Hi Michael and welcome to our.

I would like to give you some good starting points of Umbraco. On Umbraco TV, you would get some good videos that shows the basic concepts of the Umbraco CMS, some of them are free to watch and some of them requires subscription to Umbraco TV.

Here a some basic videos about how to work width content in Umbraco http://umbraco.tv/videos/umbraco-v7/content-editor/

And as you have discovered if you don´t have installed a starter kit, then you just get a empty shell where you need to build up the backend, so it fecth your clients needs. This is one of the forces as Umbraco has, as I see it. To get an idea of how Umbraco works take a look at these videos.http://umbraco.tv/videos/umbraco-v7/implementor/

The main concept in Umbraco, is what they are calling Document types, it here where you are defining what type of fields the user should work with, and you can find some written documentation here:http://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Using-Umbraco/Creating-Basic-Site/

In Umbraco you havr full control over your markup, that is comes out of Umbraco, so there is no problem using Bootstap 3 if you want that. From Umbraco 7, Umbraco is using MVC as default, but is possible to switch to WebForms, but by default it uses MVC from version 7. Documentation on MVC can you find here: http://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Reference/Templating/Mvc/ If you want to know how to change from MVC to WebForms, you need to open up,
~/config/umbracoSettings.config and chage the:

<defaultRenderingEngine>Mvc</defaultRenderingEngine>

To webforms, and recyle your app pool before it would take place.:

<defaultRenderingEngine>WebForms</defaultRenderingEngine>

In Umbraco modules are called packages and there a lots of great packages that you can use when you are build a website in Umbraco, some of the packages are free, and some are commercial. It´s always a good idea to see if the package is compatible with version that you are using, but, if you are unsure if it will work, with the current version that you are using,I would always recommend you to install the package on the dev / test environment, first and see if the package are working as intended.

You can find a package search here: http://our.umbraco.org/projects, The Umbraco 7 backoffice are using Angular, so if you want to create your own propertyEditors, it´s possible, but it require some Angular knowledge. You can find the documentation here.http://umbraco.github.io/Belle/#/tutorials/CreatingAPropertyEditor and  http://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Extending-Umbraco/Property-Editors/creating-tutorial1-v7 and https://github.com/umbraco/AngularWorkbook/

And if you want to use Knockout.js, jquery and so on then you just can do it.

I hope this answers your questions, and gives you a good starting point of working with Umbraco, if you have any further questions to this topic, keep asking them. If you have other questions about Umbraco, just create a new post  on the forum, we are friendly people.

Happy Umbraco coding.

/Dennis

Great stuff, can't wait to get started. I'll shoot more questions when I have them.

is working on a reply...