If any of you have live sites running Umbraco v4 then you'll probably have noticed the helpful little popup that lets you know when there is a new version of Umbraco available. Or maybe you don't think it's so helpful at all - when your customers ring you up demanding an upgrade to the latest version!

Everyone knows how upgrading a site can lead to problems, and sometimes work like this is just more hassle than it's worth. If this is your attitude, it's pretty simple to turn off the notifications by updating the following entry in your web.config:

<add key="umbracoVersionCheckPeriod" value="7" />

Set the value to zero to turn off the updates - the default value is to check for a new version
every 7 days. It's also worth noting that this popup only appears to administrator-type users of the site.

But in reality there's nothing to be afraid of, the upgrade process is pretty straightforward, at least for a minor upgrade such as the one I've just finished with the Web Garden site. You can find the latest version of Umbraco for download here along with all the documentation you could possibly need to ensure a smooth upgrade process. This includes install guides for a number of server setups, and an upgrade guide which deals with the various upgrade scenarios. Of course you should avoid upgrading your live site directly; upgrade your local or dev version first, do your testing, and then ftp the changes to the live server when you're happy it's all ready to go.

I've also installed Warren Buckley's Twitter4Umbraco package to display my latest tweet on the website. Once again Ashleigh at Ash Creative came up with the design in keeping with the look and feel of the Web Garden site and I think it brightens everything up a little. It's a great little package and very easy to use - a good example of how easy it is to extend Umbraco with packages. For many other excellent Umbraco packages, check out the Umbraco project hub which is filled with the latest code from the community.