I've spent the past few months leaning Umbraco and prefer it to other CMS packages in the .NET world. I have a project at work that requires a CMS. The boss's boss wasn't that impressed with Umbraco, at least for content editing and creation.
I've also evaluated dotnetnuke and immediately noticed some facets of content editing are more intuitive. For example, you can preview a whole page in edit mode, click on a container of content (pane), and an edit window pops up. Umbraco, by contrast, requires an editor to locate the a given page in the content tree, and then edit the content in one or more tabs, without seeing where the content is located on the page layout.
That said dotnetnuke is a nightmare to setup templates (called skins). And it is entirely WebForms based, meaning every page will have form tags whether I want them or not. This make jquery mobile development much harder. Umbraco gives absolute control over rendered HTML, which is impossible in dotnetnuke.
Is there a way, with Umbraco, for an unskilled content editor to see the content placement on a page while editing? This could be deal breaker for this one particular client.
I don't know if there is something existing in Umbraco to do that, but I think this could get rather complex.I don't know dotnetnuke at all, so I cannot compare, but in Umbraco, what you display on a page can be a lot more than "just" a piece of document text on your page.
You can for instance include macro's, which in turn can gather data from many different places (and even sub-macro's) and display the end result on your page.
If you would allow "in place editing", I think it could get very difficult to link back a click on macro-generated data to the actual place from which the data came from. And if you would only allow editing of the basic document property text blocks, would the client understand / be happy that he can only "in place edit" some parts of the document? My guess is that he would still complain about the parts he cannot edit :-)
Personnally, this is one of the things I like most about Umbraco: the complete separation of content management and layout/design. When you are editing, you have to focus on the structure of your document and on the actual content, on what you want to say, not about how it will look like or where it goes on a page, and I think this is a good thing (not to mention that you can use different templates for a same document...). And then you can quickly see the end result by clicking on the "preview" button of your text editor and then make changes if necessary.
And as far as finding the pages in the tree, you normally just have to follow the url parts...
Of course this is a mindset that your client would have to accept, but if he does, he will see how easy it is to manage content from the Umbraco back-end. If your document types, properties and tabs are set in a good way, it gets really intuitive. And the good news is: that's your part of the job ;-)
Just my quick thought on this, I hope you can convince your client to go Umbraco. Good luck!!
Drupal may come a bit closer to what you're looking for, if you want more of a WYSIWIG, or at least more-in-context experience for the content editor. I looked briefly at it when I was trying to fulfill my employer's requirement for an open source (i.e. free) CMS. Overall, I was pretty impressed with Drupal, but also didn't go very far with it.
In our case the fact that we're a Microsoft shop and had to port an existing .NET site, really tipped the scales toward Umbraco.
This question was asked in 2012, but for anyone who stumbles up on this in 2017 and beyond, Umbraco comes with The Grid, which if you combine with the package LePainter, lets you view how your pages will look on the front end while you're adding your content.
Umbraco for the non-technical content editor...
I've spent the past few months leaning Umbraco and prefer it to other CMS packages in the .NET world. I have a project at work that requires a CMS. The boss's boss wasn't that impressed with Umbraco, at least for content editing and creation.
I've also evaluated dotnetnuke and immediately noticed some facets of content editing are more intuitive. For example, you can preview a whole page in edit mode, click on a container of content (pane), and an edit window pops up. Umbraco, by contrast, requires an editor to locate the a given page in the content tree, and then edit the content in one or more tabs, without seeing where the content is located on the page layout.
That said dotnetnuke is a nightmare to setup templates (called skins). And it is entirely WebForms based, meaning every page will have form tags whether I want them or not. This make jquery mobile development much harder. Umbraco gives absolute control over rendered HTML, which is impossible in dotnetnuke.
Is there a way, with Umbraco, for an unskilled content editor to see the content placement on a page while editing? This could be deal breaker for this one particular client.
Have you tried Live Editing? You can basically right mouse click on a node and click live edit. I personally don't like it :)
Hi Steve,
I don't know if there is something existing in Umbraco to do that, but I think this could get rather complex.I don't know dotnetnuke at all, so I cannot compare, but in Umbraco, what you display on a page can be a lot more than "just" a piece of document text on your page.
You can for instance include macro's, which in turn can gather data from many different places (and even sub-macro's) and display the end result on your page.
If you would allow "in place editing", I think it could get very difficult to link back a click on macro-generated data to the actual place from which the data came from. And if you would only allow editing of the basic document property text blocks, would the client understand / be happy that he can only "in place edit" some parts of the document? My guess is that he would still complain about the parts he cannot edit :-)
Personnally, this is one of the things I like most about Umbraco: the complete separation of content management and layout/design. When you are editing, you have to focus on the structure of your document and on the actual content, on what you want to say, not about how it will look like or where it goes on a page, and I think this is a good thing (not to mention that you can use different templates for a same document...). And then you can quickly see the end result by clicking on the "preview" button of your text editor and then make changes if necessary.
And as far as finding the pages in the tree, you normally just have to follow the url parts...
Of course this is a mindset that your client would have to accept, but if he does, he will see how easy it is to manage content from the Umbraco back-end. If your document types, properties and tabs are set in a good way, it gets really intuitive. And the good news is: that's your part of the job ;-)
Just my quick thought on this, I hope you can convince your client to go Umbraco. Good luck!!
Cheers,
Michael.
Drupal may come a bit closer to what you're looking for, if you want more of a WYSIWIG, or at least more-in-context experience for the content editor. I looked briefly at it when I was trying to fulfill my employer's requirement for an open source (i.e. free) CMS. Overall, I was pretty impressed with Drupal, but also didn't go very far with it.
In our case the fact that we're a Microsoft shop and had to port an existing .NET site, really tipped the scales toward Umbraco.
-- Paul
This question was asked in 2012, but for anyone who stumbles up on this in 2017 and beyond, Umbraco comes with The Grid, which if you combine with the package LePainter, lets you view how your pages will look on the front end while you're adding your content.
https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/getting-started/backoffice/property-editors/built-in-property-editors/grid-layout
https://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/lepainter/
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