I am an ASP.NET developer for long time but I've never used CMS before. I am about to develop a new project which will use Umbraco as a CMS. The website will be an ecommerce with forum. There will be other 3 sub domain websites which will be content websites plus contact us page. Here are my questions:
- What would be my option in this scenario? Do I need to install 4 Umbraco instances? One for each website
- Does using Umbraco limits me to use ASP.NET MVC or I am ok to use ASP.NET forms?
- You don't expect to create such a project using the Umbraco admin, right? How do I use Visual Studio, for example I will have my project that will use Umbraco, how to do that? do I need to load the whole Umbraco in Visual Studio and add my files there or I can just work on the project as normal but make some communication with Umbraco for the dynamic content to be manageable.
Any help, articles, tutorials would be much appreciated.
1: You dont have to install 4 instances of Umbraco. You can make 4 "website roots" in the content area, and asign the required hostname to each root. That way umbraco will automaticaly route your request to the right page by the hostname in the request. (Right click the node and click the "hostnames" item in the context menu)
2: Umbraco versions up to 4.7 (current version) uses asp.net forms. Umbraco v5 will lbe switching to MVC.
3: You can create a lot of a website functionality in the umbraco admin alone. By using xslt/razor macros. And by editing the templates in the "Settings" section. However by creating a new web project in VS and adding references to a few umbraco dll's you can edit the template files in VS with syntax highliting and intellisence. You can also develop normal asp.net usercontrols in VS and copy the ascx files to to usercontrols folder, and the dll to the bin folder of the umbraco webfolder.
Actually I just remembered there is a "Umbraco Project" item in the "Extention manager" i VS.
If you install the you will have an umbraco project template in the list when you create a new project in VS. (under the root Visual C# node, not the Web)
It will ask you to specify a umbraco webfolder, and copy the needed files from that folder to your vs project. (dlls, templates, usercontrols, css, scripts etc.) And add a post build event t the project as well that copies the files back on a successful build, so your vs project folder and umbraco webfolders are in sync.
When you say Umbraco 5 will use MVC, does this mean that you have to use MVC? or it means that Umbraco 5 will support MVC in addition to Forms which is already being supported?
Is it possible for me to use Umbraco admin to define the structure of the website by defining all the templates and the managable content then move to Visual Studio to define more specific functionalities?
When you create a website that will use Umbraco, does that mean that your files has to be hosted in Umbraco in order to use Umbraco? or you can install Umbraco and create your websites in a different location but allow them to use Umbraco? if this option is possible then which is better, hosting the project inside Umbraco or create it outside?
Lets say I am in Visual Studio and I've create Master Pages and used some of Umraco fields, now if I open Umbraco admin will this structure (Master pages, fields) be visible to Umbraco. I mean will Umbraco understands the structure that I built in Visual Studio.
1/ Umbraco 5 will be built on MVC, but as far as I understood, you will be able to use it exactly as you do with version 4.7, only you will get extra flexibility points compared to 4.7. More to learn during Codegarden :-)
2/ You can indeed define as much as you can within Umbraco admin, and, for specific items you cannot do in there, swith to VS to create custom controls. Those custom controls can then be integrated into Umbraco by encapsulating them in "macro's" in the Umbraco admin.
3/ You have to create your website within Umbraco, but what you can do, if needed, is leave out some parts of your site from the Umbraco "engine". This is done by specifying the paths you want to leave out of Umbraco in the web.config file (I do not remember the name of the appsettings key, but if you look at the config file you should find it easily). That way you can have some parts of your site "leave out" of Umbraco.
4/ No, Umbraco will not understand your VS structure, but the opposite is true: if you create master pages, css etc. in Umbraco, they will appear in VS and from there on you can choose to update them in VS instead of Umbraco.
This kind of depends on what functionalities you want to create/implement, and in any case I would try to do as much as possible in Umbraco. But for example, let's say you have your own custom made e-commerce solution that you want to couple to the great Umbraco CMS to provide also documentation, forum, ..., then you might create an Umbraco site, include your e-commerce solution in VS, but then you would need to explicitely tell Umbraco to ignore every folder that relates to your e-commerce solution. When your visitors browse the e-commerce site, it would just use your custom pages, and when reading the documentation or participating to the forum, he would be using the Umbraco part of you site.
