I am new to Umbraco and I think so far looks for me to be my CMS of choice after years of searching (the holy grail). I am involved in low end websites and need a way to rapidly produce templates that aren't necessarily fancy, but just simple and workable.
I come from Joomla (uggg) and found Artisteer (while not ideal) to be a reasonably good solution for pumping out low end sites quickly.
I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on how one could go about making templates quickly and cheaply in Umbraco?
What's the best GUI tool to be using for this? Do you guy's do it by hand or do you use visual studio or expression web?
Before I went to Joomla/artisteer I was doing winforms and msaccess stuff I am not up with the way things are done for web. (I can do them from scratch, but there's gotta be a quicker way).
You might try a package I created: http://dibbus.com/umbraco/umbraco-template-package/ You can use it for rapid prototyping or basic webdevelopment. I would like it to deploy further but I need some more time ;-)
(The package will give you basic templates/960 grid css framework/jquery/conditional comments)
Hi there Dandrayne, Oh I wouldn't say MS hosting is too expensive. Not here anyway (Australia). It costs me $20 (~10euro) extra a month for my VPS and in the grand scheme of things it's pretty negligible. I find it quicker doing many things through RDP than over a shell/web, so that's time saving enough for me to justify it.
I did have a look at CWS, but I am using 4.5 and I think at the moment it's not ready for that (well seems a lot of stuff isn't yet) as it seemed to be a bit skewiff. I haven't done a full site yet so I still have much to learn and that may have been my fault. I'll try it again on my next clean install.
Folkert, I'll check those out, they might do the the trick. Thank you. I do want more tho, cause I'm greedy! For a while now I have been researching and considering making a little desktop app that churned out blueprint based templates (like Boks) but with extra ability to dynamically change the fonts, colors etc and stick cufon in there as well....but like you, and probably everyone else lol, I dream about it but I don't have the time. If you wanted to add to your 960 package, maybe I could help with that instead, but I'll try them out first and see where it takes me.
Any other suggestions are welcome too :) Thank you.
Hi, I've been using umbraco for a few days now and was quietly surprised about the ease in which I got my Artisteer template working. I used the export to html function in Artisteer and after viewing the templates and stylesheets vids on umbraco.TV it all fell into place. Of course getting the menus to work is something else but there are templates for XSLT about on the net to help get you started! Yeh, maybe thats where razor comes in.
I switched from WordPress for my current project as I wanted to incorporate .NET user controls into a CMS. So far I have been very impressed with Umbraco and it looks like all my needs will be fulfilled.
I am more of a programmer than a designer (hense Artisteer) but would imagine most umbraco designers convert their PSD files to html then copy/paste the html/css & images into Umbraco.
Quickest way to make low end templates
Hello there,
I am new to Umbraco and I think so far looks for me to be my CMS of choice after years of searching (the holy grail). I am involved in low end websites and need a way to rapidly produce templates that aren't necessarily fancy, but just simple and workable.
I come from Joomla (uggg) and found Artisteer (while not ideal) to be a reasonably good solution for pumping out low end sites quickly.
I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on how one could go about making templates quickly and cheaply in Umbraco?
What's the best GUI tool to be using for this? Do you guy's do it by hand or do you use visual studio or expression web?
Before I went to Joomla/artisteer I was doing winforms and msaccess stuff I am not up with the way things are done for web. (I can do them from scratch, but there's gotta be a quicker way).
Thank you for any thoughts.
You can certainly pump out sites quickly by starting with http://our.umbraco.org/projects/starter-kits/creative-website-starter-(cws) or http://our.umbraco.org/projects/starter-kits/business-website-starter-pack, although you may want to look at hosting, as MS hosting is not generally very cheap or low-end.
As for making templates, I just use a trusty text editor and the umbraco backend.
You might try a package I created: http://dibbus.com/umbraco/umbraco-template-package/
You can use it for rapid prototyping or basic webdevelopment. I would like it to deploy further but I need some more time ;-)
(The package will give you basic templates/960 grid css framework/jquery/conditional comments)
Hi there Dandrayne, Oh I wouldn't say MS hosting is too expensive. Not here anyway (Australia). It costs me $20 (~10euro) extra a month for my VPS and in the grand scheme of things it's pretty negligible. I find it quicker doing many things through RDP than over a shell/web, so that's time saving enough for me to justify it.
I did have a look at CWS, but I am using 4.5 and I think at the moment it's not ready for that (well seems a lot of stuff isn't yet) as it seemed to be a bit skewiff. I haven't done a full site yet so I still have much to learn and that may have been my fault. I'll try it again on my next clean install.
Folkert, I'll check those out, they might do the the trick. Thank you. I do want more tho, cause I'm greedy! For a while now I have been researching and considering making a little desktop app that churned out blueprint based templates (like Boks) but with extra ability to dynamically change the fonts, colors etc and stick cufon in there as well....but like you, and probably everyone else lol, I dream about it but I don't have the time. If you wanted to add to your 960 package, maybe I could help with that instead, but I'll try them out first and see where it takes me.
Any other suggestions are welcome too :) Thank you.
Hi, I've been using umbraco for a few days now and was quietly surprised about the ease in which I got my Artisteer template working. I used the export to html function in Artisteer and after viewing the templates and stylesheets vids on umbraco.TV it all fell into place. Of course getting the menus to work is something else but there are templates for XSLT about on the net to help get you started! Yeh, maybe thats where razor comes in.
I switched from WordPress for my current project as I wanted to incorporate .NET user controls into a CMS. So far I have been very impressed with Umbraco and it looks like all my needs will be fulfilled.
I am more of a programmer than a designer (hense Artisteer) but would imagine most umbraco designers convert their PSD files to html then copy/paste the html/css & images into Umbraco.
Hello, Good news! Starting from 4.0, Artisteer supports Export Plug-ins and it's possible now creating a plugin (free or commercial ) for Umbraco.
I think many users here are ready to pay some responsible fee for it ($10-$20?).
http://www.artisteer.com/?p=dev
http://www.artisteer.com/?forum_id=30&p=forum_topics
Thanks,
Bob
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