On November 28th Jon and I had our second day of development work on SocialFront for Umbraco. A little overdue but here are our notes from the day.

Day one developing a social networking package called SocialFront for Umbraco. Lots of mistakes were made, tea was drunk, fun was had - and progress was made. Read all about it!

I've just spent a full day working with Jon Carlos on a new open-source social networking platform called SocialFront for Umbraco. It's nowhere near ready for release yet, but I thought I'd introduce the project by talking about the philosophy behind the project and the hopes that we have for its future.

I've just upgraded the Web Garden site to the latest version of Umbraco, v4.0.2.1. Here's a quick note about how easy the upgrade process was, and how much documentation is available to help you through the process. I also show you how to turn off the popup notifications for new versions of Umbraco.

Export your document types to quickly get your changes from your local machine to your live server.

Here's how to use an xslt macro with the TinyMCE richtext editor in Umbraco to allow content editors to easily embed nicely formatted images with captions into their content.

When you blog about something on your website, you want people to know about it. The more people that know about it the better. And the more blog search engines that know about it, the better it is for your search engine optimisation (SEO). This post describes one way of increasing the exposure of your blog using a simple Umbraco package called PingXMLRPC.

I had a couple of problems on the new Web Garden Umbraco v4.0.1 with Windows Live Writer 2009 integration. In this blog post I describe the issues that I had and the solution to those issues.

At last I have gotten around to upgrading the Web Garden site to the latest version of Umbraco. Here are the details of some of the packages that I installed, including site compression, image caching, google sitemap, new blog package for Umbraco v4 and some other features that may be of interest.

I previously blogged about a simple Umbraco helper class to get Umbraco data into your usercontrols, but since then I've updated it quite a bit. Due to ongoing efforts to package up my code into more easily re-usable chunks, I've created a new class library, WebGarden.Utilities, that I just add to each new project. It gives me access to a number of handy functions, a few of which I'm going to share here (the more general purpose ones).