What alternative CMS to Umbraco are you using? It seems that A LOT of packages stopped being offered after 2016-2017 and most DO NOT work with version 8. Where did everyone go?
The number of packages for v8 is a lot lower than V7. Packages we used in v7 are not supported in v8 and it seems like most of the authors have disappeared.
For example there were a few store locator packages for v7 and none of them have been updated to work for v8. Most of the plugins stopped being updated in 2016-2017.
I've found that Umbraco 8 has all the plugins I've needed. It's only natural that thing should change a bit after a major upgrade. Sometimes this means a plugin grows stale, other times it means similar functional was integrated into the core, other times it means there is a commercial offering. Some examples:
Archetype No longer necessary, as Nested Content (and now Blocks Editor) is built in.
Formulate One of my colleagues helped upgrade this to support Umbraco 8.
uMarketingSuite Adds support for a bunch of marketing functionality, such as personalization.
Internationalization Packages like Polyglot and the like are no longer necessary, as this is built in to Umbraco 8.
Robots I had a package called Robotnik to help with serving a different robots.txt file per domain. There are other similar packages now available for Umbraco 8.
Ditto More focus has been made around ModelsBuilder, which is now built into the core of Umbraco, making mapping packages like Ditto less necessary.
It's also worth keeping in mind that most packages are open source, so if you wanted to upgrade them you would be able to.
The problem is that I am competing against other design shops that offer WordPress. Either we are stuck in hell with updating umbraco or trying to either create a package from scratch or fixing broken ones while our competitors are able to create a site and with minimal plugins installed, upgrade the site, sometimes automatically without any downtime, while we fiddle with some new half backed version of Umbraco that breaks something after each upgrade. Version 7s upgrade process and packages available was way better than v8. It seems like a lot of package creators have left or got tired of the constant upgrades.
I tend to see a lot more folks wanting to reinvent the wheel instead of using an third party plugin... maybe because Umbraco is used more for bigger budgets these days?
Problem is that if plugins arent maintained and you rely on a plugin, then you might not be able to upgrade.
For example: I used the plugin called Tinifier, then we upgraded to V8.6 and the site stopped working. That is very dangerous. While third party plugins are great to enhance functionalty, they are also dangerous. You cannot depend on them.
Or another example: what happens the day for example uSync breaks with a new version, or they decide to take 500$ a month in license fee (exaggerated example, I know, but just for this example)? Most of us are heavily dependant on uSync features to get normal dev/test/prod environments working.
We try not to rely on plugins, but in some cases we like to use them because of budget reasons. We are competing against other firms that develop in Drupal and WordPress. In many cases they are able to out bid us based on the ability to provide a certain functionality at a far lower cost than we could because we would need to build out that functionality. For example, Elementor in WordPress has a ton of widgets that we build in Umbraco from scratch. There is a store locator with built in mapping, there is Woocommerce that has been around for ever. The list goes on and on. I really dislike working in WordPress because it is a pain to make your own widgets/plugins.
I like Umbraco, but I can not depend on the releases that come out EVERY SINGLE WEEK to be bug free. There have been many times where basic functionality like managing media assets has broken after an upgrade. We used to use custom Media folders for SEO purposes, but after a few upgrades the media picker looses the thumbnail, when you try to replace an image, the old one is not over written, I have a list of issues we have experienced when upgrading a site.
If we are to rely on Umbraco as a stable platform, the Upgrade process needs to be addressed.
As far as using plugins, why have them at all if we are not supposed to use them?
Not all changes in Umbraco break plugins and you can use the out-of-the-box features if a plugin is not available.
In regards to the weekly updates (which is not true, Umbraco is not updated weekly) would you prefer Wordpress just because the don't bother you fixing issues? I hope you are not telling me that Wordpress is bug free ;)
Also, it's up to you to upgrade to a new version balancing you own pros and cons of doing so.
Presonally, I think Wordpress and Umbraco have very different target clients, if you are good using WP and for you, Umbraco is a pain why you just don't stick to WP?
If your customers requirements is met with WordPress then it gets really difficult to sell Umbraco to them.
Unless you find an actual need that requires Umbraco I wouldn't try matching the budget.
