Sunday, July 20, 2008

This is the last of the series of blog posts about the Umbraco UK Developer Meeting in London last Friday. It is kind of like the results of an Umbraco focus group, and details how we think about Umbraco, what we like, what we dislike, and also a number of confusing issues and unanswered questions that we had about Umbraco. I'm sure this is one to kick-start some interesting debate!

Umbraco in general

Everyone is looking forward to Courier!

• Umbraco is great for designers as there are no constraints. Umbraco is a framework.
• You can use non-technical staff to help with content, for example. Content testers can go ahead and fix the bugs that they find. This can be vital when timescales are very tight – everyone on the team can pitch in simultaneously using Umbraco.

• The lack of documentation is a frustration.

Umbraco v4

• Master pages are brilliant!
• Feels better
• New url aliases for pages.
• Did we mention that Master pages are brilliant?
• Leveraging existing technology in Umbraco in general is great, for example using xslt instead of a proprietary system, html instead of some bizarre new markup, etc.
• Xslt no longer stored in the database so there are no more xslt caching issues
• Faster
• Focus on performance: version 4 could be the polished release that really gets Umbraco to the next level.

• At the moment you can’t use AJAX functionality in the datatypes tab
• Some packages don’t work in v4 yet
• The source code from the daily builds is untested and can be buggy.
• Refactoring the trees in the site has meant that the mediapicker is broken.
• When inserting an Umbraco page field into a template, strip paragraphs doesn’t work in v4 – only the ‘recursive’ option from this dialog box works. So you need to write your own xslt to get around it.

• What is the long term plan for Umbraco - will Umbraco eventually get bought out by Microsoft (seeing as they’re using it for one of their sites, and there were two Microsoft guys at Codegarden)?
• Confusion: what is the difference between the Motus Connect store and the Umbraco store?
• What effect will the store have on the community? Will we lose the community friendliness and willingness to help by sharing if code can now be sold? The community is one of Umbraco’s biggest asset (if not THE biggest asset). Also, as a developer working on a site, you don’t want to have to pay to try out a package that may not work in your situation
• What is the difference between a nitro and a package?
• Why is there only an “installed packages” folder, and not an “installed nitros” folder?
• What is the definition of a nitro? Is it something that can appear on a page, as opposed to a package that can generate pages of content?
• What exactly is Boost? Is it just a starter kit for v4, similar to the Creative Website Wizard? Or is it more than that?
• Why has this new, proprietary vocabulary been introduced now? What about this blog discusion between Niels and Jeffrey Veen from 2004, specifically the "stop it with the jargon already" section?
• Why isn’t Cruise Control being used with the Umbraco source to ensure that the nightly builds actually build?
• It would be nice to have a tab in the back end where you could manage the whole Umbraco installation, for example clearing the logs, removing old versions of content by date, etc. Perhaps a good idea for a package?
• SEO – how can you deal with extremely long file names if the client sees them as important? Especially if they are being stored in a deep folder structure in the site. You can probably use urlrewritingnet in Umbraco to use regular expressions to achieve this.