Reasons for selecting Umbraco

How-to
Experience in setting up Umbraco and my first website.

Contents

• Introduction
• Reasons for selecting Umbraco
• Some references
• Where to start
• A digression – XSLT
• Event Calendar
• Do some design
• Images
• Rendering the output
• Templates and CSS
• Back to Media Pickers

Reasons for selecting Umbraco

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't.” (William Shakespeare, "Hamlet")

I have spent quite a time looking at various CMSs, and started building a website in one of them, before settling on Umbraco. The reasons for the selection are as always in these things a personal judgement, made at the time, but these are the main factors (in some sort of priority order).

• It is open source and therefore the software is available free.
• The main reason for the website’s existence is to advertise our programme of events. I therefore need a respectable Events Calendar, with ability to produce secondary diary lists etc. (This and the next point I settled on as indicators that a CMS would give the minimum level of functionality I needed.)
• As with any website, but especially as an arts centre, provision of good images (and photo galleries) illustrating our activities is important. I have found that open source CMSs are almost universally confused about their image handling, in particular about whether images should be represented in the database as full-blown nodes (objects/assets/etc.) or simply exist as files in filestore to be pointed to by attributes on objects elsewhere. Umbraco is no exception here, and is an area where I am hoping that the developers can make improvements.
• Umbraco seems to have a level of sophistication, and a user interface, that is relatively easy to use while providing a good level of functionality to the users. (Though I am still finding plenty of things I had not realised were there.)
• I am attracted by the slogan that “one can do anything with Umbraco”, though as noted above I hope I don’t have to.
• It does seem to have a particularly open templating system however, in the sense that the site designer has full control, and the system is not inserting bits of HTML from hidden repositories.
• My recent programming experience has been in ASP.NET so Umbraco’s base in this and XML related technologies is attractive.
• A trial installation seems to be reasonably robust compared to some others I looked at.
• The forums are quite active, and I have had answers to questions when asked.

Some worries

It would be surprising if any candidate did not have some downsides. Some particular worries remaining about Umbraco include the following:

• Less than ideal (in my opinion) image management features, as indicated above.
• Limited and scattered documentation.
• Add-on packages are scattered, can be difficult to find, and difficult to keep track of updates.
• The risk, as with many open source projects, of developer support ceasing or declining. (Though commercial products can be chopped as well.)