In my (seemingly) never ending search for great CMSs, I have recently come across umbraco, an open-source CMS developed in ASP.Net - a rare bird!
In my interest to learn more about the system, I have decided to compile my research & resources here.
Introduction to umbraco from their website
umbraco is a free, stable and standard-supporting cms that is easy to use. You get the best from both worlds by having an open source cms that has a fully open api, full source code included, a helping and growing community and still you have that great .NET platform backed up by Microsoft.umbraco is fast to learn for both developers and content contributors. It's based on the Microsoft .NET platform and is using w3c standard technologies like XML and XSLT for template building while still being fully open for integration using any .NET language like c#, VB.NET or Delphi. The editor interface is using well known metaphors making it a breeze to use for content contributors.
Basic umbraco Links
- umbraco website
- The main site, frequently updated.
- umbraco Developers Forum
- Finally the forum is up and running!
- umbraco developers mailing list (Yahoo! Group)
- Now that the forum is up, help requests should go there, but this old Yahoo group has tons of pre-forum content, so if you can't find an answer on the forum, check here.
- Umbraco Developer Community
- Nothing up here yet, but keep an eye out.
Umbraco Developer Community Coming 2006. - Umbraco Wikibook
- Umbraco Documentation
Includes:
FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
Reference
Plugins and Extensions
Samples and Articles
Help Out
Useful links - Getting Started - umbraco cms, open source ASP.NET Content Management System - written in C#
- Post-installation information, including:
- Install sample site
- Download PDF Manual
etc.
Additional Resources & Related Blogs
A lot of great people are devoting time to umbraco development and code samples. These are very worthwhile for the umbraco enthusiast
- Niels Hartvig's umbraco blog
- "Random thoughts on developing a .NET Content Management System"
Niels Hartvig is the lead developer for umbraco. Sometimes info shows up here before it makes it to the main website. - Kasper Bumbech Andersen's Blog
- Kasper Bumbech Andersen is one of the umbraco developers. Some examples of integrating other types of services (aka Flickr & RSS feeds) with umbraco.
- Darren Ferguson's Blog » Umbraco Category
- Darren is a great umbraco developer who not only develops (and shares) great code and modules, but also contributes to documentation. (Way to go Darren!) Check out for very concise and useful info.
- Objects.dk Blog » Umbraco Category
- Per Ploug Hansen's blog posts categorized as "umbraco" (check here also for great XSLT demos and tips)
- CPalm - Umbraco
- Christian Palm's blog posts tagged "umbraco"
- Daniel Bjørnbakk's Blog Posts tagged "umbraco"
- "Thoughts about .NET development and my opinion about random stuff I (don't) care about"
- Ismail's Umbraco blog
- Ismail Mayat's blog. "My five pence worth on Umbraco and other things"
Technical References
Sometimes locating documentation for open-source projects is a challenge. Here is a (not quite comprehensive) list of technical docs.
- umbraco.library functions reference
- Function library for umbraco. Includes various helper-methods to save, load and transform data from umbraco.
Especially usefull in XSLT where any of these methods can be accesed using the umbraco.library name-space. - umbraco template tags : umbracoGetItem
- Inserts the value of a given field
- umbraco template tags : umbracoMacro
- Insert a macro
- umbraco template tags : umbracoTemplateLoadChild
- Inserts the child template
- umbraco template tags : aspNetForm
- Insert a server-side ran form tag for using runat="server" html-controls
- Umbraco Installers Guide
- More info about installing umbraco
- Umbraco XML Format
- All published content in umbraco are stored in an Xml Document. This page explains the various nodes & attributes.
- Debugging Tips
- How to debug in umbraco.
* 1.1 Getting trace data from umbraco
* 1.2 Getting data sent to macro elements
* 1.3 Production systems - Step-by-Step: Setting up a Newsletter
- How to set up a newsletter in umbraco
- umbraco 2.1 Package XML Schema
- First initial version of an xml schema to help the process of creating packages.
umbraco Forum
Here are some of the latest posts.
