I hate to say it, but my frustration with Umbraco is starting to get the best of me. I love the concepts in Umbraco, but I feel like working with it is like walking through a minefield.
I've been working on my first Umbraco site for a few months now, on the weekends (thankfully a very relaxed timeline). Everytime I come back to it, I end up spending days resolving issues and never getting any real work done. Specifically, upgrading never goes smoothly, medium trust environments are difficult to work in, and most recently I'm failing to get Razor to do what I want it to do.
Now, I'm not trying to get solutions to these specific problems in this topic, nor am I trying to rant. I realize that I may be defiling my abilities by stating what difficulties I've had getting Umbraco going, but the truth is that I am a capable and accomplished .NET web developer and getting umbraco going has been very difficult.
The purpose of this topic is to reach out to those who have had great success with Umbraco. It would be nice for someone to acknowledge the issues that I am having, let me know I'm not alone, and give me some reasons not to move to another proven CMS.
I believe the #1 problem with Umbraco is the lack of maintained, up-to-date, canonical, documentation. See the jQuery, extJS, or MSDN .NET documentation for an example of what I'm talking about. I have no doubt in the abilities of the CMS, but bad documentation + steep learning curve don't go well together. Umbraco TV doesn't cut it either. I paid for Umbraco TV several months ago and watched everything there was to watch at the time as quickly as I could. I cancelled the subscription, anticipating that the amount of new video wouldn't justify another monthly bill, which in my opinion was correct (compare with Pluralsight's video training, which easiliy justifies it). Also, the audio quality in many of the videos is terrible.
See highlighted below. It would be nice if it could read, "Search through THE documentation," but it can't.
Again, I'm not trying to rant, though I know it sounds like one at this point. These are just my feelings and opinions. I hope they are received as constructive and I welcome the same in return.
I'm new to Umbraco too and I've had my fair share of problems. Some have to do with Umbraco, some are my lack of web knowledge(I do desktop and server programming now). But usually I can find an answer, either on the forums or else where. And I realize that most of the dev's and guru's are in Europe so by the time I ask a question they are well asleep. I agree it's frustation but my experience with any other CMS has been the same.
Find a host that let's you have full trust. There are many cheap ones out there now. I do wish Courier were cheaper since I can't justify that price for my tiny website.
What other CMS would you move too? My opinion DNN has just as many issues. Plus it is harder to get it to do what you want.
You're quite right about the problem with the documentation - but there's a hidden gem in the value of the Umbraco Community, which is second to none! People in this community will literally help you 90% of the way - which is far longer than you'll ever get anywhere else.
If you've got specific "solutions" on how to solve (or move closer towards "perfect") the Documentation issue, I know the Umbraco HQ are more than eager to hear them - they're actually pretty accessible (probably even listening to this :-).
But try asking a couple of questions here, and see the kind of responses you get - you'll be surprised at the level of devotion the Umbraco Community offers...
I understand your frustations and if more people out there has the same experience as you it's obviously something that needs to be taken care of.
Chriztian pretty much hits the nail on the head with his post.
The true power of Umbraco is the community. (And people from HQ are probably reading this already and will probably also participate at some point).
Documentation has always been an issue as far as I remember. But god knows it has improved much since the release of this wonderfull place called over. There is much good stuff in the WIKI. There is also some stuff that is not that good and obviously some topics are not covered at all. And unfortunately some entries could use a remake since a lot has happened with Umbraco in the last year. (New view engine, new XML schema just to mention a few).
But if you could mention some more specific issues you're having I'm sure this friendly and open-minded community will help you out in no time :-)
I think it's great if you would like open up and share what is bothering you. Then there can be done something about it.
So...Please share your frustrations with us and let us see if we can help you out :-)
You are completely right... Once we reach the point of large extensibility ,nothing provided can be helpful ! I'm just playing around for two weeks on how to extends umbraco to make it more powerful and more flexible, and more user friendly. We have created a lot of umbraco projects none of them can be given in the hands of an editor with the risk zero that it fucks up the complete thing ! If the structure is too complex, and there is a lot of dependencies on documents and children, it becomes a complete miss to show up the CMS structure, and the maintenance is mainly impossible. I would like to be able to reorganize things, to be able to hide items from the structure and to make them editable from the node it belongs to. I would like to be able to copy things and not to have to have to redo all the links that are still pointing to the original items...
But it sounds impossible, without any guidance as the ways I explored , I just stucks within the secret designs of umbraco ! It could be great that some leading could be done, to see what expects the users on the back end, to enhance the user experience of the editors and the developers and to let people creating some packages that fullfill their needs without any risk of losing everything when there is new update available...
