Would I be better-off dropping Umbraco and building my site using ASP.NET MVC hosted on Azure?
Let me start by congratulating everyone here. You've clearly created not just a good product, but also a great community. However, I've been using Umbraco off-and-on for about a year now and I'm still not sure about how it might fit into my future plans. I would appreciate some advice.
I came at Umbraco as an experienced ASP.NET C# programmer who has been writing code since Bill Gates was a lad. I wanted to build a blog site, but didn't want to maintain another ASP.NET website or spend a lot of money getting that profession design studio look. Therefore I paid for the basic Cloud service and also paid a consultancy to do some customising work. Frankly neither have been very successful.
I discovered too late that Cloud service would still require me to maintain the site in order to manually apply the patches each quarter or so. This is my fault as I didn't read the small print very closely. The consultancy customised my site, but didn't tell me that the work would need to be redone after each upgrade. The site is also some way from the neat design studio look that I expected.
It is now clear that my goal of having a cool looking website to which I can post blogs from time to time and get people to comment on them isn't going to be achieved without paying a substantial fee for someone to design / maintain the site in addition to the monthly hosting fee. I suspect that's how most people in this community earn their money, yes? The problem is that I can't justify spending £250 a month on the site which I suspect is the lowest fee anyone half-decent would accept.
My alternative is to invest quite a bit of time learning about Umbraco and even more time doing the maintenance myself before employing a graphic designer. The plus side of that approach is I might then join the rest of the community making money from doing the same for organisations wanting a website. Unfortunately, I have some higher priority work which will occupy me for the next year or so.
I suspect that very few people use Umbraco without spending a lot of time becoming technical experts or employing someone else to do this work. In this respect it seems very different to competitors like Wordpress which appear to have plenty of users with little or no technical skills and no experts employed to help them. Is this a fair assessment?
Question: Would I be better-off dropping Umbraco and building my site using ASP.NET MVC hosted on Azure, or just going for Wordpress? What is the compelling case for someone like me using Umbraco given that I don't want to become an Umbraco developer/consultant.
Personally, I use it as a headless multi-tenant API with separate .NET core + Angular 4 front ends. It handles things that I would otherwise have to code like user authentication and authorization, data validations, audit logs, error logging and the CRUD UI etc.
Umbraco allows me to create users’ experiences for site editors with ease. It can dumb down the complexity of editing a sites content so someone with no experience can maintain their own site. It allows me to develop business rules and logic that will confine, control and secure the site editors usage. It increases the longevity of a design, protects the design against blanket and uncontrolled content updates, requires little maintenance after deployment, and site editors love it.
Umbraco has a learning curve! To create pixel perfect content editing experiences for the end users takes skill and knowledge of Umbraco and there is no way around that. The end results are excellent; if what you are after is a clean experience for site editors and to pass the site editing and content creating to a marketing team or anyone other than IT staff.
For a site that you are going to maintain and create content for yourself I wouldn't use Umbraco, unless you would like to experiment with it :)
First up - I love Umbraco and cannot get my head around using Wordpress at all, but that is just my personal view, and is tightly coupled with the fact you can generate high quality, highly optimised sites using Umbraco that are more secure than Wordpress.
However I totally appreciate Wordpress has it's place and what you describe is probably the right reason to use Wordpress. You describe simply a repository for blog posts, and correct me if I am wrong, but you are probably not overly concerned with page load times / SEO ???
Having said that, an option might be to use a starter kit from https://uskinned.net/ so as to negate the development time, but still use Umbraco - the cost for a kit is far far less than the time / cost to learn and build a site from scratch.
The big thing in having a blog is enjoying the experience when writing a new blog post, and rolling your own MVC I would think might detract from that aspect. Wordpress would provide a good experience, but my money is still on Umbraco in terms of the admin interface.
Thanks for posting. Can absolutely understand where you're coming from, but it still sounds like Umbraco is a good fit for you and it doesn't sound like you're too far off.
While upgrading your Umbraco version is certainly recommended, it isn't something that you have to be doing regularly. Especially on Cloud, any security patches will be applied automatically for you, so the only upgrades you need to do include new features, enhancements and fixes. Often, there may be no need for you to be on the very latest version if your site continues to run smoothly and provides the functionality that you need, and you can be safe in the confidence that any security issues are patched quickly and automatically.
If you do decide to keep your site up to date, it is a very straight forward process on Cloud, needing only a few minutes. But of course this does depend on the customizations that were applied - sometimes these can require a little work after upgrades, but for a straight forward blog/website, you should be able to upgrade regularly without any issues.
As for the design, the suggestions above at looking towards a starter kit could be worth seriously investigating. uSkinned provide some great templates to get you up and running, and there's no reason that you can't then engage with another designer/consultant further down the line to make tweaks and adjustments to really make it your own.
