.0 on their profile today along with API documentation. It is a free upgrade to all existing Pro subscribers.

our.umbraco.org maintenance

Chris Houston — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:20:53 GMT

At around noon today, we will take our.umbraco.org offline for a couple of hours to perform some maintenance upgrades and bug fixes, do not panic, we will be right back.

We know this is hard on some of our community members, so here is a list of suggested things to do instead of refreshing our.umbraco.org every 10 seconds:

Submit your work to the list of sites running umbraco
View the new list of umbraco solution providers
Twitter "Congratulations" to Mr. Tim Geyssens, who started working fulltime at umbraco this monday.

Package repo updated with the best from our.umbraco.org

Chris Houston — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:39:21 GMT

The project page at our.umbraco.org is rapidly being filled with some excellent packages (even looks like we'll need to split them in categories, since the projects list is getting crowded).

Since we now have a clear overview of the projects and their value for the community (don't forget to hit the 'thumbs up' if you like a project) we'll be updating the package repository more often.

For our first update we've added 5 of the best rated (and stable) projects.

You can now download and install these directly from the integrated package repository.

I’m coming for the UK Meetup next week

Niels Hartvig — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:09:55 GMT

I'm jumping a plane on Wednesday for London to join the exciting Umbraco UK Meet up arranged by Darren Ferguson and kindly hosted by LBi.

I'll do a recap of the most important things announced at the CodeGarden 09 conference as well as co-host a session with Darren where we're going to build a little crazy app live in 30 minutes.

The meet up is next Thursday (the 6th) and is a great chance to learn about Umbraco as well as experience the worlds friendliest community crowd. Don't miss this and as LBi just made it possible for us to be 55 instead of 35 people, there's room available again!

So what are you waiting for - sign up (it's free!) and let's talk next week! There'll be beer and prizes too!

London Meetup, Thursday 6th August

Per Ploug Hansen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:11:22 GMT

Since Codegarden09 in Copenhagen Darren Ferguson and the UK umbraco community have been busy arranging an Umbraco UK meetup.

The event will take place on August 6th in London and will be kindly hosted by LBi - one of the largest full service digital agencies. LBi are kindly donating the venue free of charge!

There is an event wiki page with all of the details here. You can sign up to attend by leaving your details on this wiki page or by filling out this contact form.

Spaces are limited so please don't leave it until the last minute.

Help required!

Although most of the practical details are in place there is plenty the Umbraco community can do to support this event.

Give a presentation

If you think that you have a compelling talk/presentation to give at the event, please leave some details on this wiki page or fill out this form.

Tweet/Blog/Email your friends

Be sure to let any UK Umbraco users know about the event by sending links to the wiki pages above. Use the hashtag #umbracouk.

Non Umbracians are welcome, there will be plenty of beginner focused material. If you know any CMS professionals who may be interested in Umbraco then get them to come along.

Come along prepared to participate

We don't want the meetup to be a bunch of guys standing up and talking we want to have group sessions and may be some open space. Come along prepared to speak up, with questions and topics around Umbraco in mind.

Finally

Without community partcipation this event will just be some tech guys in a room.

By contributing to the wiki pages above and throwing your suggestions into the ring we can make it something much more than that.

Can you upgrade your site to Umbraco 4?

Per Ploug Hansen — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:12:16 GMT

As Umbraco 4 is coming on Friday it's a good idea to start preparing upgrades. We've gone to great lengths to make sure that Umbraco is as compatible with Umbraco 3 as possible and Umbraco 4 includes an automated upgrade wizard that will convert any existing Umbraco 3.0.5+ installation to Umbraco 4, including converting your old templates to the new MasterPage syntax. For most installations, upgrading shouldn't be a problem and should take less than an hour.

In general it's very few items that aren't supported, but if you're using any of these features, upgrading is not straight forward:

The XSLT helper method RenderTemplate(). As we've switched from the old proprietary template model in Umbraco 2 and 3 to ASP.NET MasterPages in Umbraco 4, the RenderTemplate can no longer be used. If your site depends on the RenderTemplate functionality, you need to disable MasterPages as continue to use the old template model which is still supported in Umbraco 4 by editing /config/umbracoSettings.config and set "useAspNetMasterPages" to false. It's crucial that you change this setting in the Umbraco 4 distribution before you copy the Umbraco 4 files.
UltraSimpleMailer / Newsletter. This is not compatible with Umbraco 4 as it relied on a very old WYSIWYG editor and the old template model. We're working on making a new version of the UltraSimpleMailer, but it won't be ready for the release of Umbraco 4 on Friday. If you're using the UltraSimpleMailer we suggest that you don't upgrade yet.
3rd party datatypes. In general all old data types should work with umbraco if they're made using best practices. However, we can't give any guarantees that they'll work and you should make sure to test them first.

How to upgrade

First of all the upgrade wizard only supports Umbraco 3.0.5+ installations (while 3.0.3 installations apparently work too). If you're running an older version of Umbraco (2.0, 2.1 or <3.0.5) you should first upgrade to Umbraco 3.0.6.

Secondly, make sure that your site doesn't use any of the un supported functionality described above and if it does make sure that you follow the suggestions above.