Reason is that Umbraco is a developer CMS. If you're not a developer then you need a developer to help you.
If you're not a developer you will struggle with packages and upgrades. I would n.e.v.e.r. install a package directly on a live site so for that reason alone you will need to have multiple environments.
If you're a developer you will probably be in heaven with Umbraco and all the flexibility Umbraco can give you and your project.
I'm also seeing a lot of discontinued packages. Some just gets replaced by better bigger packages. Others are added to core. But I also think that everybody is building their own custom features in projects which don't get released as packages (no time, no budget).
I also consider it easier to build the small stuff we need to customize for a given solution rather than trying to install a package that maybe does.what you need but not exactly as you want it.
Also packages is a risk. Every package needs to be evaluated in terms of: ux quality, code quality, future upgrades. One bad package can cause a lot of grey hair (I have a lot of grey hair).
To keep budget down and quality up we've spent month on building a kit that we use to build every site. This enable us to build without any backend coding until you get to the last 10% requirements.
If we hadn't build this we would have to do WordPress. And that's not gonna happen.
Tim,
I have only been coding in Umbraco for < 1 year so started with 8.6.3 (I think) and have relied heavily on looking at code examples from packages on github,
Even where the packages no longer work in >v8 the source repositories and this site have enabled me to recode most of them to work in v8, I'll admit it has been a very steep learning curve, but in the majority of cases the answers are out there. I agree it can be frustrating, but like Jesper we have been building a core site that we can then clone as the starting point for others.
We chose Umbraco because of it's 'more developer focus' as we use it for creating portals that integrate heavily with Microsoft dynamics so we have a lot of customisations.
I am trying to share some of my code but time is limited at the moment.
WP - used for lower budget clients. They are prepared to have a site that doesn't have every feature or for it to look exactly like they want.
Umbraco - when your client is specific on how every aspect works and has a budget which makes it worth a developers time (we're expensive).
If your business model / budget is somewhere in between it's hard.
The argument is ease of ongoing content updating (though WP is coming along on this front) and the absolute hacks you still have to do with WP to hide the blog engine.
Personally I never really use packages - they often do 80% of what I need but rather than spend the time to try to hack someone else's code it's easier to build bespoke.
Equally for package builders to build something generic enough to be useable for all whilst still have time to make their clients happy is super hard.
It looks like Umbraco Uno is an attempt to be covering the type of clients you're referring to. But competing with WP on price alone is always going to be a tough gig.
Umbraco HQ likes new and shiny, so er... yeah.. Every major release seems like a giant reset in terms of available packages. It's been like this since the very beginning, because HQ is, more or less, trying to keep up with whatever Microsoft is doing rather than opting for a stable ecosystem ;)
"New" is not always better (I am looking forward to Umbraco on .NET Core/.NET 5, though).
I agree, "New" is not always better or even good. If it ain't broke, don't "fix" it. We have a site that is unpublishing a single page after the automatic health check. There is not reason for it to unpublish. There is nothing special about the page. The site is in version 8.6.5. We have tried to upgrade. For some reason the site gets stuck in a death loop when we try to upgrade to 8.6.6. The upgrade process for Umbraco is very unstable and trying to trouble shoot site after site for bugs in places there shouldn't be is becoming an issue. We have clients on various systems from WordPress, Drupal, Concrete5, DotNetNuke, and Kentico. The ONLY one we have issues with in upgrading is Umbraco, but at the same time, we are able to build websites with Umbraco much quicker than the other systems.
That's an interesting upgrade issue you are having, can you share more details such as logs etc in a different thread about it? Someone here (myself included) might be able to see what's going on. :-)
I have to say I've had no upgrade issues since 8.1 at all, so would be curious as to the approach you are taking and what sort of issues you are having.
I can send over the issue we are having with upgrades later, but now we have a new problem with a V7 site. For some reason, when we upload any jpg image, you can see them on the site, but if you visit the image directly, it's a bunch of code or encryption.
We have older jpgs in the site that we are able to see, but a some point the images started to get messed up by umbraco. We have no idea why this is happening. I have not seen this issue on any of our umbraco sites. This is just another example of the random unexplained issues we face with Umbraco.