If you were starting today, I would say that Umbraco Cloud hosting with a starter kit is a very compelling reason to use Umbraco in your use case. The hosting is very solid, security patches are automatically applied, and even the most common Umbraco starter kits aren't recognizable compared with Wordpress themes.
As you mentioned, there's a great community around Umbraco, with a lot of excellent freelancers that could help you get up and running again. And of course, you can always ask questions and get advice from the forum. With your background in .NET, you'd likely feel more at home with Umbraco than Wordpress as well.
I would like to raise a question about the automatically applied security patches for the Cloud offering - see Ed's post. Looking at the version history of Umbraco it seems that once there's a major update (7.10 to 7.11) then work on the previous branch stops (7.10.3). Therefore whilst hosting Umbraco as a WebApp on Azure means that operating system patches will continue to be applied by Microsoft, Umbraco related security patches will not be applied after a major update. Is my understanding correct? If so, then deciding to keep at a given Umbraco version for a year or so cannot be recommended, yes?
The main thing holding me back from embracing Umbraco is the on-going maintenance costs. It wouldn't be too bad if each year I had rebuild the site from scratch using the latest version of Umbraco and the latest theme version, but there doesn't seem to be a clean separation separation between pure content data (like a blog post) and data needed to support its presentation or parts of the CMS. If that existed then I could backup my pure content data, rebuild the website with the new theme/Umbraco updates and then restore my pure content data. This is like the polymorphism you get with an app displaying a given dataset as a table or a pie chart - the data stays the same it’s just the representation that changes. In this case the website content would remain the same, but its presentation would change over the years. Is that possible?
In terms of the security patches, HQ would be in a better place to confirm, but in the past it had depended on the severity as to how far back patches have been applied. For example, 7.10.4, 7.9.6 and 7.8.3 were all released on the same day with bug fixes that applied across them, so even if you were on 7.8, you were still receiving some fixes (not automatically but it makes the point of security patches going backwards where it makes sense).
If you are starting from scratch, I would jump right to 8.4. Look at the Articulate Package (https://our.umbraco.com/packages/starter-kits/articulate/), it will give you a good jump start on your blog, and probably will get you quite a ways down the learning path if you understand asp.net developer familiar with Razor markup.
The community here is very helpful, and having used Articulate on another project quite sometime ago I think you will find it likely has most of what you are looking for from a functionality perspective.
Would I be better-off dropping Umbraco and building my site using ASP.NET MVC hosted on Azure?
Let me start by congratulating everyone here. You've clearly created not just a good product, but also a great community. However, I've been using Umbraco off-and-on for about a year now and I'm still not sure about how it might fit into my future plans. I would appreciate some advice.
I came at Umbraco as an experienced ASP.NET C# programmer who has been writing code since Bill Gates was a lad. I wanted to build a blog site, but didn't want to maintain another ASP.NET website or spend a lot of money getting that profession design studio look. Therefore I paid for the basic Cloud service and also paid a consultancy to do some customising work. Frankly neither have been very successful.
I discovered too late that Cloud service would still require me to maintain the site in order to manually apply the patches each quarter or so. This is my fault as I didn't read the small print very closely. The consultancy customised my site, but didn't tell me that the work would need to be redone after each upgrade. The site is also some way from the neat design studio look that I expected.
It is now clear that my goal of having a cool looking website to which I can post blogs from time to time and get people to comment on them isn't going to be achieved without paying a substantial fee for someone to design / maintain the site in addition to the monthly hosting fee. I suspect that's how most people in this community earn their money, yes? The problem is that I can't justify spending £250 a month on the site which I suspect is the lowest fee anyone half-decent would accept.
My alternative is to invest quite a bit of time learning about Umbraco and even more time doing the maintenance myself before employing a graphic designer. The plus side of that approach is I might then join the rest of the community making money from doing the same for organisations wanting a website. Unfortunately, I have some higher priority work which will occupy me for the next year or so.
I suspect that very few people use Umbraco without spending a lot of time becoming technical experts or employing someone else to do this work. In this respect it seems very different to competitors like Wordpress which appear to have plenty of users with little or no technical skills and no experts employed to help them. Is this a fair assessment?
Question: Would I be better-off dropping Umbraco and building my site using ASP.NET MVC hosted on Azure, or just going for Wordpress? What is the compelling case for someone like me using Umbraco given that I don't want to become an Umbraco developer/consultant.
Personally, I use it as a headless multi-tenant API with separate .NET core + Angular 4 front ends. It handles things that I would otherwise have to code like user authentication and authorization, data validations, audit logs, error logging and the CRUD UI etc.
Umbraco allows me to create users’ experiences for site editors with ease. It can dumb down the complexity of editing a sites content so someone with no experience can maintain their own site. It allows me to develop business rules and logic that will confine, control and secure the site editors usage. It increases the longevity of a design, protects the design against blanket and uncontrolled content updates, requires little maintenance after deployment, and site editors love it.