Upgrade:

Before you upgrade make sure to backup your files and your database and make sure that you run the upgrade on a local development server and not in a hosted environment.
If you have special settings in your web.config or in your config files in the /config directory such as XSLT Extensions or localized url replacement characters, make sure to have those changes nearby as you'll need to update those settings after the upgrade. You might want to use a diff tool to see the differences.
Extract the Umbraco 4 zip somewhere local outside your development environment.
Copy the /web.config, /default.aspx, /bin, /config, /masterpages, /umbraco and /umbraco_client from the unpacked files to your umbraco 3 installation.
Update the web.config and the /config files if you had any special settings (from step 2)
Start a browser and point it to the root of your site (ie. http://localhost or http://mysite.com)
Follow the installation wizard - it should upgrade your database and your templates automatically

If you have any troubles upgrading, let us know in the comments and if you encounter any bugs add them to the Codeplex tracker.

Win tickets for CodeGarden 09 :)

Niels Hartvig — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:11:55 GMT

Do you want to get to CodeGarden for free and do you have a cool site or package that you want to show during the open space, then you're in luck.

Microsoft have sponsored 2*2 tickets and all you need to do is to submit a three paragraph description (inclusion of screenshots is a bonus here) of what you'd like to show and mail it to me.

The deadline is the 15th of June 12.00 GMT+1 and the winners will be selected by the hard but righteous jury which is me and Daniel Frost from Microsoft.

Impress us, come to CG for free and get famous :-)))

Umbraco 4.0.2.1 is released

Niels Hartvig — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:36:01 GMT

Unfortunately there was an issue with linking in the WYSIWYG editor in yesterdays release which we completely missed, so we've fixed that this morning and updated the release so we now have an Umbraco 4.0.2.1 aka the "digit edition".

The update service have been updated to automatically notify existing Umbraco 4 installations about this update.

Thank you to our wonderful community who found this error and reported it quickly and sorry for any inconvenience.

Umbraco 4.0.2 is out and so is an upgrade guide

Niels Hartvig — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:48:42 GMT

Thanks to great response from the community I was able to make the release of 4.0.2 come today. I fixed three bugs in the beta and I've updated the change log.

Introducing the Upgrade Guide

I was finally able to make the first version of an Upgrade Guide that shows you how to do both a patch upgrade as well a major upgrade of Umbraco. I've tried to gather all the details that have caused headaches, but as this is a v1.0 of the guide, I'd love feedback and ideas for changes.

You can download the upgrade guide on Codeplex.

Umbraco v4.0.2 beta released

Niels Hartvig — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:03:27 GMT

Finally - Umbraco version 4.0.2 is ready for testing (this is not marked as a stable release yet, but it's likely to be within a couple of days). Please report any bugs you find in the Issue tracker. Only bugs related to this release will be fixed, so no need to report any issues already added in the tracker, please vote them instead.

This is a stability release fixing 43 bugs. Most importantly the horrible encoding bug has been fixed, but also a lot of minor quirks reported by our fabulous community via http://codeplex.com/umbraco has been fixed.

Most work has gone into the way Macros are inserted and edited in TinyMCE, so hopefully this should feel much more stable, especially if your macros are rendered in the editor. The Membership Provider has also been fully implemented, so it now supports the full featureset of the MemberShipProvider APIs.

We've also ensured that all events in Umbraco are now correctly wired up - there have been quirks with the BeforeUpdateDocumentCache as well as the Macro save events.

Full change log on the download tab.

We expect v4.0.2 to be released during the first week of June.

UmbracoCast no 9 - the family grows...

Niels Hartvig — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:33:52 GMT

Watch this new UmbracoCast to see that our little family will finally get a new member on August 1st 2009. But you'll need to watch three minutes of Per Ploug Hansen and yours truly mumble about CodeGarden 09, Umbraco 4.0.2 and Paul Sterlings US events first.

Missed any previous UmbracoCasts? Now we finally have an archive of all old videos.

Umbraco Events in the US

Niels Hartvig — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:59:18 GMT

While the US and Canada have the largest number of Umbraco users the number of Umbraco related events here is quite low relative to our European counterparts. Recently there was the Tulsa Umbraco Users Group meeting, and last year Codegarden US 08, but that's about it. Starting what we hope will be a much more frequent schedule of Umbraco sessions, events, training, and meetups here is where you can find Umbraco in the next few weeks:

Level 2 Course at Butler University (closed course) : 26-27 May
Corvallis .Net Users Group : 28 May
Portland Code Camp : 30 May
Bellingham .Net Users Group : 10 June
Seattle Bar Camp : 13-14 June

We are very excited to tell more .Net and web developers about Umbraco. Like many of us who use Umbraco daily already know, once you realize the limitless flexibility and ease of use it's a rare-day you return to another framework.

In each of the appearances above, look for North America's very own Nabaztag Umbraco Rabbit.

Hope to see you at one of these events and, if you know of other events that will benefit from learning more about Umbraco, let us know. If I don't see you at one of these, I hope to see you at CodeGarden 09.