That would indicate it is not being recognised by your browser as an image so it opens it as a text file and displays it's binary content rather then opening it as an image. You say other jpg files open ok, is there any commonality in those that open as text?
Maybe it's a browser setting, perhaps in combination with whatever content type or encoding is returned in the HTTP response headers? The image looks fine to me in Chrome:
Maybe it could also be related to some browser plugin that's installed.
There are a few jpgs that are ok, but 80% of them are not. This is an issue with Umbraco and how the images were stored or uploaded. I don't really know what the issue is. We have uploaded a few jpg images from another umbraco site where we can see them fine and this site still does something to the images when they are uploaded. These sorts of issues should not be an issue and are the things that make umbraco look like some sort of hobbyist platform than something that should be used in professional settings. I like umbraco, but the strange and unexpected behaviors of simple things needs to stop. It seems that every release is full of land minds. The way we found this error is when we protected the site via IIS. We could not see most of the images on the site. This is a PIA issue that we need to solve because we need to protect the staging sites, but can't because basic functionality is broken.
That's weird. I also tried it in a Chrome incognito window, so without any extensions. And on Firefox it doesn't show the text/gibberish, but it opens a download window instead. So not loading the image inside the browser window there either. I did however test it on a remote machine and no issues there, so it must be related to something on my local machine.
I have a suspicion that one of the releases from Umbraco started doing something to uploaded images because older images that we added to the site in the beginning work fine.
UPDATE: You need to remove the stupid ga added url params to see this issue so manually copy and paste the URLs into the browser.
I haven't had time to look into this but I hope this helps someone work out what's going on?
Alternative to Umbraco
What alternative CMS to Umbraco are you using? It seems that A LOT of packages stopped being offered after 2016-2017 and most DO NOT work with version 8. Where did everyone go?
I gues we are trying different packages, most of the ones I've tried work ok but obviously haven't tried any very old ones 😃
The number of packages for v8 is a lot lower than V7. Packages we used in v7 are not supported in v8 and it seems like most of the authors have disappeared.
For example there were a few store locator packages for v7 and none of them have been updated to work for v8. Most of the plugins stopped being updated in 2016-2017.
the authors don't have time to update them perhaps.
I've found that Umbraco 8 has all the plugins I've needed. It's only natural that thing should change a bit after a major upgrade. Sometimes this means a plugin grows stale, other times it means similar functional was integrated into the core, other times it means there is a commercial offering. Some examples:
It's also worth keeping in mind that most packages are open source, so if you wanted to upgrade them you would be able to.
The problem is that I am competing against other design shops that offer WordPress. Either we are stuck in hell with updating umbraco or trying to either create a package from scratch or fixing broken ones while our competitors are able to create a site and with minimal plugins installed, upgrade the site, sometimes automatically without any downtime, while we fiddle with some new half backed version of Umbraco that breaks something after each upgrade. Version 7s upgrade process and packages available was way better than v8. It seems like a lot of package creators have left or got tired of the constant upgrades.
What kind of plugins do you require? I have found those available to be all that we need for a functioning CMS
Comment author was deleted
I tend to see a lot more folks wanting to reinvent the wheel instead of using an third party plugin... maybe because Umbraco is used more for bigger budgets these days?
Problem is that if plugins arent maintained and you rely on a plugin, then you might not be able to upgrade.
For example: I used the plugin called Tinifier, then we upgraded to V8.6 and the site stopped working. That is very dangerous. While third party plugins are great to enhance functionalty, they are also dangerous. You cannot depend on them.
Or another example: what happens the day for example uSync breaks with a new version, or they decide to take 500$ a month in license fee (exaggerated example, I know, but just for this example)? Most of us are heavily dependant on uSync features to get normal dev/test/prod environments working.
Comment author was deleted
if they are open source... you are depending on an open source cms to start with.. so if the code is available those issues can be tackled...
The same can be said of Wordpress
I've been zoning in on the reason why Tinifier crashes in anything after 8.6.
As soon as I can set up a simple, reproducable scenario, I'll open a ticket for Umbraco.
