It’s the weekend, it’s my birthday, and I’m taking time away from all of my various client and company projects and working on my things for the day. Yesterday, the Umbraco 4 was released. Great job Umbraco team and congratulations. Maybe one day I’ll be as lucky with one of the side projects that I’m working on. I spent a few minutes last night downloading the release, importing it into my Subversion repository, and then merging it with the web site that I had started. The merge went pretty smoothly. Now it’s time to go back to exploring what I perceive my needs to be and learning how to further extend Umbraco.

The first thing that comes to mind is that if I want to use Umbraco to support a commercial web site, there are parts of Umbraco that I want to be secured via SSL. For example, a payment screen for a product, the user registration screen, or the user login screen could all be protected using SSL. Is it possible to have a mixed HTTP/HTTPS site using Umbraco? Absolutely. I actually set up the infrastructure for supporting this in an earlier post, which I suggest that you read in case you haven’t. More...

It’s been a crazy week, and I am very much looking forward to the week ending. I read a quote from Colin Farrell in one of those tabloid magazines that my wife buys: “I was burning the candle at both ends, and the flames were meeting in the middle.” (Or something approximately close to that.) But that’s basically how I feel. Just way too much going on. But in the middle of all of that chaos, I’ve managed to find some time to do pleasant stuff like continue to explore Umbraco.

I came up with my latest extension while playing with templates. I’m still planning some posts hopefully this weekend to describe my document types and templates that I am building. Basically, document types are containers that have properties that contain data. Data can be images, files, text, other things. Templates describe where in the web page that the property data is inserted. Umbraco provides an ASP.NET server control that allows you to insert data into a page using the control, but sometimes you need data in a place where you can’t use a server control. To get around this problem, I created the <%$ Item:xxx $> expression. More...

Continuing on my previous posts, I’ve been looking into Umbraco more. I’m really liking the new features for version 4.0. My main complaint about it in previous versions when I looked at Umbraco were the proprietary membership database, and the difficulty of doing ASP.NET things with it. All of that seems to have been fixed with the upcoming 4.0 release. Umbraco now uses the ASP.NET membership and role providers, and templates have been replaced with ASP.NET master pages. In addition, direct support now exists for ASP.NET controls within pages. All-in-all, Umbraco 4.0 is shaping up to be a great release, in my opinion, and looks like it will be a great CMS for all purposes.

The one feature that is missing from Umbraco v4 is built-in support for ASP.NET themes. Umbraco supports CSS style sheets, but there are key uses for themes to control and customize the look-and-feel of web sites that is very special in ASP.NET, and a necessity for ASP.NET-based web sites. Umbraco would be killer if it supports that feature. Fortunately, as I discovered, it’s not that hard to add support for ASP.NET themes, and it’s even possible to let different parts of your web site use different themes. More...

I’ve been looking through the Umbraco web site all day, and doing some web searches on various topics of interest that interested me before. While the documentation is still a little sparse, I really do like a lot of the improvements that they’ve made in version 4.0. I installed and downloaded the release candidate from CodePlex. More...

Umbraco is a free, open source CMS written for ASP.NET. I looked at it a while ago, but for a couple of reasons I stopped working with it. Now, they’re at release candidate stage for version 4 and it has a bunch of new features including finally switching from their proprietary membership system to supporting the ASP.NET membership and role providers.

I might give it another look to see if it’s worth using. What was very cool about it from the standpoint of developing a web site, was that it provided all of the functionality for data storage and content management, and as the web site developer you only needed to really focus on the UI aspects of the site. One of the downsides, in my opinion, was that all of the content remained in memory in XML storage, which means that as you get more content your memory usage is going to increase. I was concerned about this at a shared hosting level, but then again, I guess it would require a lot of content before that became a problem.

I’ll probably start playing with it again and seeing what I can do with it, and will blog about the results for anyone else that’s interested.