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byumbraco Packages, Extensions, & Tools
Packages are a newer feature that allows for functionality chunks to be bundled and transported from one installation to another. I hope that as the user community gets used to this new feature lots of great packages start showing up online. I will try to add them here.
- umbraco Extensions
- Rune Thougaard Kristensen's excellent list of available goodies.
- UmbracoUtilities
- UmbracoUtilities is a collection of small utilities that can be very usefull when implementing umbraco websites. The collection consists of the following:
* Search Result: A Lucene implementation that indexes and searches umbraco content extremely fast
* AutoForm: A utility that automatically creates front-end forms from a documenttype
* ContentType: Let's you specify a contenttype for your umbraco page
* SubscribeUnsubscribe: Create, delete or update members with information on subscribing to newsletters - Ecommerce server
- Add eCommerce functionality to an umbraco site.
- Language Packs
- For changing the language of the umbraco GUI.
- Umbraco Log Viewer (for Development)
- A small tool build for debugging umbraco packages and the like. It is a (very!) simple log viewer that will show you the log entries for the last 30 days for a specific category (system/error/save/publish/etc)
- TinyMCE in Umbraco
- Alternative WYSIWYG editor
- FCKeditor in Umbraco
- Another alternative WYSIWYG editor
- TextGen.aspx via flat URL's
- An Umbraco plugin that allows use of /umraco/TextGen.aspx via flat URL's.
You can now generate an image using a flat url as follows:
< img src="/textgen/This%20is%20a%20pen/arial/48/000000/ff0000/1.aspx" /> - Static HTML Export Plugin
- Allows you to save flat html to an alternative document root.
- Blog Extensions for umbraco
- Peter D.'s download repository for BlogCalendar & Blog Package
- Packages from CodeGarden
- Thursday, June 01, 2006 by Niels Hartvig:"I've made a zip file of all the packages that I used in my demos. Soon we'll have the Package Directory, but until then - go download this zip file and enjoy.
- Events Calendar
- Ismail's Umbraco Events Calendar
- Updated Umbraco RSS Package
- An updated version of the Umbraco RSS package with new functionality. The following things are updated:
1. You can choose a publish date field, that way you are not forced to use the updated date on a page. This could be quite annoying when you have to correct a typo etc.
2. You can choose an author, so it is not the user that has updated the page.
3. When you save/update a RSS setting in umbraco, the RSS file are updated/created immediately, no need to create a test page, just to see if it work like you want to.
4. Small update to the UI (webservice stuff)
5. The source is a nicely Visual Studio 2003 class library, this way you can easily have a look at the code or change it into your needs. No need for setting up a virtual directory etc. - MultiplePagePickerViaSource
- In short the MultiplePagePickerViaSource is a Data Type where you can select multiple children of a given page in the site structure you can also sort the selected pages.
- Image cropper
- Martin Hagermark has developed the new Data Type, Image cropper, which lets you take a part of an image and create a thumbnail from a cropped area in the umbraco backend.
- Dashboard Controls
- A couple of controls for the umbraco dashboard for making life easier:
* In the content section you can see a list of latest edited and newest created items
* In the media you can upload a zip file and have all included files created as images or files
* In the member section you can search for members (including their properties) - Member Library Tools, Including Messaging
- By Per Ploug Hansen: "The library itself is a bunch of methods that can be used to add internal messaging to your members, list members, get types and groups etc. for a more complete list view this post. besides those I've added some basic methods for delete/creating messages adding/removing contacts from your adressebook and stuff like that. There is no message reader or composer included as ascx files tho. It is possible with just xslt to write your own composer that can send/delete/forward messages and other basic stuff. (wrote one in 5 minuttes just now) If you want to, you are ofcourse free to use the library to create a .net based form. Simple to do as the functions are already there to use in the dll."