Not sure you needed to flood the forums with posts about it, thanks for that.
We try not to rely on plugins, but in some cases we like to use them because of budget reasons. We are competing against other firms that develop in Drupal and WordPress. In many cases they are able to out bid us based on the ability to provide a certain functionality at a far lower cost than we could because we would need to build out that functionality. For example, Elementor in WordPress has a ton of widgets that we build in Umbraco from scratch. There is a store locator with built in mapping, there is Woocommerce that has been around for ever. The list goes on and on. I really dislike working in WordPress because it is a pain to make your own widgets/plugins.
I like Umbraco, but I can not depend on the releases that come out EVERY SINGLE WEEK to be bug free. There have been many times where basic functionality like managing media assets has broken after an upgrade. We used to use custom Media folders for SEO purposes, but after a few upgrades the media picker looses the thumbnail, when you try to replace an image, the old one is not over written, I have a list of issues we have experienced when upgrading a site.
If we are to rely on Umbraco as a stable platform, the Upgrade process needs to be addressed.
As far as using plugins, why have them at all if we are not supposed to use them?
Not all changes in Umbraco break plugins and you can use the out-of-the-box features if a plugin is not available.
In regards to the weekly updates (which is not true, Umbraco is not updated weekly) would you prefer Wordpress just because the don't bother you fixing issues? I hope you are not telling me that Wordpress is bug free ;)
Also, it's up to you to upgrade to a new version balancing you own pros and cons of doing so.
Presonally, I think Wordpress and Umbraco have very different target clients, if you are good using WP and for you, Umbraco is a pain why you just don't stick to WP?
If your customers requirements is met with WordPress then it gets really difficult to sell Umbraco to them.
Unless you find an actual need that requires Umbraco I wouldn't try matching the budget.
Reason is that Umbraco is a developer CMS. If you're not a developer then you need a developer to help you.
If you're not a developer you will struggle with packages and upgrades. I would n.e.v.e.r. install a package directly on a live site so for that reason alone you will need to have multiple environments.
If you're a developer you will probably be in heaven with Umbraco and all the flexibility Umbraco can give you and your project.
I'm also seeing a lot of discontinued packages. Some just gets replaced by better bigger packages. Others are added to core. But I also think that everybody is building their own custom features in projects which don't get released as packages (no time, no budget).
I also consider it easier to build the small stuff we need to customize for a given solution rather than trying to install a package that maybe does.what you need but not exactly as you want it.
Also packages is a risk. Every package needs to be evaluated in terms of: ux quality, code quality, future upgrades. One bad package can cause a lot of grey hair (I have a lot of grey hair).
To keep budget down and quality up we've spent month on building a kit that we use to build every site. This enable us to build without any backend coding until you get to the last 10% requirements.
If we hadn't build this we would have to do WordPress. And that's not gonna happen.
Comment author was deleted
thanks for the response Jesper... just a shame the sharing culture is getting a bit lost since I learn most from other peoples code
Tim, I have only been coding in Umbraco for < 1 year so started with 8.6.3 (I think) and have relied heavily on looking at code examples from packages on github,
Even where the packages no longer work in >v8 the source repositories and this site have enabled me to recode most of them to work in v8, I'll admit it has been a very steep learning curve, but in the majority of cases the answers are out there. I agree it can be frustrating, but like Jesper we have been building a core site that we can then clone as the starting point for others.
We chose Umbraco because of it's 'more developer focus' as we use it for creating portals that integrate heavily with Microsoft dynamics so we have a lot of customisations.
I am trying to share some of my code but time is limited at the moment.
Yes - I think I agree with everything above.
WP - used for lower budget clients. They are prepared to have a site that doesn't have every feature or for it to look exactly like they want.
Umbraco - when your client is specific on how every aspect works and has a budget which makes it worth a developers time (we're expensive).
If your business model / budget is somewhere in between it's hard.
The argument is ease of ongoing content updating (though WP is coming along on this front) and the absolute hacks you still have to do with WP to hide the blog engine.
Personally I never really use packages - they often do 80% of what I need but rather than spend the time to try to hack someone else's code it's easier to build bespoke.