Things that are common, the help, the forums, the plugins are a complete mess. When you look for information you never know if it applies to your version, when you start with a plugin, you never know if you upgrade your site if the plugins will still work Especially with the 4.7 version that invalidates a lot of plugins, and the one that are still working are still not compiled in 4.0, and don't let you the chance to have a nice plateform that fits in that single framework without all the nightmares that could happen with framework 2.0 components and the thousand ajax frameworks, and other dependencies !
Not sure about most of what you wrote, as I haven't gotten that far. But, "When you look for information you never know if it applies to your version," is completely true.
If umbraco ever does get any proper documentation in order, make it like MSDN: You choose the version of the framework you are working with for the topic you are learning about. It's nice.
I have to say as a new Umbraco user too, that it is not plug and play. But I have to say I don't mind that. I think the flexibility Umbraco provides for design and development is the cause of the confusion. Something so powerful is bound to have a large learning curve.
Of course I wish there was more/better documentation. But there is a wiki, as we figure things out we can write some documentation. Which I should probably do as well.
The WIKI ! A piece of doc... or let's say a piece of #@@{[{@ :
It needs to be pointed out that canceling an event in Umbraco does not actually stop default operation of the BeforeSaving event. In fact the Save doesn't actually do the saving to the database for a Document. Calling the Save method of a Document object only serves to force the events to fire. This also means that when you set the Cancel property to true it will not prevent the save (as it has already occured).
Does that mean that the BeforeSaving event occurs after the document has been saved ? And there is nothing to prevent it to happen ? Anyway it's completely ununderstandable :-)
Ok, let's try something else : I just tried to create a custom IAction... I used the example provided here :http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/reference/backoffice-apis/tree-api-to-create-custom-treesapplications
Just do it ! Run the backend ! ... Backend crashes !!! I guess the problem is the unique KEY... A ONE CHAR KEY that has to be unique ! And no doc about what is using what, and even not the certitude that another component could not reuse your key !
I've been working with umbraco for over 4 years now and I couldn't agree more, extensive and up to date documentation would make my work a lot easier and twice as fast.
I thought about leaving umbraco and return when it has more matured, but there really is no alternative for .Net. Except the new Orchard, which looks promising but is a whole other concept.
Yes Jeroen ! I used the key of the example... '2', I just cut & paste from the page, put in a class, compiled and started umbraco, and no content tree were filled up anymore... I remove the IACtion and everything went back ok.
So my best guess is that the key was already used, but I didn't checked up further. For me the result is : IT CAN NOT BE USED SAFELY ! AND IT'S TERRIBLY NORMAL with such a limitation and so I can not use actions on nodes... Till next version ???!!! I'm curious :-)
first i would like to say that some of the abstract concept of umbraco is quite new and exciting, giving me alot to think about when i design a cms for a certain use
second ide like to say that your code suck balls, and some of the things you take pride of, exp: 15k lines of code, are completly idiotic
ide seen some bad software written in typed and compiled langauges like c# or c++ but i had never seen a break of dev soul like in umbraco
instead of trying to manifest this sort of problem in an OOP way following the basic concepts of the object oriented paradigm, umbraco dev crew has decided to write it in a way similiar to a PHP newbe without even understand basic program structures like an INTERFACE or an ABSTRACT BASE CLASS
and while c# and every OOP language and solution has such building blocks in order to facilitate a clear separation of concerns within our application and code blocks umbraco decided to simply ignore thus foundamental decision and simply decided to integrate it's "cms" into the mvc framework provided by .NET declaring it as a DEVELOPER and PROGRAM CONSUMER tool for the development of "distributed" web components
im had some high hopes at the begging however was in total -> completly disappointed
i also like to add that from the get go i encourage my boss not to use this tool as it seams to be written by a few kids, or as i like to call them - them boyz, which was not bad and i always tend to encourage community software developement however - this is not the case since you claim a price for your documentation - which is poor, and for basic concept of support, like umbraco.tv -which, by the way, is also poor since the basic concept of umbraco is developer oriented - do you really think dev guys like to watch movies that waste their time ? show code.
while you, the end developer, may not see too many posts declaring umbraco is an extremly bad tool with poor design and quite an impossible to maintain in the long term i personally beleive it is simply because non of thus developers simply took the time to write such a comment.
i strongly suggest that people who does not know how to code should try to simply avoid it - or atleast not wrap it up in such a manner that it will seem productive and positive for an ongoing developement
surely, if you had taken some time to try and understand some of the poor reviews you had been given and not just summarize them with a sentence like - umbraco has a steep learning curve, this product might had been worth something - but at the current stage of it; for me its something less then a POC
congrats and thank you for making me a bit dumber going throguh your docs, after all ignorance is bliss.
About to give up on Umbraco
I hate to say it, but my frustration with Umbraco is starting to get the best of me. I love the concepts in Umbraco, but I feel like working with it is like walking through a minefield.