- Darren Ferguson's Umbraco Backup
- Features
* Backup Files, SQL server data and virtual directories
* Initiate backups via the Umbraco GUI
* Scheduled backups
* Restore datbase with single executable command
* Detailed user guide - ImageGen v.1.3
- Douglas Robar's latest version of ImageGen (v.1.3) along with all the documentation. Dynamically resize images and other fun stuff.
- umbraco Redirect Package by Casey Neehouse
- "Umbraco has a handy method of redirecting to internal nodes simply by picking the desired destination from a content picker control, but that does not always provide the desired effect. I had a need to redirect a node to something else, thus I created this simple control to allow you to redirect to allow you to redirect to a url string."
- Multimedia Indexing
- From Ismail: "This has been asked on the forums and I have also promised on the umbraco site to release my multimedia indexing hack. The code is live with one site www.synexus.com and is going to go live with another site soon. Its a hack of the umbracoUtilities package that Niels originally wrote. I have also got some code written by Niels that is work in progress for multimedia indexing. Download the zip read the readme and off you go. Any questions comments post them here."
- Captcha for umbraco
- From Per: "I've been getting more and more spam in this blog ever since I removed the random headlines and thereby made it findable by google. So to put an end to that I've added a captcha check on comments forms.
It's an Umbraco Editor control mixed with some code from this codeproject article, It doesn't save anything, but it acds validation to the form, so the comment will not be submitted if the phrase is wrong." - Automated Sorting of Media & Content Nodes
- By Stewart Twynham - "After uploading about 400 images over the weekend into upteen media folders, I then realised that the sort function is rather limited - i.e. UP and DOWN. The thought of going through each of the 130 folders and manually hitting up and down really did not appeal, so I've added a "Sort" option to /umbraco/sort.aspx."
- Captcha for umbraco
- It's an Umbraco Editor control mixed with some code from this codeproject article, It doesn't save anything, but it acds validation to the form, so the comment will not be submitted if the phrase is wrong.
HOW TO: Set umbraco Directory Permissions Using Plesk
Some web hosting accounts use Plesk as their control panel (the one I am using is LunarPages)
umbraco requires ASP.Net to have modify (write) permission on several folders for correct operation. The directories you need to set these "modify" permissions on are:
bin
config
css
data
media
umbraco
usercontrols
xslt
When you first install umbraco, you need to log in to Plesk, click on your domain, click "Web Directories" and for each directory listed above you need to follow these steps:
1. Click the gold padlock to the right of the directory.
2. UNCHECK the box next to "Allow inheritable permissions from the parent to propagate..."
3. CHECK the box next to "Replace permission entries on all child objects..."
4. Click on the user named like this: "Plesk IIS User (IUSR_)"
5. Under the column to the right - "Permissions for IUSR_", CHECK the box next to "Modify", then click OK.
6. Most likely, you will now be looking at the contents of the directory, so to go back, click on the gold "Permissions" icon.
7. Repeat steps 2-6 for all the other listed "Plesk" user(s).
umbraco requires ASP.Net to have modify (write) permission on several folders for correct operation. The directories you need to set these "modify" permissions on are:
bin
config
css
data
media
umbraco
usercontrols
xslt
When you first install umbraco, you need to log in to Plesk, click on your domain, click "Web Directories" and for each directory listed above you need to follow these steps:
1. Click the gold padlock to the right of the directory.
2. UNCHECK the box next to "Allow inheritable permissions from the parent to propagate..."
3. CHECK the box next to "Replace permission entries on all child objects..."
4. Click on the user named like this: "Plesk IIS User (IUSR_)"
5. Under the column to the right - "Permissions for IUSR_", CHECK the box next to "Modify", then click OK.
6. Most likely, you will now be looking at the contents of the directory, so to go back, click on the gold "Permissions" icon.
7. Repeat steps 2-6 for all the other listed "Plesk" user(s).
What have I missed?
Calling all umbraco aficionados! Please put in your suggestions for more great links and info here!
submit
by hfloyd
Since 1998 I have been helping people organize their business processes, especially utilizing technology. My company, Floyd Innovations LLC, develops... (more)
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