I work for a small development business and have been asked to look at possible CMS applications we could use. I have spent the last day or so looking at the Umbraco introductory videos and a bit of the documentation.
Could someone help me with these queries I have:
1. I am struggling to find any real benefits of using Umbraco over a custom asp.net admin site. It seems to me that I would still have to write everything in asp.net and then embed it into Umbraco via a macro. All this adds is an extra layer of complexity.
2. How does Umbraco work with user databases? Currently I build an n-tier application that will add/update etc sql tables via stored procs. Does Umbraco just have its own database for its internal workings and then I still use my custom built database etc for everything that it currently does except with the addition of Umbraco macros or does Umbraco update the user custom database directly? Or does Umbraco store the user data in its own database, in which case how does my custom built 'main' site access the data? Sorry if this rambling is incoherent, but I think it is clear that I haven't found any information on how everything hangs together.
3. The basic starter sites all seem to be 'main' sites rather than back office admin sites. My understanding is that a CMS is for back office staff to add new data that will be displayed on the 'main' site. I think it would be good if one of the starter sites was something whereby the user could add new products or articles so that people like me could get a better idea of the look/feel of Umbraco.
4. I installed Umbraco and Webmatrix and find the interaction of the 2 quite confusing. It seems that I can open and run a site via web matrix, but in order to use Umbraco I have to enter a url like http://localhost:30587/umbraco/umbraco.aspx#content. Is this correct? Surely there must be a simple way to start and load a website in Umbraco.
I'm sorry if the above rambles a lot, but I am encountering some difficulty getting started and would appreciate some help.
I'll try to see if I can answer some of your questions.
1) I think you should consider Umbraco as a framework on, which you can build upon. All the tedious stuff has already been made. I think about handling users, members, content and content option like "Create", "Delete", "Rollback" etc. - It's up to you to decide how you want to structure your site defining it using document types where you can specify the possible properties on each document type, inheritance and allowed structure. The document types reflect a node/page in the content tree.
I think you should look at it this way: There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. All you need to do when using Umbraco is to focus on the fun stuff you would like to develop - if you think that Umbraco is the perfect match for the site your building and the needs you have of course.
If you have some data or some functionality in a user control you can easily create a macro in Umbraco that points to that user control, making it work just out of the box. This Macro could then be used in a template or in a rich text editor all dependent on the use case for it.
2) Umbraco is running on it's own database. However it's easy to add more databases in the web.config, which you can use for your user controls or custom datatypes etc.
3) I'm not sure what you're thinking about here. All the starter kits of course represents the website, which can be modified using the content section in the backoffice where pages can be added, deleted and modified by users who have access to the Umbraco backend. But maybe you have not yet got a test installation running, so you have had the chance to experience it first hand yet?
4) I can't say that I have tried to install Umbraco using webmatrix yet but the url you mention should take you to the content section in the umbraco back office, which is correctly accessed that way. On a live site it would be www.domain.com/umbraco/umbraco.aspx#content - The url looks weird because you're accessing it from a local web server, IIS express, which is a part of web matrix. To access the website you should probably just write localhost:30587.
I hope the above answers are usefull to you - and you're of course welcome to ask even more questions if there is something that you're in doubt about or something that just does not make sense to you.
No need to be sorry, these questions and the answers to them can prove to be very usefull toward others in the future so it's only good that you ask :-)
I thought I posted a reply to your message a week ago, but it obviously didn't happen. I didn't realise that my reply wasn't posted until I received an email from umbraco a couple of hours ago.
I'll try again.
I have had another look at some of the sample sites and am now a little bit more comfortable with it.
There is obviously a big learning curve but I can now probably struggle on.
I'll have a quick stab at answering your questions:
1) Having written custom asp.net sites and, indeed, a mini bespoke CMS, I can honestly say that Umbraco makes things much easier. As Jan says, Umbraco provides the framework that deals with all the tedious bits of development (such as authentication, workflow, rollback, retrieval and storage of data). As a developer you can concentrate on defining what the data is to be stored and how it is to be displayed - in most cases you won't need to worry about databases or even writing much code. On top of this there are a lot of community packages out there that meet lots of common user needs.
2) If you have a custom database you can just keep it and have your controls interact with. However, in many cases you can replace the functionality of a custom database with the functionality umbraco provides. For instance, say you want to store a list of custom data then you create a doctype that defines the fields you want to capture and then can create pages that 'store' that data.
3) All Umbraco sites have an administration back-end that can be accessed by authenticated users. You will only see this when accessing an actual site.
4) Webmatrix comes with a local version of IIS which will, by default, launch any website (not just Umbraco ones) on the localhost domain using a random port.The idea of webmatrix is to make it simple for people to run sites without the need to have IIS running as a service etc. But if you create a normal umbraco website then it can be accessed like any other - and to access the backend you normally just append /umbraco/ to the main website address.
