It has only been a couple of months since we first started using Umbraco, an open-source CMS built on top of the .NET platform, and a lot of my colleagues will agree when I say that we have grown extremely fond of it. Why, you ask? Well, let me explain a few things.
Finding the right CMS is a challenge
Finding a CMS that suits your needs – not to mention fully embracing one – is not an easy task. It is hard to get your hands on a descent comparison and research is very time consuming as you really need to get your hands dirty. If you are somewhat wary and cautious about using a CMS, you are right, it is to be a tool that assists you in creating and maintaining websites, and it should never dictate the way you handle things as you probably already have a methodology or framework in place. And that is exactly what we have found in Umbraco: a reliable, user-friendly and extensible platform which drastically reduces development time and really fits into our projects.
Umbraco is easy, extensible and reduces development time
After completing several projects with Umbraco, we are very pleased with the results and would like to emphasize the following:
- Umbraco is easy to learn. Within days you are able to grasp its concept and developers will be writing custom XSLT for dynamic content such as a news pages, FAQ’s, ..
- As Umbraco is based on ASP.NET, most developers will be very familiar with the environment and configuration settings which eases development and deployment
- Umbraco has an active community: http://our.umbraco.org/
- A project can be implemented without writing a single line of .NET code. You may have to write some XSLT or install a package, but you will save a considerable amount of development time nonetheless
- Umbraco is extensible in many ways, from writing custom XSLT and .NET user controls to installing packages and integrating its API or event-driven model.
Most importantly, its extensibility allows us to choose which parts of an application we wish to implement using Umbraco while we are still able to implement the parts we don’t see fit in the exact same way we would implemented these in other situations.
Completed projects
Although we still have several projects in the pipeline, we would already like to share some of the projects that have been fully implemented using Umbraco:
- Ijsboerke – http://www.ijsboerke.be
- Wunderman Belgium – http://www.wunderman.be
- Mio – http://www.mio.be
- VAD – http://www.qado.be
Plans for the future
We plan to do much more with Umbraco, and the first thing we want to do now is tweak our development environment and make Umbraco integration even easier:
- Add an abstraction layer to our framework that will abstract the Umbraco API integration and provides a set of global helper classes for Umbraco
- Create a template solution for Visual Studio that contains a pre-configured Umbraco install and includes our framework projects
- Moving the template solution to Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer, allowing our developers to install the latest version of the template in no time. See also: http://bit.ly/aj2Uwm
As you can see, many of us have become strong believers and if you are considering using Umbraco as your CMS or you are a strong believer yourself we are always glad to hear from you.
