11-08-2007
Thoughts on Umbraco after getting my first site live
I know there is plenty of activity in the area of ‘my favourite CMS’ in the blogosphere, but I just thought I’d add my tuppence worth after completing my first Umbraco site. It’s a pretty pure site with only a single .NET user control, everything else being 100% Umbraco. Here are my thoughts on the experience:
- XSLT is obviously a huge part of Umbraco as it’s used to create your macros which are more or less the intelligence of your running site. I had no experience in this area before beginning and yes it was definitely frustrating. However, three weeks later I’m much more confident with it and can achieve the majority of the tasks I need to with ease. The patterns you use tend to be similar to others you’ve already written and it soon gets familiar.
- The output from Umbraco was perfect, no layout issues or strange characters being outputted, only the content styled and laid out as specified in the template.
- The ability for the programmer to work simultaneously with the html/css builder was a great advantage. None of this handing of html to the programmer to wrap around his code, the builder can get straight in and input the styles, etc, directly. Also, it’s feasible that if your builder is up for it they can get to grips themselves with the XSLT, document types, templates, etc, and the programmer can concentrate on the more difficult (and interesting!) programming tasks. This saved us loads of time, especially in the final phase of the project where we were finessing the site for the client.
- It sometimes feels with Umbraco that to do very basic tasks (which you might expect would involve a drag-and-drop operation or a button to click) involves semi-complex (and often complex) XLST. For example to get an image to appear on the page! At first this was a source of frustration but once you’re used to working with the XML which represents your site you take it in your stride.
- I haven’t had to use the Umbraco dlls within my .NET user controls as yet, that will have to wait for the next project. However, adding my .NET user controls into Umbraco was simplicity itself.
So overall it’s been an interesting learning experience, frustrating at times but ultimately fulfilling. The site is live and on time, the client is happy and in control of their site, and most importantly my manager is also happy! I’ll definitely be using Umbraco again in the future and I know that here at Equator we are looking at using it for similar projects in the near future.
Dave
Posted by dotnetdave in Umbraco, .NET 2.0 Development | RSS 2.0
Well done Dave, the sites are good
It’s great that the copy and image management seems to be quick and intuitive for the client.
Hi Dave!
Great feedback - much appreciated. You’re right that some basic things are too complex and we should definately do something about that (like inserting an image). If you e-mail me a list of the things that was most frustratious (like most basic tasks that was too complex), I’d be happy to divide them into issues and see if we could do better, which I’m sure we could.
Are you familiar with the XSLT templates build into umbraco? When you choose to create a new XSLT, there’s a drop down in the create dialog with around 8-10 templates/patterns that will help you get started. I use them a lot myself
Cheers - and again I appreciate this constructive feedback. A post like this is *really* useful.
/n
Thanks Niels,
I have to admit that I didn’t pay too much attention to the built-in XSLT templates but I will.
One obvious point that’s missing from the post is of course the value of the community. Despite the frustrations, for the majority of issues a solution could be found through the Umbraco Community Search, and if not then a post to the forum would do it.
Cheers,
Dave
Sounds familiar Dave
I am using Umbraco for about 1.5 year now, and i agree some things are frustrating (what you say, displaying a image in XSLT), but after building a complete site, you know 95% of the familiar things. My first site took about 3 weeks to build (the site in my profile). But the second one took only 20 percent of the time, even a lot of code was reusable with some small tweaks.
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