Hi,

Umbraco is a great CMS but it comes with a learning curve. The way I learned Umbraco was installing the CWS Package you can find it at http://umbracocws.codeplex.com/

Also check out these getting started with Umbraco links

http://www.nibble.be/?p=40
http://www.nibble.be/?p=56

Hope it helps you,

Richard

well, at least i can understand his disappointment... i'm struggling if i would go for umbraco again... missing documentation is a pretty big issue...

i just hope i'll finish my project within the next 2 weeks... and then i'll see if there'll be another project which i can do with umbraco...

searching for answers in the forum where you often don't get answers you were looking for is also quite disappointing... i found myself many times searching the forum, google the problem, searching the dlls

a cms without solid documentation won't be successful imho
it will work for small projects where you don't use a lot of umbracos functionality - or at least don't have the need to modify the code...

i'm doing now a private project with umbraco, but a few months ago my company was considering a cms... so we evaluated quite a few and at this point i definitely couldn't recommend umbraco to my company (of course i wish it would be different and umbraco has definitely the capabilities to get there, but it's just not there yet)

just wanted to share my point of view, not sure if anyone cares :-)

see ya in the forum

I agree with Richard, Umbraco is a great CMS and beats some of the big named ones out there which I have used before and which can cost in excess of £30k.

As for the documentation I agree there is not much for Umbraco, but tbh the £30K CMS I have used, their documentation was either flooded with so many words which just puts you off and/or badly written I couldn't believe it.

With the Umbraco functionality there is a huge API Document with all the functions in all the Assemblies to help you create your own .NET controls.

@mudhut

1. Wordpress is not a CMS its a blogging tool.
2. Drupal - I find it more of a framework than a CMS - so many simple CMS plugins missing making you having to write them yourself which is so time consuming.

Tom

[quote=prec_tommy]
1. Wordpress is not a CMS its a blogging tool.
2. Drupal - so many simple CMS plugins missing making you having to write them yourself which is so time consuming.

Tom[/quote]

Ok, wordpress is a blogging tool but it is easy to manage and easy to extend(forums, galleries and more).

Drupal and Joomla worked right out of the box for me (forums, galleries(lots of options with Pro quality), Video, Community(myspace/facebook like), Blogs, store fronts... whatever man. No custom coding other than building templates, themes and navigation.

Joomla and Drupal are easier to manage and extend than Umbraco has been so far. Joomla has some funky ways of doing things but still doable even for an idiot like myself. Call me an idiot. Maybe I am. I just want an easy way to put together a site with easy to install/configure/manage modules/components/extensions/packages or whatever you want to call them. I want an easy to use back-end to manage my content, blogs, galleries, forums, storefronts or whatever.

[b]
I am going to try out the CWS and see if I can move forward from there. Thank you to those that recommended this package. I want Umbraco to work. But don't talk down on me because I honestly found other CMS(like) tools easier to configure and manage. [/b]

I am liking CWS2. Pretty much a lot of the same stuff in runway but with a twist of sexy with good examples.

Ok, so this is getting easier by the moment. Thanks for the links to the help pages and the CWS2 recommendation.

Hi mudhut,

Really appriciate you hanging on. Good luck on the journey and don't be afreaid to ask 'stupid' questions as there are no stupid questions and the community is great and we'll help you as much as possible.

Cheers,
/Dirk

Ok, here's a stupid question. I installed Umbraco 3 last year and decided not to go on because there was no documentation worth looking at. After being told on a freelancing forum that Umbraco had learnt it's lesson I've just spent an hour or two installing Umbraco 4. Now please tell me how the heck people are supposed to make progress when this page: http://umbraco.org/documentation/getting-started is effectively empty. It makes Umbraco a laughing stock and I'm NOT impressed.

Basically if this VERY OBVIOUS shortcoming is there, then what is it going to be like to work with when the chips are down. It doesn't look good at all and should be remedied ASAP.

Once again, looks nice, but doesn't deliver.

Craig

Download the CWS and start working with it. Umbraco is not a CMS for the novice developer, there is a learning curve that comes with the territory. You can watch the podcasts on umbraco TV which are great as well as nibble.be (i believe that is the site). Don't give up yet it is well worth it once you figure it out!

Stick in there, once you suddenly "Get" the relationship between templates, document types and content theres a whole new lease of life, I have hit so many walls with umbraco I have lost count but I have always found the forums a good source of information and they soon get you going again.

@Craig100, @mudhut et al

I would have agreed with you when I first started, but we're basically a .NET shop and I there are precious little good (affordable) .net cms solutions out there.

