The Business Website Starter Pack is an early release of a starter kit for business-oriented umbraco sites, aiming to kickstart development and give new umbraco devs a good starting point for building their own sites.
Lee Messenger has published a very valuable blogpost at BlogFodder called A Complete Newbie’s Guide to Umbraco which serves as a collection of excellent links and information specifically targeted to Umbraco newbies (of which I am one!) It’s great to see this type of information being published around Umbraco as it will help build the user base by making it easier for newbies to get involved in this great CMS. One of the recommendations that Lee makes is that you should join Umbraco.tv (19 eur per month) to gain access to over 5 hours of video training. I plan on checking out these videos as I get more involved in Umbraco.development.
I’ve just had my second look at Umbraco, an ASP.Net content management system (CMS). When I first stumbled on Umbraco about a year ago, I misunderstood the license agreement to mean that in order to use the open source version of the software, you were required to put “Powered by Umbraco” on the home page of the site. After a closer look, reveals that this is not true. The only Umbraco branding that you’re stuck with is in the control panel. This works just fine for my purpose which is to give my clients a framework within which they can edit their own content.
The main feature of Umbraco that has me excited is the text editor. It uses TinyMCE as do many CMS packages. The difference I’ve found from some of the others (such as InsiteCreation) is that Umbraco gives you full control over the editor in terms of what buttons are displayed to the person doing the editing. This way, you can completely hide the Font and Font Size buttons which will effectively eliminate the problem of people inserting Font Size inline styles or worse, font attributes directly into the markup. As an example, the editor within InsiteCreation will actually insert “<span style=”font-style:italic”>” instead of simple <em> tags.
The other factor which I LOVE is that the designer has full control over the markup that the editor outputs. This makes it easy to maintain the standards compliance of the markup of the site without the need to coach your client in the nuances of editing standards based html using the editor.
I’ll post more on Umbraco as I get more deeply involved, but my initial response is extremely positive. If you call and talk to me about content management in the near future, we’ll likely be discussing Umbraco.
