9

Time for a new tiny update to umbraco v3, this time the baby is named 3.0.3. Most importantly, this version fixes issues with publishing on load balanced environments. Download from Codeplex.

For new-comers (and the rest of us), the most interesting thing is that we finally got ourselves an installer! Yes, that's correct. The future default distribution format for umbraco will be a nice MSI file that handles everything from checking pre-requisites, setting permissions, adding site to IIS (including an AppPool), installing and configuring the database, etc. Installing umbraco is simply clicking next, next, next and takes less than five minutes. The installer works with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003. Amazing!

The installer is made by Sebastian Gloeckner and Bernhard Frank from Microsoft Germany. Thanks a million!

Here's some screen-dumps (click to enlarge):

Full update list:

• Missing "Create"-method in memberservice
• Typo when using [#parentID]
• Radio Button List will not save first entry...
• Publishing fails on load balanced environments
• Anchors fails when using the WYSIWYG
• Export document type, XML output should be Indented
• Change umbraco version id to be an internal variable instead of stored in xml

At last weeks chat, I suggested informal recurring Tuesday chats. That is tonight at 19.00 GMT+1, so feel free to join. I'm celebrating the one year birthday of my youngest son, but that might even make the chat better when I'm not there to say "no", "no", "noooooo".

As "always" - the chat will be at our Campfire room and all you need is a web browser.

Finally! After quite a lot of preparations, we're are live with "umbraco Pro" a supported version of umbraco. "We" are Per Ploug Hansen, Casey Neehouse and I, so that's a killer-team if you ask me.

umbraco Pro is a commercial license bundled with either three months or a year of support with guaranteed response time. Pricing starts at just €1.500 and details are in the feature matrix.

We're also in the process of getting the umbraco pro distribution certified by Microsoft, which should be ready by the end of the year.

umbraco Pro is not the end of the open source version of umbraco. It's a certified, supported alternative to the existing distribution which finally makes umbraco fully comparable to closed source products, but both editions are based on the same code base and that won't change. With "umbraco Pro" everybody wins. You can get answers to your umbraco questions, we can share our knowledge and finance the development of umbraco.

Go order ;-)

Casey Neehouse made minutes from todays chat - thanks:

<minutes>
Participants:
Niels Hartvig, Per Ploug Hansen, John Cruz, Casey Neehouse, Bob Baty-Bar, Morten Bock, Søren Sprogoe, Daniel Bjørnbakk, Kenneth Sølbergø, Jesper Ordrup, John Hodgkinson, DouglasRobar, Ismail, Boris Masis, Warren Buckley, Christian Palm, Ryan Roberts, Sean McGonagle, Simon Justesen, Christian Sparre

Chat Notes:
Introductions all around...
Discussion of expectations:
  Morten - to gain knowledge of the roadmap and how it will be executed.
Soren - no real expectations - just wants to stay up to date.  Ideas for the website.
  Niels - to see who to get involved.
  John H. - no expectations either
  Per - to get feedback

Niels informed us that Microsoft Germany has provided an MSI installer.  This will provide a simplified means to install umbraco for novice users by checking for prerequisites such as ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX.NET, SQL Server, Set up IIS site, and build necessary connection strings.

Per and Niels started refactoring the umbraco UI yesterday.  YUI was chosen for the foundation, with scriptaculo-us for effects.  ASP.NET AJAX controls for client/server communications with script-enabled web services.
The whole UI will be rewritten to be based off of YUI.

With sponsorship (anyone interested), there will be an effort to implement an Accessible interface as well.
Casey brought up control refactoring, which brought in several comments, and created need for an additional topic.  Validation became a major point of discussion, and control configuration was mentioned.  To be revisited later....

Per provided us some screenshots of the new UI, and explained some of the more important changes:

• The create button becomes a menu, allowing for the user to create new items from any of the sections. 
• Also, the Sections have been moved into a section menu as well, creating more room for the tree.
  Create menus and Section menus will both support shortcuts, in which you can drag items from the content tree to the menu to create shortcuts to common locations.  This will be user-based (possibly global/group shortcuts as well).
• Per also discussed the new internal search.  Search will integrate Auto Suggest features for node names as well as search across different sections.  There will be an advanced search that will allow you to search into more detailed metadata.  There will also be a means to save Searches to allow for easy search at later times.   There will also be an API to allow extensions to become searchable, allowing you to easily have umbracoo insert the data into the index.
• Niels explains how the search would be savable, or Instant Dashboards could be created.
• Back to UI, there will be a few widgets globally available.  First of which is Modal Dialogs, Panels (for the Speech Bubble), and simple dialogs.
• The tree will be rewritten to allow for drag-n-drop moving, copying, and sorting.  The context menus will be extended to allow for custom actions as well.

John Cruz has started implementing Membership Providers to allow for support of LDAP/AD, and your custom member DB for authentication.  This should be released in v 3.1.

Back on topic of the Editor Controls, Default Values, Better Validation Controls, and Configuration methods.  Discussions varied between approaches, but the consensus led to a property editor interface for DataType settings, and string values and key/value collections interfaces for Document Type settings.  Due to lack of Volunteers, this will be placed on a wish list.

The chat then moved to templates, and the possible use of Master Pages in place of the built-in template system.  Discussion was mixed about the effectiveness of such implementation.  Research will be given to see the effectiveness.