I've been working on my first Umbraco site for a few months now, on the weekends (thankfully a very relaxed timeline). Everytime I come back to it, I end up spending days resolving issues and never getting any real work done. Specifically, upgrading never goes smoothly, medium trust environments are difficult to work in, and most recently I'm failing to get Razor to do what I want it to do.
Now, I'm not trying to get solutions to these specific problems in this topic, nor am I trying to rant. I realize that I may be defiling my abilities by stating what difficulties I've had getting Umbraco going, but the truth is that I am a capable and accomplished .NET web developer and getting umbraco going has been very difficult.
The purpose of this topic is to reach out to those who have had great success with Umbraco. It would be nice for someone to acknowledge the issues that I am having, let me know I'm not alone, and give me some reasons not to move to another proven CMS.
I believe the #1 problem with Umbraco is the lack of maintained, up-to-date, canonical, documentation. See the jQuery, extJS, or MSDN .NET documentation for an example of what I'm talking about. I have no doubt in the abilities of the CMS, but bad documentation + steep learning curve don't go well together. Umbraco TV doesn't cut it either. I paid for Umbraco TV several months ago and watched everything there was to watch at the time as quickly as I could. I cancelled the subscription, anticipating that the amount of new video wouldn't justify another monthly bill, which in my opinion was correct (compare with Pluralsight's video training, which easiliy justifies it). Also, the audio quality in many of the videos is terrible.
See highlighted below. It would be nice if it could read, "Search through THE documentation," but it can't.
Again, I'm not trying to rant, though I know it sounds like one at this point. These are just my feelings and opinions. I hope they are received as constructive and I welcome the same in return.
Besides documentation what issues are you having?
I'm new to Umbraco too and I've had my fair share of problems. Some have to do with Umbraco, some are my lack of web knowledge(I do desktop and server programming now). But usually I can find an answer, either on the forums or else where. And I realize that most of the dev's and guru's are in Europe so by the time I ask a question they are well asleep. I agree it's frustation but my experience with any other CMS has been the same.
Find a host that let's you have full trust. There are many cheap ones out there now. I do wish Courier were cheaper since I can't justify that price for my tiny website.
What other CMS would you move too? My opinion DNN has just as many issues. Plus it is harder to get it to do what you want.
Hi Ronnie,
You're quite right about the problem with the documentation - but there's a hidden gem in the value of the Umbraco Community, which is second to none! People in this community will literally help you 90% of the way - which is far longer than you'll ever get anywhere else.
If you've got specific "solutions" on how to solve (or move closer towards "perfect") the Documentation issue, I know the Umbraco HQ are more than eager to hear them - they're actually pretty accessible (probably even listening to this :-).
But try asking a couple of questions here, and see the kind of responses you get - you'll be surprised at the level of devotion the Umbraco Community offers...
/Chritztian
Hi Ronnie
I understand your frustations and if more people out there has the same experience as you it's obviously something that needs to be taken care of.
Chriztian pretty much hits the nail on the head with his post.
The true power of Umbraco is the community. (And people from HQ are probably reading this already and will probably also participate at some point).
Documentation has always been an issue as far as I remember. But god knows it has improved much since the release of this wonderfull place called over. There is much good stuff in the WIKI. There is also some stuff that is not that good and obviously some topics are not covered at all. And unfortunately some entries could use a remake since a lot has happened with Umbraco in the last year. (New view engine, new XML schema just to mention a few).
But if you could mention some more specific issues you're having I'm sure this friendly and open-minded community will help you out in no time :-)
I think it's great if you would like open up and share what is bothering you. Then there can be done something about it.
So...Please share your frustrations with us and let us see if we can help you out :-)
/Jan
Ronnie,
You are completely right... Once we reach the point of large extensibility ,nothing provided can be helpful ! I'm just playing around for two weeks on how to extends umbraco to make it more powerful and more flexible, and more user friendly. We have created a lot of umbraco projects none of them can be given in the hands of an editor with the risk zero that it fucks up the complete thing ! If the structure is too complex, and there is a lot of dependencies on documents and children, it becomes a complete miss to show up the CMS structure, and the maintenance is mainly impossible. I would like to be able to reorganize things, to be able to hide items from the structure and to make them editable from the node it belongs to. I would like to be able to copy things and not to have to have to redo all the links that are still pointing to the original items...
But it sounds impossible, without any guidance as the ways I explored , I just stucks within the secret designs of umbraco ! It could be great that some leading could be done, to see what expects the users on the back end, to enhance the user experience of the editors and the developers and to let people creating some packages that fullfill their needs without any risk of losing everything when there is new update available...