This is of course just an example, probably not so good, as you might maybe then want to migrate your e-commerce solution into Umbraco or use an Umbraco-ready e-commerce solution, but I guess you get the picture of what is possible.
Thank you for your reply Michael. This was really helpful.
I would like also to thank "Thomas Enggaard Christensen" for his greate response.
Note: I would have voted for your answers guys but I have to have 70 "karma" to do so.
I would be thankful if you have a tutorial that attack this issue, i.e. create some structure in Umbraco then move to Visual Studio to complete the site functionality.
When you start creating templates and styles etc. into Umbraco, you will see that the items also appear in VS. Also, I'm 99% sure that when you create a css in VS, it will automatically be available in Umbraco. Same for javascript files I think.
VS should be used to create custom user controls when needed: place them under the "usercontrols" directory or one of its subfolders in VS, and include them in Umbraco via macro's (when creating a macro you can browse and select your user controls). You can also add third-party javascript libraries from within VS, your custom code that has to run outside Umbraco, etc.
I guess the best is to start playing with Umbraco and I think you will quickly see what needs to be done where. And otherwize, just post on the forum :-)
Before going down the route of implementing an e-commerce solution from scratch you might want to take a look at some of the packages, which provide this functionality out of the box. The e-commerce packages provide full administration built right into Umbraco and ready made APIs to work with.
There are open source, commercial, and even free commercial options available for Umbraco, so you can basically take your pick based on what fits your scenario the best.
New to Umbraco Questions
Dear Friends,
I am an ASP.NET developer for long time but I've never used CMS before. I am about to develop a new project which will use Umbraco as a CMS. The website will be an ecommerce with forum. There will be other 3 sub domain websites which will be content websites plus contact us page. Here are my questions:
- What would be my option in this scenario? Do I need to install 4 Umbraco instances? One for each website
- Does using Umbraco limits me to use ASP.NET MVC or I am ok to use ASP.NET forms?
- You don't expect to create such a project using the Umbraco admin, right? How do I use Visual Studio, for example I will have my project that will use Umbraco, how to do that? do I need to load the whole Umbraco in Visual Studio and add my files there or I can just work on the project as normal but make some communication with Umbraco for the dynamic content to be manageable.
Any help, articles, tutorials would be much appreciated.
Kind regards,
Sul
1: You dont have to install 4 instances of Umbraco. You can make 4 "website roots" in the content area, and asign the required hostname to each root. That way umbraco will automaticaly route your request to the right page by the hostname in the request. (Right click the node and click the "hostnames" item in the context menu)
2: Umbraco versions up to 4.7 (current version) uses asp.net forms. Umbraco v5 will lbe switching to MVC.
3: You can create a lot of a website functionality in the umbraco admin alone. By using xslt/razor macros. And by editing the templates in the "Settings" section. However by creating a new web project in VS and adding references to a few umbraco dll's you can edit the template files in VS with syntax highliting and intellisence. You can also develop normal asp.net usercontrols in VS and copy the ascx files to to usercontrols folder, and the dll to the bin folder of the umbraco webfolder.
Actually I just remembered there is a "Umbraco Project" item in the "Extention manager" i VS.
If you install the you will have an umbraco project template in the list when you create a new project in VS. (under the root Visual C# node, not the Web)
It will ask you to specify a umbraco webfolder, and copy the needed files from that folder to your vs project. (dlls, templates, usercontrols, css, scripts etc.) And add a post build event t the project as well that copies the files back on a successful build, so your vs project folder and umbraco webfolders are in sync.
That might be a good place to start
whoops... double post...
Thank you for your reply.
When you say Umbraco 5 will use MVC, does this mean that you have to use MVC? or it means that Umbraco 5 will support MVC in addition to Forms which is already being supported?
Is it possible for me to use Umbraco admin to define the structure of the website by defining all the templates and the managable content then move to Visual Studio to define more specific functionalities?
