What IS umbraco?

Reference
What umbraco is, what you need, how to get started.

Contents

• What IS umbraco?
• Technical Requirements
• Skills Requirements
• Getting Started
• Getting Help
• umbraco for Teams

What IS umbraco?

Some very basic info about umbraco:

umbraco is an ASP.Net open-source Content Management System (CMS)(written in C#).

Slightly expanded...

umbraco is optimized for the presentation of human-readable and human-editable website content. It is a completely customizable system - in other words, YOU CAN DO ANYTHING with umbraco, it's just a matter of how and if you need to use technologies outside of the basic umbraco framework. 

umbraco is written using ASP.Net technology, but to create a website in umbraco you don't need to know anything about programming in ASP.Net, or C#. You can create your entire website in umbraco's web-based interface. (Check out some of the cool How-To articles for screenshots of the umbraco interface.)

Stuff you can do with umbraco's interface (not at all a comprehensive list!):

• Create document types with whatever properties you want
• Add/edit content on your site
• Set your XHTML and CSS templates for different document types
• Upload and use photos and other images
• Create a basic membership system, to allow logged in people to view certain sections of your site
• Create separate user accounts with customizable permissions to access the back-end to write, edit and publish content
• Have a multi-lingual site
• Create dynamic navigation and pull your content dynamically (aka showing "latest" items on the homepage)
• Have your site consume RSS feeds

There are however, cool things you can do with your umbraco site if you know ASP.Net:

• Integrate with external systems
• Use web services
• Create custom ASP.Net user controls and use them in umbraco pages

If you can program it, you can do it...

Read on for more about the technical and skills requirements...