Umbraco has a learning curve! To create pixel perfect content editing experiences for the end users takes skill and knowledge of Umbraco and there is no way around that. The end results are excellent; if what you are after is a clean experience for site editors and to pass the site editing and content creating to a marketing team or anyone other than IT staff.
For a site that you are going to maintain and create content for yourself I wouldn't use Umbraco, unless you would like to experiment with it :)
Hey Will
First up - I love Umbraco and cannot get my head around using Wordpress at all, but that is just my personal view, and is tightly coupled with the fact you can generate high quality, highly optimised sites using Umbraco that are more secure than Wordpress.
However I totally appreciate Wordpress has it's place and what you describe is probably the right reason to use Wordpress. You describe simply a repository for blog posts, and correct me if I am wrong, but you are probably not overly concerned with page load times / SEO ???
Having said that, an option might be to use a starter kit from https://uskinned.net/ so as to negate the development time, but still use Umbraco - the cost for a kit is far far less than the time / cost to learn and build a site from scratch.
The big thing in having a blog is enjoying the experience when writing a new blog post, and rolling your own MVC I would think might detract from that aspect. Wordpress would provide a good experience, but my money is still on Umbraco in terms of the admin interface.
Good luck with deciding the best way forward.
Nigel
Hi Will,
Thanks for posting. Can absolutely understand where you're coming from, but it still sounds like Umbraco is a good fit for you and it doesn't sound like you're too far off.
While upgrading your Umbraco version is certainly recommended, it isn't something that you have to be doing regularly. Especially on Cloud, any security patches will be applied automatically for you, so the only upgrades you need to do include new features, enhancements and fixes. Often, there may be no need for you to be on the very latest version if your site continues to run smoothly and provides the functionality that you need, and you can be safe in the confidence that any security issues are patched quickly and automatically.
If you do decide to keep your site up to date, it is a very straight forward process on Cloud, needing only a few minutes. But of course this does depend on the customizations that were applied - sometimes these can require a little work after upgrades, but for a straight forward blog/website, you should be able to upgrade regularly without any issues.
As for the design, the suggestions above at looking towards a starter kit could be worth seriously investigating. uSkinned provide some great templates to get you up and running, and there's no reason that you can't then engage with another designer/consultant further down the line to make tweaks and adjustments to really make it your own.
If you were starting today, I would say that Umbraco Cloud hosting with a starter kit is a very compelling reason to use Umbraco in your use case. The hosting is very solid, security patches are automatically applied, and even the most common Umbraco starter kits aren't recognizable compared with Wordpress themes.
As you mentioned, there's a great community around Umbraco, with a lot of excellent freelancers that could help you get up and running again. And of course, you can always ask questions and get advice from the forum. With your background in .NET, you'd likely feel more at home with Umbraco than Wordpress as well.
Hope this helps. Wish you luck!
Ed
Thanks for the various responses.
I would like to raise a question about the automatically applied security patches for the Cloud offering - see Ed's post. Looking at the version history of Umbraco it seems that once there's a major update (7.10 to 7.11) then work on the previous branch stops (7.10.3). Therefore whilst hosting Umbraco as a WebApp on Azure means that operating system patches will continue to be applied by Microsoft, Umbraco related security patches will not be applied after a major update. Is my understanding correct? If so, then deciding to keep at a given Umbraco version for a year or so cannot be recommended, yes?
The main thing holding me back from embracing Umbraco is the on-going maintenance costs. It wouldn't be too bad if each year I had rebuild the site from scratch using the latest version of Umbraco and the latest theme version, but there doesn't seem to be a clean separation separation between pure content data (like a blog post) and data needed to support its presentation or parts of the CMS. If that existed then I could backup my pure content data, rebuild the website with the new theme/Umbraco updates and then restore my pure content data. This is like the polymorphism you get with an app displaying a given dataset as a table or a pie chart - the data stays the same it’s just the representation that changes. In this case the website content would remain the same, but its presentation would change over the years. Is that possible?
Hi Will,
In terms of the security patches, HQ would be in a better place to confirm, but in the past it had depended on the severity as to how far back patches have been applied. For example, 7.10.4, 7.9.6 and 7.8.3 were all released on the same day with bug fixes that applied across them, so even if you were on 7.8, you were still receiving some fixes (not automatically but it makes the point of security patches going backwards where it makes sense).
Ed
Hi Will,
If you are starting from scratch, I would jump right to 8.4. Look at the Articulate Package (https://our.umbraco.com/packages/starter-kits/articulate/), it will give you a good jump start on your blog, and probably will get you quite a ways down the learning path if you understand asp.net developer familiar with Razor markup.
The community here is very helpful, and having used Articulate on another project quite sometime ago I think you will find it likely has most of what you are looking for from a functionality perspective.
John
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