Stick with it, get to grips with xslt and you'll wonder how you ever tried to squeeze wordpress into being a CMS with ugly 'custom field' hacks. The power and flexibility offered by umbraco is enormous.

As an example, I'm a front-end guy (no .net beyond the extreme basics) and with umbraco I've been able to build a complete property site with listings, search, paging, relationships between data, blog, news etc etc all from a standing start and with no input from our developer. I've also set it up as a backend to a 100% flash site and built a large site for a multinational without any outside assistance - something that just isnt possible with a less flexible cms.

We're now pretty much moving on to umbraco as our main web platform and despite a few niggles haven't looked back.

So, if you have the patience to learn some xslt and read through the books and the forums you may be pleasantly surprised.

Good luck,
Dan

Dan and Doogie, as someone who survived the initial barrier of Umbraco if you should give us three ideas - small, big or tiny - on how your experience could have been better, what would that be? I'd love very specific, call-to-action (did I really use a word like that ;-)) ideas. Free CodeGarden admission on stake if you can make it to CPH in June (or a year of .tv).

Now there's a nice challenge! Like I say, I'm not a developer so this advice would only be useful for front-end types like me and exiles from other CMS systems. Developers checking out Umbraco for the first time may have totally different needs and expectations. In my experience however, initially assessing a CMS and then using it to create sites is something done by people like myself, and not so much by hardened developers.

* An official walk-through for absolute beginners, from the "no nodes" screen to having a couple of pages in a site using xslt and master templates, setting up a document type. Something like this may exist, but if it does it should be more prominent on the site, labelled clearly and made as simple as possible. Lots of great content is out there but even the fact that http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006828407427845235189%3Au1fygyy_s54 exists tells us that it could be more coherant and consistent.

This could be even a reorganisation of the 'books' section. Clear categorisation and a logical order to the documentation would be a tremendous help. Looking at http://umbraco.org/documentation/books, there is good content but it is disparate and randomly ordered. A bit of vetting might be good too, e.g. "The move is taking too long with too many little things to fix. I'm not going to use Umbraco for now..." (http://umbraco.org/documentation/books/converting-existing-site-to-umbraco). This isn't a good look, and is hosted on umbraco.org - the official site is telling me that umbraco is basically too hard!

Umbraco's power is (for me) in its flexibility. A bit of hand-holding at the start will show people this flexibility and enable them to see the potential. Here's a quick and dirty example

Starting out with umbraco
- Creating the "sample data" site
- Document types explained
- Templates explained
- Creating your first umbraco page
- XSLT basics
- Using xslt to create a navigation menu or sitemap
- Macros
- Create a mobile site using "alt templates"
- etc.

Developers
- Extended umbraco with usercontrols
- API docs
- Programmers guide to live editing
- etc.


* An option during install to install with 'sample data' or similar. CWS is fantastic, but has to be found first, and could even be a little too complicated for absolute beginners. The sample data could go hand in hand with a document like that described above, showing how the sample site is built and would wrap things up quite nicely for beginners. A lot

* A simplified install process. "It's not hard", I hear you say! I don't know if this is even possible with a .net site, but there is a lot to be said for the famous wordpress install process.
- Upload files
- Insert database details
- Done
If someone can get a small site with sample data up in a couple of minutes they'll be much more likely to stick around and see what it offers them.

* A working demo on umbraco.org of a fully featured umbraco install showing off umbraco at its best.

(now this is for me, as you're listening!)

* 'Official' multiple node/media pickers! Ultimate picker is great and all, but literally every site I've built has had a use for the lefteris multiple pickers and after the move to v4 I've had to work around their absence.

* Contact forms. These are needed in every site, and a 'form builder' would be a great addition. Doc2Form is fantastic for people building the site, but a lot of our clients want to manage their own forms, creating new etc. and using doc2form would scare the hell out of them. The essence-design form builder is good but feels like a bit of a hack and not user-friendly.

Hope these are "Actionable" and "Value-Added" enough for you (sometimes normal words just aren't good enough eh? )! I could maybe come up with more if you'd like, never been to Copenhagen before ;^)

Keep up the good work,
Dan

Hi,

I often thought of what could be the best way to help newbies getting startet with umbraco because i also had big problems with the documentations as i started.

I compared several CMS websites and a very good example where Dan's suggestions are already implemented is silverstripe.org.

What do you think ?

It would also be cool to have a community list of umbraco sites out there. Show off some site!

