Umazel Starter Kit (Responsive Bootstrap Theme)

About this starter kit

The current version of the Starter Kit is for Umbraco 8.16.x. The Starter Kit is based on the Mazel HTML theme. It is actually the same kit we are using on our web site (www.dot-see.com).

This starter kit includes functionality contained in other packages created by DotSee: AutoNode and VirtualNodes.

The starter kit uses strongly-typed models.

You are free to use it as you like, for personal or commercial purposes. (The original HTML theme was purchased from WrapBootstrap with Extended License which allows redistribution).

DEMO SITE FOR V8 VERSION: https://umazeldemov8.dot-see.com

VIDEOS (old v7 version only): http://screencast-o-matic.com/channels/cDQFYJrU3

General Instructions: This package creates a new Home node named "Welcome to the uMazel Starter Kit" along with some basic subnodes. You can delete the old "Home" node and its children (if they're there), as they will not work properly any more. If you can't get the site running, go to Settings -> Published Status -> Memory Cache and hit "Reload", and then save and publish your new home node once.

Features

This starter kit features a lot of functionality both in the front-end and the back-end. Let's see the highlights.

Known features from previous version:

• Global scripts (head, body start, body end)
• Open Graph and Meta tags for all pages
• Default OG type for all pages if OG type field is empty
• Infer OG Description and OG Title from specific property aliases (if present on a page)
• Copy OG data to Meta data if empty
• Ability to add the site name as suffix to all browser titles
• Customizable logo and Favicon
• Mailchimp integration
• Automatic or manual setup of navigation menu
• Hide or show breadcrumbs option
• Custom titles for menus, browser, breadcrumb, in-page and title override per page
• Redirect a page to its first sub-page or another site page

A lot of new features have been added in this version!

General:

• Support for multiple cultures using Umbraco's new variants functionality

Sections:

• All sections are now Block Elements
• Ability to disable a block element (similar to unpublish in normal nodes)
• Section pickers use custom preview images (not very useful, but fancy!)
• Sections containing collections of items show number of items they contain in the Block List interface
• Animations, paddings and margins and other common settings for each section in the Settings area

Images:

• Responsive images (almost) anywhere, even when background images are used (with focal point preservation).
• Support for 2x, 3x densities and a maximum image size to be rendered on the front end to avoid huge images for large resolutions
• Customizable dynamic responsive image generation via config file

Open Graph and Meta tags:

• Inheritable Open Graph properties for all pages with the option to inherit only specific OG tag values to child pages
• Default OG tags for all pages
• Url and Language Meta Tag creation option
• Custom Meta tags and Http-Equiv tags per page
• Use OG image from default language (if empty) option

Scripts:

• Global scripts can now have names and be categorized as Marketing, Statistics, or Essential depending on the type of cookies they emit (if any)
• Per-page scripts in addition to global site scripts

Product list (new content functionality):

• New Products List section with image-based custom product list in the back office, featuring 2,3, and 4-column layouts, custom currency, discounted prices, hide prices option, customizable number of products per page.
• New Product Pages with customizable attributes and image list

Cookie consent:

• Customizable Cookie Consent popup with the option to accept all cookies or load only essential cookies

New back office functionality:

• Option to customize daily login messages and login background image from within Umbraco
• Option to create a custom introductory dashboard from within the Umbraco back office
• Ability to automatically hide unpublished variants from content tree in the back office and right-click option to toggle between hiding and showing

Blog updates:

• New blog article list layout with 2,3, or 4 columns and option to have sidebar on left or right
• RSS discovery Url in metas
• Configurable number of RSS items

Site Search:

• New Site Search interface based on Examine
• Customizable Indexer use for search
• Per-page option to exclude a single page or a whole hierarchy of pages from search results

Sitemaps:

• Automatically populated XML sitemap pages with per-page option to exclude a single page or a whole hierarchy from the sitemap.
• Per-page sitemap priority setting
• Option for automatically created Site Map Index page

Other:

• Option to redirect a page to its first sub-page, another site page, or an external URL, as Permanent or Temporary
• Ability to swap current font with a Google Font (for testing and preview purposes)
• Ability to enable/disable the loading animation for pages
• Default site-wide section padding and margins for desktop, mobile, and extra small mobile screens
• Inheritable header image and (optionally) titles for sub pages when they don't have their own header
• Custom 404 page
• Google invisible ReCaptcha integration for contact forms

Why this starter kit was created

We wanted to take an HTML theme, convert it to Umbraco, and make it as configurable as possible. We also wanted to demonstrate a modular approach to creating content that would not restrict each page to predefined content positions. Finally, we wanted to do all that with strongly typed models (ModelsBuilder) functionality available in Umbraco.

We hope you like this approach.

We haven't implemented everything from the HTML template, but there's always room for future releases :)

We don't claim that this starter kit contains state-of-the-art code or is the best approach around, but we think it's good. We would really like to hear your feedback though! 

Special thanks to: Tom Madden, Jon Humphrey, Carlos Casalicchio, Marcus Maunula, and our own George J. Capnias.

Dev Team:  Sotiris Filippidis, Vassilis Fotopoulos, Chris Marathonitis

VERSION HISTORY

1.0.3

Initial Release

1.0.4

Bugfix - Blog post pages not allowed for internal link picker

Bugfix - Sidebar blog partial views not cached by page (incorrect caching in multi-language setups)

Bugfix - Form submission will not work correctly if specific web.config keys not present

Bugfix - Light/dark menu being decided by script in some cases rather than settings

Bugfix - MNTP (e.g. for blog categories) would default to site root if document was not yet saved

Enhance: Changed left footer text to RTE instead of textbox

Enhance: Custom CSS for RTE

1.0.5

Bugfix - Blog post paging behaving irreguraly when filtering by categories or tags

Bugfix - Category picker not starting at correct root for blog categories

2.0.0

Updated package for Umbraco V8 (min. version. 8.9.1)

2.0.2

Package min. version is now 8.16.0.

Bugfix - Fixed counter for block items in backoffice.

Bugfix - Let marketing scripts load when cookie dialog hasn't been responded yet. This allows the Google Analytics code not to lose the referrer for each visit.

Bugfix - Fixed background check for Hero Image Slider and switched from picture element to background image.

Bugfix - Removed unresponsive Content Page with Sidebar. Probably will add it again in a future update.

Bugfix - Fixed pagination for blog-tags.

Bugfix - Fixed caching issue with Multi Column Block.

Enhancement - Section scripts improvement to include external scripts in unified script output.

Enhancement - Switched from reCAPTCHA v2 to v3.

Enhancement -  Switched from external to embedded Umbraco Models Builder.

Enhancement - Added language menu.

Enhancement - RSS now supports image URLs.

Generic code improvements and tidying up.