You have found solutions for (almost) all of your problems already and that's exactly the way people currently build Umbraco web sites: they take the stable core of Umbraco that is really good at providing content editing options to website editors and really good at providing implementors (you) to implement all of their custom needs and bring together the right tools for the job in their final solution. We explicitly want people to think about what components to use because you should be using the components that make the most sense for your customer: the end-user that will be entering the content on your site.

For things like multilingual and archetype: yes, we want to offer functionality like it out of the box, but we also need time to put that into the core properly, which takes time, time is limited when you're working with 4 or 5 people on that core. So we're very grateful and happy that there's a lot of people building those packages and we learn a lot from those packages and we take that experience of what does and does not work into account when adding new functionality to Umbraco.

Specifics:

• We have limited folder support, templates and user controls can be put in any folder you want (you just will have limited backoffice access to them, which should be fine as it looks like you're a visual studio user), for document types you can make inherited doctypes of which the "top" one is just a dummy doctype, not ideal but it'll do the job. For pages..? Not sure, you create your pages in any structure you want them to be in
• Package manager.. Eh, you have seen Developer > Packages, haven't you? A right click and you can create packages yourself and include whatever you want
• Multilanguage: maybe Vortex, maybe a custom solution (google for it, there's as many solutions as there is developers and everybody seems to want to do it slightly differently)
• Archetype is great, just use it
• We have required and regex. Do not put too many restrictions on these fields though, people will HATE you for it and be discouraged to actually start filling content. Other validation options can be added by creating your own custom property editors for that
• Detecting broken links: try Concierge and/or SEO checker.
• Some "data type" settings should be present on a document type: create your own data type (use existing ones for inspiration)
• Umbraco is unclear about source control best practices (IMHO): Again, there is a shitload of wildly different opionions about it. Google for gitignore and hgignore files, they're out there. A lot of it is also personal preference though.
• Images on disk: There's options to store items in the media section on AWS storage, I don't have links at hand but there's a few packages that cover this scenario. IMHO: databases should not be used to store binaries, a slightly better option is to store them in source control (which is what most people do)
• Not up to the task for portal systems: Umbraco is a Web Content Management System, not a portal builder system. You can build portal systems with Umbraco though. If you need a completely out of the box solution then just use Sharepoint, that's what it was made for.
• Are these third pary tools supported by the core team? - No, 3rd party tools are not supported by us, but we have a wonderful eco system of packages which are mostly open source and most developers do support very well
• Will they break when the Umbraco installation is updated? - They shouldn't do, that would mean we introduced a breaking change which we only should do for major new versions
• What's actually happening beneath the surface? (business logic and data storage wise) - Most of these packages are open source. If you have specific questions the community would love to help
• Do the third party tools support Webforms and/or MVC only? - It depends, for most packages it doesn't matter whether you use WebForms or MVC, but in rare occasions things are specifically only built for one or the other. Ask these questions for each specific package, most of the time if there's no specific statement about it, both are supported.

So, with all this said, again, we don't pretend to be in the business of developing portal software, we make a CMS and it serves a lot of people very well. We also stress that Umbraco is best used for tailor made solutions, not for generic one-size-fits-all solutions.

Hope this helps.

Hi sebastiaan,

First of all, thanks for anwering my questions (again).

I would like to start by responding to the conclusion of your post: "So, with all this said, again, we don't pretend to be in the business of developing portal software, we make a CMS and it serves a lot of people very well. We also stress that Umbraco is best used for tailor made solutions, not for generic one-size-fits-all solutions"

The company i work for does exactly that: we develop custom webapplications for our customers. These solutions often include a CMS as part of the solution. At the moment we are still rolling out our homemade CMS for every project. But this means we must also invest valuable time into maintaining/extending the CMS. It's the main reason we are looking for an existing CMS to offer to our clients.

My company is at a crucial point were it will decide which CMS will be used in our future projects. (ranging from small monolingual sites to large multilingual webbapps) We're not looking for one-size-fits-all solutions, but just a CMS that covers (what we consider) the basics.

I have been keeping an eye on Umbraco for a while. The CMS has great potential and the community is very sympathetic, yet i haven't had the confidence to deploy it for many of our projects.(but we have many awesome clients we could/want to introduce to Umbraco :) If Umbraco was just a bit more extensive out of the box, then it would definitly be the default CMS we would incorporate in our solutions.

I guess it's a matter of perspective as our definition of "basic CMS functionality" may be different from others. The functionality i'm talking about:

• Multilanguage (language switch in backoffice that facilitates the modification of the page fields + url slug for the specified language)
• Archetype (or something similar)
• Courier (or something similar)

I'm sure the ecosystem is cool, and the third party builders are smart people, but i'm gonna have a hard time convincing management to use Umbraco when basic functionality is missing out of the box. This also means that buying (complete/confidence) support is not a viable option because basic functionality is added by 3rd party tools which aren't supported by the core. (The dependency on third party packages doesn't feel right.)

We don't have a priciple/rule against using third party packages. We would consider them for additional features like blogs, forum, SEO checker or 301 redirects.

Sebastiaan, you have been very helpful and patient when anwsering my questions. Many many thanks for that! It's also the reason why i wanted to provide some insight on which factors play a role in the process of selecting a CMS for my company. I hope you'll find the feedback somewhat useful. :)

Anyway, my company hasn't decided anything yet, so i'll do some more R&D work on Umbraco.

Cheers, Erik

Specifics:

We have limited folder support, templates and user controls can be put in any folder you want (you just will have limited backoffice access to them, which should be fine as it looks like you're a visual studio user), for document types you can make inherited doctypes of which the "top" one is just a dummy doctype, not ideal but it'll do the job.

• You're right, i can structure my templates the way i want in Visual Studio (using subfolders). But then how do i assign a template to a document type? (Because when trying to assign a template to a doc type, the umbraco backend seems to ignore the templates that are in subfolders)

Package manager.. Eh, you have seen Developer > Packages, haven't you? A right click and you can create packages yourself and include whatever you want

• My bad. I mixed up the terminology. I know Umbraco has a Packages section where one can install packages. I was talking about the ability for syncing doctypes/template between installations out of the box. (I'm reading kinda negative feedback from people that have used Courier)

Archetype is great, just use it

• Last time i looked, it was an alpha release. Thats a no-no for production websites. :)

We have required and regex. Other validation options can be added by creating your own custom property editors for that.

• Fair enough. I'll have a look at it.

Detecting broken links: try Concierge and/or SEO checker.

• Thanks. I'll have a looksy.

Images on disk: There's options to store items in the media section on AWS storage, I don't have links at hand but there's a few packages that cover this scenario. IMHO: databases should not be used to store binaries, a slightly better option is to store them in source control (which is what most people do)

• Cool. Although it would be nice to have a web.config switch that provided the developer a choice were to store binaries. Consider it a feature request :)

Not up to the task for portal systems: Umbraco is a Web Content Management System, not a portal builder system. You can build portal systems with Umbraco though. If you need a completely out of the box solution then just use Sharepoint, that's what it was made for.

• Uhm, i guess my words were poorly choosen. I know that Umbraco is a Web Content Management System and that it's possible to manage multiple website with Umbraco. I'm trying to find out how easy/hard it is to manage multiple websites within 1 umbraco installation and what the limitations are.

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