Action Handlers were next discussed, as they will be moved to the CMSNode class, to allow for global inheritance.  Thus, most items in umbraco will be able to use actionhandlers.  Also, some other API changes to allow for extensions to self register, versus the database table approach.

Moving on to the repository, Niels nominated Bob, Doug, Warren, and Casey to act as a team to get that up to par.  A form to allow for package submissions would be available for install/testing/approval.
Package discussion also went into Upgrades and Uninstalls.   Uninstalls scare Niels, so, the conversation was postponed...  Uninstalls by practice could be very dangerous, and could break a lot of things, so, they should be taken lightly.

Help came to discussion, and a team will be formed to handle basic help as well.

I am sure I missed some stuff....
</minutes>

Casey, you didn't miss much but next chat will be October 9th 19.00 GMT+1. The room will be open on the same url for anyone to use, so feel free to use it to discuss something that would take too long on the forum. Also; look in the forum on Tuesday around 19.00 GMT+1 - could be fun to have some regular stuff going on.

Remember the developer chat tonight about the future development and roadmap for 3.x. The "official topic" is
"Talking about the roadmap and who's interested in contributing"

Url to the chat will come here 20 minutes prior to the chat. Please notice that seats are limited (25), so please only participate if you'll contribute. Minutes will be published after the chat for everyone who's curious.

"See" you in about two hours!

Per and Niels

Update: If you wish to add topics to the agenda, please add them in the comments

To access the chat:

Visit our campfire chat room. When you access, you cannot see what's previously been going on for some awkward reason, but everything will be published later. To make the chatting process as simple as possible, please follow these rules:

1. The main topic is to start a collective development process of umbraco, as open and inviting as possible
2. Stay true to the current topic - the format makes it hard to discuss multiple topics
3. The first 15 minutes is for saying hello and suggesting further topics. If you come after 19.15 GMT+1, then just follow the chat and add something when it stays in-sync with the topic . Starting with a "Hi all" can be pretty annoying even though it's meant in a good way :-)
4. Agenda is:
1. 19.00 - 19.15: Welcome, chit-chatting, saying hi and suggesting topics
2. 19.15 - 19.45: Presenting the current research status and what's have been done and delegated so far with discussions
3. 19.45 - ??:??: Discussing roadmap features and who want to contribute with what.
4. ??.??: Beer, no wait - gotta save that until codegarden '08 ;-)

It's my pleasure to welcome John Cruz to the umbraco core team. John is a C# developer from Honolulu, Hawaii and MCTS in Web development in C# and in SQL Server 2005 and currently works for Pacific Resources for Education and Learning as a Senior Web Developer. He enjoys developing web applications in C# using design patterns and test driven development.

His skills are a perfect match for planning the re-factoring of umbraco (v4), ensuring a safe process and much prettier code, but he's already started working on implementing the Membership Provider model for v3.1.

Give him a warm welcome!

Next week, Per and I will spend three wonderful days to start the initial development of umbraco 3.1 (primarily with focus on the UI re-factoring). But improving umbraco shouldn't be a closed process and with arms wide open we'll invite you to join.

As very initial work, we've created a wish list of stuff we'd like to see added to umbraco 3.x - not necessarily in v3.1 but in the v3.x life cycle. Consider it a work-in-progress roadmap with the most important major updates loosely described.

We hope that you'll read it and give feedback in the comments, but we'll also encourage you to discuss it with your customers/end-users so they could add improvements too. After all, they're the people who use the tool almost everyday. When adding ideas in the comments, please spec them with a couple of sentences in the same style as in the roadmap.

On Tuesday at 19.00 GMT+1 we'll arrange a chat to discuss our ideas as well as the ones submitted in the comments (download as an ICS reminder for Outlook/gCal).

When we've collected all the ideas, we'll arrange a poll for developers and a poll for editors to get an idea on how to prioritize (think Dell Ideastorm).

[1] umbraco 3.x wish list / roadmap (.pdf)
[2] Developer chat reminder file (.ics)

As you might have seen, Microsoft just released the 3rd beta of Live Writer, and I'm pleased to announce that it's 100% compatible with umbraco v3. A part from being gentle to blogging, Live Writer let's you create and edit pages in umbraco using the neat new "Content Channel" concept in v3.

So instead of using a web based interface, you can use a nice Windows application which also makes it possible to edit pages offline and even do spell checking. It also supports embedding images which are uploaded to the umbraco media library, like this screenshot:

Highly recommended and did I mention that it's a free download?

If you missed the fabulous umbraco training previous week, here's some good news. We'll be running umbraco training again on October 11-12th. Seats are limited this time, so don't wait to long to order. As always there's two courses - here's a little topic appetizer:

• Understanding the umbraco basics - Document Types, Templates and Macros
• Creating a simple website from scratch
• Understanding XSLT - creating a news "module"
• Creating multi-language websites including coverage of Dictionary Items and Languages
• Advanced properties: Re-use of properties and recursive usage of properties
• Two-way feedback using AutoForms and Notifications
• Great Packages: Implementing full-text searching and mail forms

Level 2 - umbraco for .NET Developers, extending and integrating solutions

• Usage of .NET User Controls with umbraco
• Debugging .NET Controls with umbraco
• In-depth explanation of the umbraco object model and usage of the umbraco presentation APIs
• Creating, importing and modifying content from .NET using the API
• Extending XSLT with custom .NET classes
• Usage of AJAX and umbraco
• Custom event handling in umbraco using ActionHandlers
• Walkthrough of Members and their APIs

Full details on training as well on how to order at the training section.