Equally for package builders to build something generic enough to be useable for all whilst still have time to make their clients happy is super hard.
It looks like Umbraco Uno is an attempt to be covering the type of clients you're referring to. But competing with WP on price alone is always going to be a tough gig.
Umbraco HQ likes new and shiny, so er... yeah.. Every major release seems like a giant reset in terms of available packages. It's been like this since the very beginning, because HQ is, more or less, trying to keep up with whatever Microsoft is doing rather than opting for a stable ecosystem ;)
"New" is not always better (I am looking forward to Umbraco on .NET Core/.NET 5, though).
I agree, "New" is not always better or even good. If it ain't broke, don't "fix" it. We have a site that is unpublishing a single page after the automatic health check. There is not reason for it to unpublish. There is nothing special about the page. The site is in version 8.6.5. We have tried to upgrade. For some reason the site gets stuck in a death loop when we try to upgrade to 8.6.6. The upgrade process for Umbraco is very unstable and trying to trouble shoot site after site for bugs in places there shouldn't be is becoming an issue. We have clients on various systems from WordPress, Drupal, Concrete5, DotNetNuke, and Kentico. The ONLY one we have issues with in upgrading is Umbraco, but at the same time, we are able to build websites with Umbraco much quicker than the other systems.
That's an interesting upgrade issue you are having, can you share more details such as logs etc in a different thread about it? Someone here (myself included) might be able to see what's going on. :-)
I have to say I've had no upgrade issues since 8.1 at all, so would be curious as to the approach you are taking and what sort of issues you are having.
I can send over the issue we are having with upgrades later, but now we have a new problem with a V7 site. For some reason, when we upload any jpg image, you can see them on the site, but if you visit the image directly, it's a bunch of code or encryption.
https://www-dev.targetpharmasolutions.com/about/management-team/
Image from the same page: https://www-dev.targetpharmasolutions.com/images/1351/targetpharmaweb-michael-w-fried.jpg
We have older jpgs in the site that we are able to see, but a some point the images started to get messed up by umbraco. We have no idea why this is happening. I have not seen this issue on any of our umbraco sites. This is just another example of the random unexplained issues we face with Umbraco.
That would indicate it is not being recognised by your browser as an image so it opens it as a text file and displays it's binary content rather then opening it as an image. You say other jpg files open ok, is there any commonality in those that open as text?
This issue is currently also present on the Umbraco site:
https://umbraco.com/media/xi2ghy0k/cloud_b.png?width=117&height=70&mode=max
Edit: Could this be related to ImageProcessor, because the direct link to the image does work normally?
https://umbraco.com/media/xi2ghy0k/cloud_b.png
Maybe it's a browser setting, perhaps in combination with whatever content type or encoding is returned in the HTTP response headers? The image looks fine to me in Chrome:
Maybe it could also be related to some browser plugin that's installed.
There are a few jpgs that are ok, but 80% of them are not. This is an issue with Umbraco and how the images were stored or uploaded. I don't really know what the issue is. We have uploaded a few jpg images from another umbraco site where we can see them fine and this site still does something to the images when they are uploaded. These sorts of issues should not be an issue and are the things that make umbraco look like some sort of hobbyist platform than something that should be used in professional settings. I like umbraco, but the strange and unexpected behaviors of simple things needs to stop. It seems that every release is full of land minds. The way we found this error is when we protected the site via IIS. We could not see most of the images on the site. This is a PIA issue that we need to solve because we need to protect the staging sites, but can't because basic functionality is broken.
That's weird. I also tried it in a Chrome incognito window, so without any extensions. And on Firefox it doesn't show the text/gibberish, but it opens a download window instead. So not loading the image inside the browser window there either. I did however test it on a remote machine and no issues there, so it must be related to something on my local machine.
I have a suspicion that one of the releases from Umbraco started doing something to uploaded images because older images that we added to the site in the beginning work fine.
I think this is an issue in the image processor with mode=max as a parameter.
The difference is the mode=max url param.
UPDATE: You need to remove the stupid ga added url params to see this issue so manually copy and paste the URLs into the browser. I haven't had time to look into this but I hope this helps someone work out what's going on?
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