I've been looking at the Umbraco.com site and browsing the wiki, forums, and the documentation but I have yet to find any information on basic "features" in Umbraco. There are hints but no information about the capabilities of certain features such as workflow or Active Directory support. On the tour page it says "Power to Publish. No Geek Required" and "Powerful yet simple to use." Does this mean there is a workflow component? Can a workflow be defined that requires approval at one or more levels? How about AD support? There are a lot of old posts in the forums about getting AD to work in old versions of Umbraco, how about v7? Is this something that is easily configurable? I've installed 7.2 and like a lot of what I see but clicking around the UI isn't the best way to discern the capabilities. There just seems to be a big hole in the documentation. Maybe the paid docs are better but before I get to that point I would at least like to know what the product is designed to do out-of-the-box. I realize this is an open-source product and Umbraco funds itself on support and documentation but it doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of selling itself. Is there a whitepaper somewhere that I haven't found yet? I keep trying to explain Umbraco to other devs and all I can say about what it can do is "I don't know yet."
Not a rant, just looking for some better information on the capabilities of Umbraco.
For free you can read a lot in the internet.
Download a lot of Umbraco projects and learn Umbraco features from the code.
Read http://24days.in/umbraco/2014/epub/
For each question you can get answer on this forum.
I think people have been a little nervous to answer this one.. let me try! Out of the box Umbraco isn't as feature laden as some commercial offerings. The reason people love it is that with a small amount of dev effort you can have a lot of customised functionality to suit your needs probably equallying the commercial offerings but without any restrictions of not being able to change how something works. This level of customisation is only suited to devs but there is a lot you can do with Umbraco without doing this - I suspect with your requirements of Active Directory etc then you're going to need to roll up your sleeves.
Some people prefer this sort of functionality to just be there "and work" (I'm thinking of the infinte Wordpress plugins) and with the Umbraco Packages there is a large amount of functionality that you can add. For things like Active Directory integration (as far as i know) there are no simple packages but it's very possible to add this (hence why you've seen forum posts with code) and you'll get a lot of support on these forums if you get stuck.
So as you can see it's probably hard to write a feature list as if they "sold" Umbraco on Active Directory integration for example and then when people found they had to code something they might be upset.
This is just my personal view - I hope it helps - the simple answer though is list what you'd like to do and I'm sure this community will give you pointers.
Where do I find Umbraco 7 features information?
I've been looking at the Umbraco.com site and browsing the wiki, forums, and the documentation but I have yet to find any information on basic "features" in Umbraco. There are hints but no information about the capabilities of certain features such as workflow or Active Directory support. On the tour page it says "Power to Publish. No Geek Required" and "Powerful yet simple to use." Does this mean there is a workflow component? Can a workflow be defined that requires approval at one or more levels? How about AD support? There are a lot of old posts in the forums about getting AD to work in old versions of Umbraco, how about v7? Is this something that is easily configurable? I've installed 7.2 and like a lot of what I see but clicking around the UI isn't the best way to discern the capabilities. There just seems to be a big hole in the documentation. Maybe the paid docs are better but before I get to that point I would at least like to know what the product is designed to do out-of-the-box. I realize this is an open-source product and Umbraco funds itself on support and documentation but it doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of selling itself. Is there a whitepaper somewhere that I haven't found yet? I keep trying to explain Umbraco to other devs and all I can say about what it can do is "I don't know yet."
Not a rant, just looking for some better information on the capabilities of Umbraco.
Thanks for any input anyone might provide.
Hi Stuart,
For free you can read a lot in the internet. Download a lot of Umbraco projects and learn Umbraco features from the code. Read http://24days.in/umbraco/2014/epub/ For each question you can get answer on this forum.
Thanks
Hi Stuart,
I think people have been a little nervous to answer this one.. let me try! Out of the box Umbraco isn't as feature laden as some commercial offerings. The reason people love it is that with a small amount of dev effort you can have a lot of customised functionality to suit your needs probably equallying the commercial offerings but without any restrictions of not being able to change how something works. This level of customisation is only suited to devs but there is a lot you can do with Umbraco without doing this - I suspect with your requirements of Active Directory etc then you're going to need to roll up your sleeves.
Some people prefer this sort of functionality to just be there "and work" (I'm thinking of the infinte Wordpress plugins) and with the Umbraco Packages there is a large amount of functionality that you can add. For things like Active Directory integration (as far as i know) there are no simple packages but it's very possible to add this (hence why you've seen forum posts with code) and you'll get a lot of support on these forums if you get stuck.
If you're still keen to try following the https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Using-Umbraco/Creating-Basic-Site/ guide (this will show you what you can do with base Umbraco and simple razor scripts) and then move onto the http://umbraco.tv/ developer videos if you want to get into the extending Umbraco side of things (using code).
So as you can see it's probably hard to write a feature list as if they "sold" Umbraco on Active Directory integration for example and then when people found they had to code something they might be upset.
This is just my personal view - I hope it helps - the simple answer though is list what you'd like to do and I'm sure this community will give you pointers.
Steve
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