Umbraco CMS

I recently helped to create a small website to show off some colleagues’ work. Rather than start from scratch we decided to hunt around for a Content Management System (CMS) compatible with the .Net framework. Following a tip from a friend we decided to try out Umbraco 4 which is open source and written in .Net. I just did the installation and some technical stuff – James & Joel added the content and made it look nice.

Installation was simple and comes with a set of basic pre-built website samplers to get you going. There’s also some free training videos on the Umbraco website. These are a good start although they are a little out of date, but it was easy to map what they were talking about to the current version.

A screen shot of the videos listing page is shown although as it’s a work in progress it will probably look different now. The link to the site is: http://rlo.harper-adams.ac.uk/.

Umbraco provides an administrative user interface in the Umbraco folder of the website with which you can create document types and instances. Database access (SQL Server) is handled for you. You can edit the aspx page in the Umbraco UI to control the display of a document type (you can also write your own custom controls, but I’ve not tried this yet) and you can use XSLT to generate HTML via templates. Umbraco hands you the site’s content in XML format so all the plumbing is done for you.

The same XSLT template approach is used to generate RSS feeds. It was easy to create a feed page and link it from the home page.

I’m not sure how to create multiple categories yet – we would like to be able to list the pages by department, for example, as well as content type (video, image, etc).

I’ve been told that subsonic is good from database access from Umbraco, but not tried it yet.

Umbraco also has a plug-in system so it’s easy to find and install third-party utilities. The same system can also be used to export your files out to a zip file so you can easily move a site between dev and live, for example.

So far I’m impressed. It looks like my Netcetera web hosting account comes with tools to install Umbraco. Will be trying this out soon.