When you create a website that will use Umbraco, does that mean that your files has to be hosted in Umbraco in order to use Umbraco? or you can install Umbraco and create your websites in a different location but allow them to use Umbraco? if this option is possible then which is better, hosting the project inside Umbraco or create it outside?
Lets say I am in Visual Studio and I've create Master Pages and used some of Umraco fields, now if I open Umbraco admin will this structure (Master pages, fields) be visible to Umbraco. I mean will Umbraco understands the structure that I built in Visual Studio.
Kind regards,
Sul
Hi Sul,
1/ Umbraco 5 will be built on MVC, but as far as I understood, you will be able to use it exactly as you do with version 4.7, only you will get extra flexibility points compared to 4.7. More to learn during Codegarden :-)
2/ You can indeed define as much as you can within Umbraco admin, and, for specific items you cannot do in there, swith to VS to create custom controls. Those custom controls can then be integrated into Umbraco by encapsulating them in "macro's" in the Umbraco admin.
3/ You have to create your website within Umbraco, but what you can do, if needed, is leave out some parts of your site from the Umbraco "engine". This is done by specifying the paths you want to leave out of Umbraco in the web.config file (I do not remember the name of the appsettings key, but if you look at the config file you should find it easily). That way you can have some parts of your site "leave out" of Umbraco.
4/ No, Umbraco will not understand your VS structure, but the opposite is true: if you create master pages, css etc. in Umbraco, they will appear in VS and from there on you can choose to update them in VS instead of Umbraco.
Hope this helps you get a better idea :-)
Cheers,
Michael
Thank you for your reply.
More on point 3. So from your experiance which items I should create outside Umbraco and why?
Kind regards,
Sul
Hi Sul,
This kind of depends on what functionalities you want to create/implement, and in any case I would try to do as much as possible in Umbraco. But for example, let's say you have your own custom made e-commerce solution that you want to couple to the great Umbraco CMS to provide also documentation, forum, ..., then you might create an Umbraco site, include your e-commerce solution in VS, but then you would need to explicitely tell Umbraco to ignore every folder that relates to your e-commerce solution. When your visitors browse the e-commerce site, it would just use your custom pages, and when reading the documentation or participating to the forum, he would be using the Umbraco part of you site.
This is of course just an example, probably not so good, as you might maybe then want to migrate your e-commerce solution into Umbraco or use an Umbraco-ready e-commerce solution, but I guess you get the picture of what is possible.
Hope this helps :-)
Cheers,
Michael.
Thank you for your reply Michael. This was really helpful.
I would like also to thank "Thomas Enggaard Christensen" for his greate response.
Note: I would have voted for your answers guys but I have to have 70 "karma" to do so.
I would be thankful if you have a tutorial that attack this issue, i.e. create some structure in Umbraco then move to Visual Studio to complete the site functionality.
Kind regards,
Sul
Thanks for the thought :-)
And I'm glad I could help!
Cheers,
Michael.
About the tutorial, unfortunately I am not aware of any. But a good start is indeed the "Umbraco Project" extension mentioned by Thomas, which you can find here: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/visual-studio-2010-project-template-
When you start creating templates and styles etc. into Umbraco, you will see that the items also appear in VS. Also, I'm 99% sure that when you create a css in VS, it will automatically be available in Umbraco. Same for javascript files I think.
VS should be used to create custom user controls when needed: place them under the "usercontrols" directory or one of its subfolders in VS, and include them in Umbraco via macro's (when creating a macro you can browse and select your user controls).
You can also add third-party javascript libraries from within VS, your custom code that has to run outside Umbraco, etc.
I guess the best is to start playing with Umbraco and I think you will quickly see what needs to be done where. And otherwize, just post on the forum :-)
Cheers,
Michael.
Thanks Michael, I will do that. Expect to see me here fequentley!
Kind regards,
Sul
Hi Sul,
Before going down the route of implementing an e-commerce solution from scratch you might want to take a look at some of the packages, which provide this functionality out of the box. The e-commerce packages provide full administration built right into Umbraco and ready made APIs to work with.
There are open source, commercial, and even free commercial options available for Umbraco, so you can basically take your pick based on what fits your scenario the best.
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