Things that are common, the help, the forums, the plugins are a complete mess. When you look for information you never know if it applies to your version, when you start with a plugin, you never know if you upgrade your site if the plugins will still work Especially with the 4.7 version that invalidates a lot of plugins, and the one that are still working are still not compiled in 4.0, and don't let you the chance to have a nice plateform that fits in that single framework without all the nightmares that could happen with framework 2.0 components and the thousand ajax frameworks, and other dependencies !
Not sure about most of what you wrote, as I haven't gotten that far. But, "When you look for information you never know if it applies to your version," is completely true.
If umbraco ever does get any proper documentation in order, make it like MSDN: You choose the version of the framework you are working with for the topic you are learning about. It's nice.
I have to say as a new Umbraco user too, that it is not plug and play. But I have to say I don't mind that. I think the flexibility Umbraco provides for design and development is the cause of the confusion. Something so powerful is bound to have a large learning curve.
Of course I wish there was more/better documentation. But there is a wiki, as we figure things out we can write some documentation. Which I should probably do as well.
The WIKI ! A piece of doc... or let's say a piece of #@@{[{@ :
Does that mean that the BeforeSaving event occurs after the document has been saved ? And there is nothing to prevent it to happen ? Anyway it's completely ununderstandable :-)
The umbraco community likes to hijack threads.
Anyway, I ran onto an article talking about this problem and it has a link to a workaround. Google for it and it shouldn't be too hard to find.
Ah ok it's true !!!
Ok, let's try something else : I just tried to create a custom IAction... I used the example provided here :http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/reference/backoffice-apis/tree-api-to-create-custom-treesapplications
Just do it ! Run the backend ! ... Backend crashes !!! I guess the problem is the unique KEY... A ONE CHAR KEY that has to be unique ! And no doc about what is using what, and even not the certitude that another component could not reuse your key !
Hi Laurent,
If you scroll down to the wiki page you see which char keys are used. This will be fixed in the next version of Umbraco.
Jeroen
I've been working with umbraco for over 4 years now and I couldn't agree more, extensive and up to date documentation would make my work a lot easier and twice as fast.
I thought about leaving umbraco and return when it has more matured, but there really is no alternative for .Net. Except the new Orchard, which looks promising but is a whole other concept.
You're not alone...
Yes Jeroen ! I used the key of the example... '2', I just cut & paste from the page, put in a class, compiled and started umbraco, and no content tree were filled up anymore... I remove the IACtion and everything went back ok.
So my best guess is that the key was already used, but I didn't checked up further. For me the result is : IT CAN NOT BE USED SAFELY ! AND IT'S TERRIBLY NORMAL with such a limitation and so I can not use actions on nodes... Till next version ???!!! I'm curious :-)
Laurent, start your own thread. I don't want notifications about your issues.
to umbraco dev hey
first i would like to say that some of the abstract concept of umbraco is quite new and exciting, giving me alot to think about when i design a cms for a certain use
second ide like to say that your code suck balls, and some of the things you take pride of, exp: 15k lines of code, are completly idiotic
ide seen some bad software written in typed and compiled langauges like c# or c++ but i had never seen a break of dev soul like in umbraco
instead of trying to manifest this sort of problem in an OOP way following the basic concepts of the object oriented paradigm, umbraco dev crew has decided to write it in a way similiar to a PHP newbe without even understand basic program structures like an INTERFACE or an ABSTRACT BASE CLASS
and while c# and every OOP language and solution has such building blocks in order to facilitate a clear separation of concerns within our application and code blocks
umbraco decided to simply ignore thus foundamental decision and simply decided to integrate it's "cms" into the mvc framework provided by .NET
declaring it as a DEVELOPER and PROGRAM CONSUMER tool for the development of "distributed" web components
im had some high hopes at the begging however was in total -> completly disappointed
i also like to add that from the get go i encourage my boss not to use this tool as it seams to be written by a few kids, or as i like to call them - them boyz,
which was not bad and i always tend to encourage community software developement however - this is not the case since you claim a price for your documentation - which is poor, and for basic concept of support, like umbraco.tv -which, by the way, is also poor
since the basic concept of umbraco is developer oriented - do you really think dev guys like to watch movies that waste their time ? show code.
while you, the end developer, may not see too many posts declaring umbraco is an extremly bad tool with poor design and quite an impossible to maintain in the long term
i personally beleive it is simply because non of thus developers simply took the time to write such a comment.
i strongly suggest that people who does not know how to code should try to simply avoid it - or atleast not wrap it up in such a manner that it will seem productive and positive for an ongoing developement
surely, if you had taken some time to try and understand some of the poor reviews you had been given and not just summarize them with a sentence like - umbraco has a steep learning curve, this product might had been worth something - but at the current stage of it; for me its something less then a POC
congrats and thank you for making me a bit dumber going throguh your docs, after all ignorance is bliss.
is working on a reply...