After developing in Umbraco 6 for the past few years, I've decided to move on to Umbraco 7 (and, unless there's an extreme change in direction I can't cope with, eventually Umbraco 8) but it seems to be a fairly steep learning curve for me.
To get an example of an Umbraco 7 setup, I installed a new site and selected the Umbraco Sample Site offered at the end of the setup process, then started looking around. My question: how good is this sample site as an example of "ideal" Umbraco 7 coding? For example, the Master.cshtml file seems to have the navigation Partial directed to a file by hard-coding the file path:
-- something I would never do with an Umbraco 6 setup. My experience has always been to make things as dynamic and as changeable from the Umbraco interface as possible, avoiding hard-coding at every opportunity. Is this direct referencing of partials accepted practice?
Are there things in this Umbraco-provided example I need to change, ignore, etc.? Or can I use this as a guide for "best practices"?
You may be interested in having a look at our Umbraco 7 themes available at uSkinned. Our themes are packed full of features which we believe every website should have out-of-the-box. Our themes are aimed at giving you a huge head start in your Umbraco development. More often than not you dont even need to make your own customisations. If you do want to delve into the code you are free to do so as we do not lock anything down. If you have any questions you can get in touch via our contact page.
Our Source theme is intended as a starting point for any Umbraco website. We use this ourselves for our own custom client projects. The design is more of a wireframe designed to give you a starting point for your own custom site designs. The features within the CMS allow you to add from a huge library of pre-built components. We have included a blog, forms, SEO optimisations and a wealth of other features that means you dont need to develop these yourself and can concentrate your time on your own customisations.
With regards to an ideal setup, that is the beauty of the Umbraco CMS it allows you to craft the CMS to your own requirements, there is no recommended approach or structure however our starter kits have been crafted and changed over the last 4 years based on user feedback with the result being a very intuitive editor experience.
As others have mentioned, there isn't really a "correct" way to build Umbraco 7 sites.
However, I will say that there is nothing wrong with using a partial view, especially for a global component (such as a top navigation) that appears in all pages.
This part of the page does not need to be dynamic, so why make the path dynamic? The contents of the top navigation can still contain dynamic things, but the fact that there is a top navigation at all doesn't need to be dynamic.
How "correct" is the Umbraco Sample Site provided with the 7.12.4 install?
After developing in Umbraco 6 for the past few years, I've decided to move on to Umbraco 7 (and, unless there's an extreme change in direction I can't cope with, eventually Umbraco 8) but it seems to be a fairly steep learning curve for me.
To get an example of an Umbraco 7 setup, I installed a new site and selected the Umbraco Sample Site offered at the end of the setup process, then started looking around. My question: how good is this sample site as an example of "ideal" Umbraco 7 coding? For example, the Master.cshtml file seems to have the navigation Partial directed to a file by hard-coding the file path:
-- something I would never do with an Umbraco 6 setup. My experience has always been to make things as dynamic and as changeable from the Umbraco interface as possible, avoiding hard-coding at every opportunity. Is this direct referencing of partials accepted practice?
Are there things in this Umbraco-provided example I need to change, ignore, etc.? Or can I use this as a guide for "best practices"?
Hi Mizzle,
You may be interested in having a look at our Umbraco 7 themes available at uSkinned. Our themes are packed full of features which we believe every website should have out-of-the-box. Our themes are aimed at giving you a huge head start in your Umbraco development. More often than not you dont even need to make your own customisations. If you do want to delve into the code you are free to do so as we do not lock anything down. If you have any questions you can get in touch via our contact page.
Cheers,
Marc
I can't use themes. I only want to know what an ideal Umbraco setup looks like.
Hi Mizzle,
Our Source theme is intended as a starting point for any Umbraco website. We use this ourselves for our own custom client projects. The design is more of a wireframe designed to give you a starting point for your own custom site designs. The features within the CMS allow you to add from a huge library of pre-built components. We have included a blog, forms, SEO optimisations and a wealth of other features that means you dont need to develop these yourself and can concentrate your time on your own customisations.
With regards to an ideal setup, that is the beauty of the Umbraco CMS it allows you to craft the CMS to your own requirements, there is no recommended approach or structure however our starter kits have been crafted and changed over the last 4 years based on user feedback with the result being a very intuitive editor experience.
Cheers,
Marc
As others have mentioned, there isn't really a "correct" way to build Umbraco 7 sites.
However, I will say that there is nothing wrong with using a partial view, especially for a global component (such as a top navigation) that appears in all pages.
This part of the page does not need to be dynamic, so why make the path dynamic? The contents of the top navigation can still contain dynamic things, but the fact that there is a top navigation at all doesn't need to be dynamic.
Everybody has their own idea of "best practices". I wrote an article a few years ago for mine: https://24days.in/umbraco-cms/2015/umbraco-zeitgeist/
Since things are so flexible in Umbraco, I also included some anti-patterns in that article so you have an idea of some things you may want to avoid.
Bit old, but it was written for Umbraco 7 and most of it still applies today.
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