umbraco Blog

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?

How-to migrate Umbraco 4.0 to IIS 7 and asp.net 3.5

Per Ploug Hansen — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:19:42 GMT

Last night umbraco.org was migrated from our tired old windows 2003 server to a new windows 2008 monster server. This meant we had the opportunity to migrate to a asp.net 3.5 setup with integrated pipe-lines using IIS 7. It can seem like a daunting task, but in reality it is a simple operation. This is the walkthrough of how we moved umbraco.org.

Files and database

To make the transfer as fluent as possible we setup a new site next to the old one, and copied over all the files. We backed-up the database, but otherwise kept it where it was, as it was already upgraded to 4.0 and no changes are needed for the database. So we now had two identical sites: www.umbraco.org running asp.net 2.0 which point at the umbraco4Db database, and new.umbraco.org pointing at that same database. The files on both sites are identical at this point.

Websites and application pools

For the new site, we setup a new website in IIS7, and a separate Application Pool, setting it to framework asp.net 2.0 and using integrated pipeline.
(note: asp.net 3.5 is an extension of 2.0 so it has no separate framework settings)

Configuration files

Despite its complexity, umbraco.org is still an unmodified umbraco installation. So the only configuration file we needed to change was the web.config, if you have a more custom setup, your results might vary.

To upgrade the web.config to an asp.net 3.5 compatible version, go to the umbraco source repository and open aspnet35.config, which is located here:

http://umbraco.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/48966#742920

Use this file as a base for your new web.config, copy over custom configuration from the old web.config, such as custom sections, umbracoDbDNS and other custom appsettings, the MemberShipProvider sections, RoleProvider settings etc.

Especially notice if umbracoMembershipProvider (under membership) has a passwordformat ="hashed", this differs between version 4.0 and 4.0.1.

When you've synced the changes between your old web.config and the file from the codeplex repository, you have an asp.net 3.5 compatible configuration file which can run on integrated pipeline. This new web.config file is placed in the root of the new website and testing can begin.

Directory urls and authentication

if you use extensionless urls / directory urls with umbraco as well as authenticating users on your website, you need to add one additional setting to the web.config.

under <system.webserver> all umbaco's httpmodules are listed. Due to the way IIS process extensionless urls, you need to add: runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True" to the modules element, så it looks like this: <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True">

That is all there is to it, copy over files, keep database connection, upgrade web.config file to a asp.net 3.5 compatible version, and you're done.

Things to keep in mind

Make sure that your folder permissions on the new site are setup to work with IIS 7 and your application pool.

Don't do this upgrade on a live site, backup your files and migrate it to a new website, when the migration is done, it is very easy to simple turn off the old site and change the hostnames on IIS7.

You don't need a new database, as no database changes are needed to switch to IIS7 and asp.net 3.5

Exciting Umbraco jobs

Niels Hartvig — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:43:01 GMT

A sure sign that Umbraco finally is going mainstream is the growing number of jobs available for talented Umbracians. This week I've spotted two interesting job posts that I'd like to share:

CondeNast (Wired, Vogue, CG) is seeking .NET/Umbraco dev . If you're living near London and wants to work on some of the largest scale Umbraco sites, you should definitely check this one. The team is cool (they got people in the Umbraco core team too) and the challenges are massive.
Twins seeking Umbraco specialist. If you're living in Denmark, one of the most prominent Umbraco Certified Solution Providers are expanding their Umbraco team (Danish) .

Our contact form has been broken

Niels Hartvig — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 06:54:17 GMT

If you've tried to send us an e-mail since Tuesday, it has unfortunately ended up in the dark nothing. When we moved servers this week our mail server has been configured wrong and as a result our contact form have been failing silently.

This means that we've never gotten your contact enquiry if you've sent it through our contact form on this website!

We sincerely apologize if you've tried to get in touch with us and when we haven't gotten back to you it's not a result of arrogance, but lack of server skills.

We really appreciate if you would contact us again.

We'll be moving umbraco.org tonight

Niels Hartvig — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:04:02 GMT

We'll be moving the umbraco.org website to new ultra fast servers tonight (22.00 - 24.00 GMT+1) so expect a little downtime as DNS will update.

This will only affect umbraco.org and umbraco.tv. The forum will continue to be online.

Lock and Unlock documents and media with Concierge

Niels Hartvig — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:40:33 GMT

The coming version of Concierge which is included in all Umbraco PRO subscriptions extends Umbraco 4 to provide exclusive lock and unlocking of Documents and Media items in Umbraco. Here's a little three minute sneak peak of the feature:

Concierge version 1.2 will available in the beginning of April and is a free upgrade for all existing PRO subscribers.

Did you know that we got some cool reseller deals for consultancies and freelancers offering up to 50% discount on PRO subscriptions? Get in touch!

Microsoft translator and umbraco

Per Ploug Hansen — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:25:39 GMT

During this years Microsoft Mix conference (which Niels, Paul Sterling and I attended) Microsoft Translator was announced (along with alot of other great stuff, which you can find on the mix site)

Microsoft translator is a Machine translation webservice, so you simply tell it to translate a piece of text from one language to another, it is very impressive and really really fast.

Integrating it with umbraco was a breeze, actually it was done during the translator Q&A session which took place at mix, half an hour of coding in total, which resulted in near-instant translation of new pages added to an umbraco site into multiple languages from english.

Now sit back, and enjoy the music while you view the video below to see how this works:

And then download this zip file to get the code.

How to use:

Copy the translatehandler.cs to the app_code folder, and setup the different configuration values. And get a AppID from microsoft here (it's free)

Introducing XSLT Visualizing in v4.0.1

Niels Hartvig — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:00:21 GMT

Version 4.0.1 of Umbraco - coming anytime now - feature two new improvements to working with XSLT:

Automated references to XSLT Extension namespaces
XSLT Visualizer

In this short video I'm demonstrating the two new features:

XSLT Improvements in v4.0.1 from Niels Hartvig on Vimeo.

Umbraco featured in the Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Niels Hartvig — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:13:34 GMT

Today Microsoft announced the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) and on the behalf of our awesome community, I'm proud to announce that Umbraco is one of the few applications that are featured as a part of the launch.

The Web PI means an end to complex installs. As from today you can install Umbraco in one single click. That includes installing a webserver, database, Umbraco, permissions, etc. One click on a web page and within minutes, Umbraco is up and running regardless of you're running XP, Vista or Server.

Kudos to the Microsoft team including Bill Staples and Rusian Yakushev and Umbraco MVP Paul Sterling from Motus Connect who helped making this happen! This is a huge step forward - today Umbraco went mainstream in the best possible way. 2009 will be the best year ever to be in the Umbraco business.

So, why don't you try it now. Just click this little button below:

Umbraco Cast no. 8 is out

Niels Hartvig — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 19:07:12 GMT

The Umbraco Video Casts are finally back and it sure feels good. We've upgraded the recording equipment and are now recording in HD and in much improved audio, but apart from that the format is the same.

In this episode Per Ploug Hansen and yours truly are talking about the release of Umbraco 4 , the coming Umbraco 4.0.1 and of course the Umbraco CodeGarden 09 Conference . It's approx twenty minutes of either fun or waste of time - we'll let you be the judge but no matter what there's more to come.

Links from this episode:

Rate Umbraco 4 on Codeplex
Register for the Umbraco CodeGarden conference
Tim Geyssens (the guy behind the RenderTemplate() fix)