Introduction to Umbraco
Hi,
I work for a small development business and have been asked to look at possible CMS applications we could use. I have spent the last day or so looking at the Umbraco introductory videos and a bit of the documentation.
Could someone help me with these queries I have:
1. I am struggling to find any real benefits of using Umbraco over a custom asp.net admin site. It seems to me that I would still have to write everything in asp.net and then embed it into Umbraco via a macro. All this adds is an extra layer of complexity.
2. How does Umbraco work with user databases? Currently I build an n-tier application that will add/update etc sql tables via stored procs. Does Umbraco just have its own database for its internal workings and then I still use my custom built database etc for everything that it currently does except with the addition of Umbraco macros or does Umbraco update the user custom database directly? Or does Umbraco store the user data in its own database, in which case how does my custom built 'main' site access the data? Sorry if this rambling is incoherent, but I think it is clear that I haven't found any information on how everything hangs together.
3. The basic starter sites all seem to be 'main' sites rather than back office admin sites. My understanding is that a CMS is for back office staff to add new data that will be displayed on the 'main' site. I think it would be good if one of the starter sites was something whereby the user could add new products or articles so that people like me could get a better idea of the look/feel of Umbraco.
4. I installed Umbraco and Webmatrix and find the interaction of the 2 quite confusing. It seems that I can open and run a site via web matrix, but in order to use Umbraco I have to enter a url like http://localhost:30587/umbraco/umbraco.aspx#content. Is this correct? Surely there must be a simple way to start and load a website in Umbraco.
I'm sorry if the above rambles a lot, but I am encountering some difficulty getting started and would appreciate some help.
Thanks in advance.
Niall
Hi Niall
I'll try to see if I can answer some of your questions.
1) I think you should consider Umbraco as a framework on, which you can build upon. All the tedious stuff has already been made. I think about handling users, members, content and content option like "Create", "Delete", "Rollback" etc. - It's up to you to decide how you want to structure your site defining it using document types where you can specify the possible properties on each document type, inheritance and allowed structure. The document types reflect a node/page in the content tree.
I think you should look at it this way: There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. All you need to do when using Umbraco is to focus on the fun stuff you would like to develop - if you think that Umbraco is the perfect match for the site your building and the needs you have of course.
If you have some data or some functionality in a user control you can easily create a macro in Umbraco that points to that user control, making it work just out of the box. This Macro could then be used in a template or in a rich text editor all dependent on the use case for it.
2) Umbraco is running on it's own database. However it's easy to add more databases in the web.config, which you can use for your user controls or custom datatypes etc.
3) I'm not sure what you're thinking about here. All the starter kits of course represents the website, which can be modified using the content section in the backoffice where pages can be added, deleted and modified by users who have access to the Umbraco backend. But maybe you have not yet got a test installation running, so you have had the chance to experience it first hand yet?
4) I can't say that I have tried to install Umbraco using webmatrix yet but the url you mention should take you to the content section in the umbraco back office, which is correctly accessed that way. On a live site it would be www.domain.com/umbraco/umbraco.aspx#content - The url looks weird because you're accessing it from a local web server, IIS express, which is a part of web matrix. To access the website you should probably just write localhost:30587.
I hope the above answers are usefull to you - and you're of course welcome to ask even more questions if there is something that you're in doubt about or something that just does not make sense to you.
No need to be sorry, these questions and the answers to them can prove to be very usefull toward others in the future so it's only good that you ask :-)
Cheers
/Jan
Thanks Jan,
I thought I posted a reply to your message a week ago, but it obviously didn't happen. I didn't realise that my reply wasn't posted until I received an email from umbraco a couple of hours ago.
I'll try again.
I have had another look at some of the sample sites and am now a little bit more comfortable with it.
There is obviously a big learning curve but I can now probably struggle on.
Thanks
Niall
I'll have a quick stab at answering your questions:
1) Having written custom asp.net sites and, indeed, a mini bespoke CMS, I can honestly say that Umbraco makes things much easier. As Jan says, Umbraco provides the framework that deals with all the tedious bits of development (such as authentication, workflow, rollback, retrieval and storage of data). As a developer you can concentrate on defining what the data is to be stored and how it is to be displayed - in most cases you won't need to worry about databases or even writing much code. On top of this there are a lot of community packages out there that meet lots of common user needs.
2) If you have a custom database you can just keep it and have your controls interact with. However, in many cases you can replace the functionality of a custom database with the functionality umbraco provides. For instance, say you want to store a list of custom data then you create a doctype that defines the fields you want to capture and then can create pages that 'store' that data.
3) All Umbraco sites have an administration back-end that can be accessed by authenticated users. You will only see this when accessing an actual site.
4) Webmatrix comes with a local version of IIS which will, by default, launch any website (not just Umbraco ones) on the localhost domain using a random port.The idea of webmatrix is to make it simple for people to run sites without the need to have IIS running as a service etc. But if you create a normal umbraco website then it can be accessed like any other - and to access the backend you normally just append /umbraco/ to the main website address.
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