Umbraco, What’s up! Volume 1

January 17, 2007

It can be difficult to keep updated on Umbraco. So many things are happening.
Because of this situation, I have written some internal newsletters at work about Umbraco for project managers and developers to keep my colleges updated on Umbraco. And why not share this info with the Umbraco community.

I will try to summarize what I have noticed on the Umbraco scene the last couple of months. Most of the text is coming from the newsletters at work.

Hope you will enjoy it.

Change of license, CPL instead of GPL.
In short, as developer you can now sell Umbraco packages/modules to your costumers and the rest of the world without concerns about breaking the more restricted GPL license and give back your source code to Umbraco.

Websites build with Umbraco
www.hasselblad.com
www.antonveneta.it (bank in Italy)
As usual you can find Umbraco powered sites at the Umbraco website.

Umbraco solution providers
More and more agencies around the world are embracing Umbraco.
UK is one of the countries, where Umbraco have gotten more addicts the last half-year. RiverInteractive where the Umbraco blogger Ismail is working, are one of them.
In my own country it is no secret that Ebita and Netmedia are focused on being big umbraco provides in Denmark.
The Netherlands Clockwork have chosen Umbraco for small and medium solutions.
The largest online agency in Australia WDG is a strong believer in Umbraco.

This show how easy it is to get started with Umbraco. Most of the agencies using Umbraco have not been visited by Niels or attended at Codegarden 2006.

Umbraco documentation
When a new developer is starting with Umbraco one of the first comments is: "Umbraco lacks on documentation, I can't find anything!"
But that is not totally true. But it can take some time to figure out how to find packages, documentation, snippets etc.

Personally I use Google. Jesper has actually created a Google Co-op search, where you can search 26 sites for Umbraco related content.

The Umbraco team is aware of the problem with documentation spread out.
Hopefully in 2007 will the Umbraco community get a brand new Umbraco site with all of the documentation, snippets etc one click away.
It will properly be some sort of a Wiki for the documentation part.

For more info see the transcript for the Umbraco developer chat in November 2006

A devoted Sitecore blogger about Umbraco
Time for something different: Umbraco CMS
It was actually the most viewed post in 2006 on Alex's blog because it got linked from Umbraco.org

Umbraco wins two BNP challenger awards.
BNP have done a really big CMS benchmark analysis for 2006/2007. They have done this since 2000.
For the first time they are giving awards. Umbraco got two challenger awards this year. One for integration and one for community.
BNP was having a best practice seminar and Niels did a presentation, watch it on Youtube.

24 hour race, mapmee
Last year Per, Jesper and Jhonny wanted to see what they could do with Umbraco in 24 hours without any sleep.
It turned out to be mapmee, an Umbraco flash yahoo map mix up.
I was one the viewers getting entertained by the 11 videos posted on Youtube while the 24 hours race went by.
More on the 24 hour race on Per's blog

CMS marketplaces - the missing link
There was an article on the Danish Computerworld about the missing marketplaces in content management systems.
Every agency was selling their own homemade (workmade) modules. Which in the end do not benefit the CMS customers.
Umbraco got mentioned for the new package repository in the upcoming Umbraco version 3, which will make it easy to buy/try/get modules for Umbraco.

Umbraco codegarden 2007
Next time it will be UK, looking forward to this

Umbraco hosting
In Denmark fab-it and netmedia offer umbraco hosting on dedicated umbraco servers. But why not just use the first and best hosting company you can find? Umbraco are just asp.net and MS SQL - most hosting companies in Denmark are not very clever on asp.net and ms sql hosting and do not know what you are talking about when it comes to asp.net hosting, tweaking and backup/restore of ms sql.
I have got umbraco running on different hosting companies in Denmark, but most of the time I need to be in touch with the hosting company allot before umbraco is up and running.
With hosting companies that are used to deliver umbraco hosting, you know the company can handle an umbraco solution.
I use Buydomains for small sites. The servers are located in US it cost around 7 dollars / 6 euros for a month. Very cheap.

Umbraco Certifications and training
Umbraco is introducing certifications and training.
Learn from the makers of Umbraco. Meet fellow Umbraco developers and have a good time.

Christian Palm on www.umbraco.org
The biggest news, I got my name on the people page.

Want more: What's up! In the future?
I could go on and on, but please give me some feedback with a comment whether you like/dislike this kind of  "What's Up!"

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