-Paul

Umbraco Courses in June - new dates

Niels Hartvig — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:46:18 GMT

UPDATE: I was a little too fast on the trigger yesterday - June 1st is a bank holiday in Denmark, so the Level 1 course will start on the 2nd and not the 1st!

By request we'll run the highly praised Umbraco courses again on June 2-3rd and 4-5th.

The courses will follow the very same model that have made the last ten rounds of courses a massive success, and just like last it'll focus entirely about Umbraco 4!

So we'll look at Masterpages, XSLT Debugging with Visual Studio, the new Event model, Canvas Editing, Membership Providers, Package creation and many of the other improvements that have made Umbraco 4 a milestone in Web CMS. By attending the course you'll be among the first to become experts and certified on the new platform.

The agendas for the courses are as follows:

June 2-3rd: Level 1 - implementing websites using umbraco:

Understanding the umbraco basics - Boost/Nitro, Document Types, Templates and Macros (including usage of the new Masterpages functionality)
Creating a simple website from scratch
Understanding XSLT - creating a news "module"
Creating multi-language websites including coverage of Dictionary Items and Languages
Advanced properties: Re-use of properties and recursive usage of properties
Two-way feedback using AutoForms and Notifications
Optimizing markup for Canvas Editing
Great Packages: Implementing full-text searching and mail forms

June 4-5h: Level 2 - umbraco for .NET Developers, extending and integrating solutions:

Usage of .NET User Controls with umbraco
Debugging XSLT and .NET Controls with umbraco and Visual Studio
In-depth explanation of the umbraco object model and usage of the umbraco presentation APIs
Creating, importing and modifying content from .NET using the API
Usage of AJAX and umbraco
Extending XSLT with custom .NET classes
Custom event handling in umbraco using the brand new event handlers in Umbraco 4
How to integrate legacy authentication systems using Membership and Role Provider

The registration is open and the first seats are already booked - as always we encourage you to register fast as the past courses have all sold out (and as mentioned the last one in 24 hours!).

I'll be speaking in Århus on the 29th

Niels Hartvig — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:13:34 GMT

I'm very excited that I've been invited by the best .NET User Group in Denmark - ANUG - to speak about Umbraco.

It's this Wednesday (April 29th) and as the fine folks have given me a whole evening I'll bring plenty of demos (one of them will feature a lottery where you can win an Umbraco CodeGarden 09 ticket or one of the famous limited edition Umbraco T-shirts).

You'll need to sign up using Facebook (WTF? ;-)) on ANUGs website.

And oh, one last thing... I'll be speaking Danish...

New videos and pricing on umbraco.tv

Niels Hartvig — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:02:05 GMT

We're really happy here at the Umbraco HQ as we *finally* managed to activate subscriptions on the umbraco.tv. This means new low prices to get started and at the same time we're back at adding a lot of exciting new content. But let me start with the best news:

New low price: 19EUR / month, opt-out and in whenever you want!

That's right, getting started with umbraco.tv and more than five ours of videos by me and Per Ploug Hansen will only set you back 19 EUR (~25USD) and you can stop your subscription at any time.

New videos on XSLT Extensions - more videos coming

To celebrate the re-launch we've added two new videos on XSLT Extensions that'll teach you the basics of XSLT Extensions, how to create them as well as more advanced topics such as accessing SQL data from XSLT including sorting and paging data in your presentation layer.

More trial videos and previews

Starting with the two new XSLT videos we'll be adding free three minute previews of the videos as a supplement to the two free full videos on User Controls and Document Types. This gives you a safe way to see if you find it worth the cash.

Existing subscribers will get their periods doubled

For all our existing subscribers - no matter when you purchased the subscription - we'll start their subscriptions on May 1st and we'll double the period. So if you've purchased three months you'll get six months, etc. We really appreciate your early support on this product.

So what are you waiting for - start your subscription today and experience that the lack of documentation is a myth ;-)

Calling SEO experts - 301 or 302 for RSS package

Niels Hartvig — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:26:11 GMT

Thanks to Søren Sprogø from Afdeling18 we've been aware that there might be a problem for correct Google indexing of certain pages if you use the RSS Community Package.

According to Søren this is due to Google using the guid attribute (ie. /26156) from the RSS to index the Umbraco pages but it detects it as duplicate content if already have indexed the content using the niceurl (ie. /blog/2009/4/7/how-to-migrate-umbraco-40-to-iis-7-and-aspnet-35).

What's the best solution - 301 or 302 redirects?

The solution to this is to make Umbraco detect if there's an incoming guid link (ie. yoursite.com/pageid) and then do a redirect and I'll look at implementing this for 4.0.2 (with the option of disabling it).

The big question is then - should it be a 301 redirect (permanent) or a 302 redirect (temporary). In my logic it should be a 302 as the whole point of a guid link is to ensure it won't change (and the id won't change, but the nice url might if a page title is changed). Søren argues that to fix the Google problem it needs to be a 301, which would be very sad as the whole point of ensuring links over time is then lost.

I've looked at how Wordpress handles this and it seems that hosted blogs (on wordpress.com) uses 302 redirects, while many Wordpress installs uses 301.

So calling all SEO/Google/RSS experts - what should we do?