I'm a freelancer and umbraco newbie. Currently most of my development work is in MVC 3. In the recent past I did a month of maintenance work on an Umbraco 4 project. I liked it and want to learn more about it. I started off with Umbraco 5, because of the mvc usage. Though it is a bit doable I now notice that there is a lack of documentation and components. Therefor I was wondering would it be advisable at the current point in time to start digging deeper in Umbraco 5 or take the save route, learn 4 and upgrade the knowledge to 5 later on. (btw, beside an Umbraco newbie I'm also an CMS newbie.)
A revamped umbraco.tv with video tutorials for V5 is in the making. There is also lot's of work put into documentation for V5
To make a production website in V5 I would wait at least untill V5.2, which is anounced for the same time Code Garden 12 is taking place (june).
On the Dutch Umbraco Festival 2012, Neils announced for may 2012 version 4.8 for the V4 series, a version he called 'the ultimate version of V4'. You can read all about it on my blog post about Neils' keynote on the Dutch Umbraco Festival 2012
If you need to get started with developing with Umbraco right away and need to build larger sites that are stable then I would go with v4 for now. But I would still keep an eye on v5.
However It's important that you keep in mind that v4 is based on ASP.NET webforms and v5 is based on ASP.NET MVC so you will need to gain some knowledge about ASP.NET webforms when working with v4.
V4 is rock solid and stable and the conceps in the backoffice UI are almost identical so the concept between versions is the same.
Unless you currently are doing some projects that would fit really well with MVC I would go for v4, since many of the nice packages that makes v4 so powerfull does not currently exist for v5.
Like Jan replied, this depends on what you want to do. If you just want to learn Umbraco, but don't need to go with a site in production very soon, than I would start from Umbraco v5, as this is the way forward.
But if you need to go in production with a website in the near future, I would save myself a lot of headeaches and go with v4. It's just that at the current time of speaking v4 has a lot more packages than v5 and v5 currently has some performance issues .
My planning is to start with an Umbraco Certification training for v5 after the summer. I hope that 'till then there will be more packages and that the performance issue with v5 will be solved.
Thanks for the input. Ill start off with 4 now, not because I have to go to production, but it is already a steep learning curve and the wealth of documentation of 4 will help me alot. I just hope that I can reuse a bit of the knowledge in 5.
Newbie, learning Umbraco 4 or 5.
Hi
I'm a freelancer and umbraco newbie. Currently most of my development work is in MVC 3. In the recent past I did a month of maintenance work on an Umbraco 4 project. I liked it and want to learn more about it. I started off with Umbraco 5, because of the mvc usage. Though it is a bit doable I now notice that there is a lack of documentation and components. Therefor I was wondering would it be advisable at the current point in time to start digging deeper in Umbraco 5 or take the save route, learn 4 and upgrade the knowledge to 5 later on. (btw, beside an Umbraco newbie I'm also an CMS newbie.)
Regards,
Patrick
Is there already an eta for umbraco.tv for v5? I really want to invest time in learning umbraco but it feels a waste to start with v4.latest.
Regards
Patrick
Hi Patrick,
A revamped umbraco.tv with video tutorials for V5 is in the making. There is also lot's of work put into documentation for V5
To make a production website in V5 I would wait at least untill V5.2, which is anounced for the same time Code Garden 12 is taking place (june).
On the Dutch Umbraco Festival 2012, Neils announced for may 2012 version 4.8 for the V4 series, a version he called 'the ultimate version of V4'. You can read all about it on my blog post about Neils' keynote on the Dutch Umbraco Festival 2012
greetings,
Anthony
HI Anthony,
Does this mean that in your opinion it is better to now jump in Umbraco 4 and then upgrade my knowledge later to umbraco 5?
Regards,
Patrick
Hi Patrick
If you need to get started with developing with Umbraco right away and need to build larger sites that are stable then I would go with v4 for now. But I would still keep an eye on v5.
However It's important that you keep in mind that v4 is based on ASP.NET webforms and v5 is based on ASP.NET MVC so you will need to gain some knowledge about ASP.NET webforms when working with v4.
V4 is rock solid and stable and the conceps in the backoffice UI are almost identical so the concept between versions is the same.
Unless you currently are doing some projects that would fit really well with MVC I would go for v4, since many of the nice packages that makes v4 so powerfull does not currently exist for v5.
Hope this helps you a bit :)
/Jan
Hi Patrick,
Like Jan replied, this depends on what you want to do. If you just want to learn Umbraco, but don't need to go with a site in production very soon, than I would start from Umbraco v5, as this is the way forward.
But if you need to go in production with a website in the near future, I would save myself a lot of headeaches and go with v4. It's just that at the current time of speaking v4 has a lot more packages than v5 and v5 currently has some performance issues .
My planning is to start with an Umbraco Certification training for v5 after the summer. I hope that 'till then there will be more packages and that the performance issue with v5 will be solved.
Hope this helps,
Anthony
Thanks for the input. Ill start off with 4 now, not because I have to go to production, but it is already a steep learning curve and the wealth of documentation of 4 will help me alot. I just hope that I can reuse a bit of the knowledge in 5.
Patrick
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