This week I finally got around to upgrading my site to Umbraco v4. I've been building up a wishlist of things to add or change on the site for months, and now I've checked them all off! Without further ado, here is a list of the upgrades and features that I've used. By the way, I know the site doesn't look very different, but under the hood there's quite a big change!

First off, a couple of packages that I now use on all Umbraco sites as standard:

1. Douglas Robar's excellent ImageGen package

You can get from the Umbraco package repository (Developer section -> packages in the Umbraco admin). I uploaded the content images for the site to the Media section, and then linked to them using ImageGen instead of a direct link in the html. This means that the images are cached automatically for me. I don't use thumbnails on my site, but for client sites that is often a requirement, and ImageGen is an excellent tool for that - the images look better than squashing them with height and width values in the html, and again you can take advantage of the caching to speed up page load times.

2. PeterD's compression package

This is another staple for all my Umbraco sites. Dead simple to install and configure (the instructions are included when you install the package and they are very easy to follow), this tool compresses all of your javascript and css files. It also merges multiple javascript and css references in the header into a single reference for each, thus improving response times. It's pretty much free compression, there's no reason not to have this tool on every site you build.

And some other improvements that I've been meaning to make for ages now:

The blog package was completely updated to the new blog for Umbraco v4. This is available from the package repository. It checked a number of things on my wishlist, including Gravatars in the blog comments, a blogroll, categories and date filtering and archiving. I did customise the xslt for my own uses a bit but the vast majority of the work was already done.

I also implemented AJAX comments on my site. Once again I turned to PeterD for help with this one (Implementing AJAX comments on your Umbraco site). I actually took his code and messed with it a bit so that I could use it both for blog comments and for the contact form on my site. Using his datatype for blog comments but also using Tim's Umbraco blog package meant I had to make some minor tweaks to get them to play nice together but they seem to work well now.

Syntax highlighting for code in my blog posts is something I've wanted for ages. I used SyntaxHighlighter version 2.0 for this. It provides a number of "brushes" which are basically sets of syntax highlighting tools. I use the Javascript, c# and Sql brushes on the site. It works using javascript along with some very simple css. I add tags like <pre class="brush: c#">code here</pre> around my code and it does the rest using javascript. Smart.

Twitter integration I used Warren Buckley's Twitter package for Umbraco. It displays a number of my latest tweets, or it can be configured to include tweets of those people that I follow, i.e. my whole tweet stream. You'll probably notice that you can't see it on the site at the moment. Well, that's because I'm a really crap designer and I'm going to wait until I get someone to make it look nice for me!

Windows LiveWriter integration. I followed Tim's excellent instructions to configure Windows LiveWriter. They are for an older version of Windows Live Writer than the latest one but they still work. You can download Windows Live Writer from the Microsoft site. This makes it a hell of a lot easier to post code, for example. I find that Tiny MCE does strange things when you try and paste code into the HTML view, and you can often lose your tags. This way is much easier, and it keeps a draft copy locally too.

Google Sitemap. This is just an xslt template which creates a sitemap in the format that Google likes. I then let Google know about it and they can use it to index my site and work out where the new pages are. It also allows you to specify how often the content is updated, and which are the most important pages on your site. Great for search engine optimisation.

Of course the irony is that just as I finally upgrade to v4.0.0, v4.0.1 is released! Sometimes being a cutting edge developer is hard work :) Luckily though the upgrade is straightforward and easy. There is a good blog post on how to upgrade your Umbraco v4.0.0 site to v4.0.1 on the forum by PeterD. Dead simple.

David