[quote=ddrayne]

...it should be more prominent on the site, labelled clearly and made as simple as possible

Clear categorisation and a logical order to the documentation would be a tremendous help. Looking at http://umbraco.org/documentation/books, there is good content but it is disparate and randomly ordered. A bit of vetting might be good too
Keep up the good work,
Dan

[/quote]

I think this is key. There is good content on the site but some of it is for previous versions etc.
I think it would help to divide the books up (v2, v3, v4 and generic maybe?)
Also, I like umbraco.tv but a newbie would probably prefer something like the Foundation videos in a document so they can print/view it and follow along at their own pace.

Another small issue is that with flexibility comes complication - there are many different ways of achieving the same outcome.

A few of us are trying to collate our various docs to put together a beginners guide.

Thanks Dan, your views echo my own when I first found Umbraco.

Jay

[quote=Doogie Talons]Stick in there, once you suddenly "Get" the relationship between templates, document types and content theres a whole new lease of life, I have hit so many walls with umbraco I have lost count but I have always found the forums a good source of information and they soon get you going again.[/quote]

It is coming along, but slowly. I really wish there was some kind of documentation or a case study. Like maybe changing from the original CWS to CWS2 using just the tools provided by the umbraco admin interface.

MudHut I would like to hear your views of CWS2 from a beginners perspective to the Umbraco platform, as CWS is aimed for beginners in mind.

I plan to do a detailed documentation to describe how all the elements in CWS2 work together to build up the site, which I am planning on starting soon. However there is through documentation on how to use CWS2 on the codplex project page which can be found here.

[url]http://umbracocws.codeplex.com[/url]

Thanks,
Warren

@ warren, from a beginners perspective, the doc you released recently for cws2 was very helpful. the thing i struggled with for quite a while was changing the look, which i think is what a lot of beginners (especially those from a design background) want to do: gimme a 'template' i can use to get started and first i'll change it to look like what need, then i'll figure out how it works and try to modify/extend its functionality to suit.

in particular, as striking as the black/pink design of cws2 is, it pretty much says from a half mile away that this is a noober's rip of the great warren/grady starter package. documenting where the particular pink elements are would be nice. as i recall, there's several different shades of pink as well so searching for the logo color just gets you started.

as i said though, the document you recently released was very helpful and maybe just shouting louder that it's available will help more begs.

also, per my other recent post, there are probably a lot of weebs like myself on whom it is just dawning that that funny db thing those ecom sites do has a very practical application for reducing labor/effort via cms and putting routine content management back in the hands of clients, which frees them to have more fun figuring out how things work (and hopefully selling them). so, documenting (or pointing to existing documents) how things work from a low level, conceptual perspective would be very helpful. the vids you did on masterpages were very enlightening to me to grasp how the various pieces are passed around to produce the source html (this is in the masterpage; this is in the homepage; etc). i guess a lot of what i learn is from first trying to grasp the overall fundamental, functional concept, then trying to add in the details later. i guess i'm always trying to learn how to fish.

so (sorry for the windy), things that explain the fundamental concepts are huge. again, as one of the weebs who are flocking to a cms solution, the biggest hole in my skills is programming. anything you do that gives some fundamental explanation of how that piece of the puzzle fits, what types of things require it, what types of programming skills one should put effort into, that at least gets the noobs on the right track.

currently, i'm heading off into xslt at w3schools as i'm clueless there too and it seems a big piece. ultimately i think i'll have to dig into c# but i'll put that off as long as i can. i do have a modicum of db experience and i think once 'connection string' and 'permissions' are on the table umbraco and existing docs cover getting started with that pretty well.

anyway, thanks again so much for all your contributions. i haunt your page waiting for the latest. assuming i manage to get a good enough grasp of umbraco and the other required skills to think i might make some livlihood from it, i will become a paying customer of umbraco tv and you will be able to take your share of credit for that. not to slight any of the other fantastic folks of this community who have also provided invaluable gifts and insights, not to mention umbraco itself. but i think it's pretty well documented that getting started is about the biggest hurdle and cws2 is the path to that, after runway of course.

WOW great reply tonian!

In regards to giving documentation on how to modify the templates what do you mean by that. As going through XHTML and CSS in detail in my opinion is overkill as I have to presume users have a background of these skills.

How do you recommend I shout out louder about CWS2 and its current documentation?

In regards to the low level stuff hopefully this new in detail document will help to explain these principals based on the CWS2 site to help with examples, but yet this has yet to be started as finding time to work on this in free time is very hard.

Do you have any other advice/suggestions for me to take on board.

Thanks for your feedback.
Warren

is working on a reply...