Videos
Master the Service APIs
By Morten Christensen / Umbraco HQ
Since version 6 of Umbraco the Core has gotten a bunch of new management services, which are used by the backoffice to create content types, content, media, members and more or less everything else you can do from the backoffice. These services are publicly available, so you can utilize them when building websites to enrich the editor experience through specialized property editors, dashboards or to create content, media and members through forms on your website.
In this session we will dive into the most used services from a website implementators perspective using concrete examples and briefly walk through which other services might be usable in other scenarios such as package creation.
Since version 6 of Umbraco the Core has gotten a bunch of new management services, which are used by the backoffice to create content types, content, media, members and more or less everything else you can do from the backoffice. These services are publicly available, so you can utilize them when building websites to enrich the editor experience through specialized property editors, dashboards or to create content, media and members through forms on your website.
In this session we will dive into the most used services from a website implementators perspective using concrete examples and briefly walk through which other services might be usable in other scenarios such as package creation.
Our First Umbraco 7 Build
A detailed walkthrough of our experience building our new corporate website on Umbraco 7
The Dark side of The Moon
By Marc Stöcker / Mindrevolution
Marc's session will focus on the user experience within the back office content management. While we invest a lot of time and money in thought through and well engineered frontends, the experience for the editorial team often comes short. This session is not primarily about tools, packages or plugins, though he will show, discuss and recommend some in the course of it. Over all Marc's session is about the process of being aware, caring about, planning and crafting a backend that is easy to use and assists the productivity of authors, content editors, digital marketers and content strategists alike.
Marc's session will focus on the user experience within the back office content management. While we invest a lot of time and money in thought through and well engineered frontends, the experience for the editorial team often comes short. This session is not primarily about tools, packages or plugins, though he will show, discuss and recommend some in the course of it. Over all Marc's session is about the process of being aware, caring about, planning and crafting a backend that is easy to use and assists the productivity of authors, content editors, digital marketers and content strategists alike.
Why CMS is a core part of the Future of Retail
By Martin Frederiksen / Klean
Technology and changes in consumer behavior is changing retail rapidly and forever. The good old days will return in new and unexpected ways, backed by technology. Content management is a core part of the new user experience, and new websites and e-commerce projects must be built to support content marketing and digital integration in stores.
Simplicity is by the way a core part of this. I’ll present a load of slides with examples of the modern retail experience backed by examples of implementation, where and why Umbraco is a strategic fit and how it can be used to connect to new devices and screens apart from the desktop browser or smartphone.
Technology and changes in consumer behavior is changing retail rapidly and forever. The good old days will return in new and unexpected ways, backed by technology. Content management is a core part of the new user experience, and new websites and e-commerce projects must be built to support content marketing and digital integration in stores.
Simplicity is by the way a core part of this. I’ll present a load of slides with examples of the modern retail experience backed by examples of implementation, where and why Umbraco is a strategic fit and how it can be used to connect to new devices and screens apart from the desktop browser or smartphone.
MVC Purée
Andy Butland / Zone
Given my background in the development of both Umbraco CMS and custom web applications using ASP.Net MVC, when MVC rendering support was featured in V4.10, it was the obvious way to go for future projects.
Working at gold partner Zone in London, we've built a number of sites using Umbraco and MVC. We've found that there's actually a number of different ways to do "MVC with Umbraco": the perhaps traditional Umbraco way with a fair bit of logic and data access in the templates or views, using surface controllers and child actions and/or using route hijacking. We've used a number of these approaches and found costs and benefits of each - which I think would make an interesting session.
Currently the model I use - and would focus on in the talk - is to go a more purist MVC approach, using dependency injection, thin controllers with route hijacking, mapping of Umbraco content to custom view models and use of strongly typed views. Tieing all this together is a mapping package (http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/umbraco-mapper) that we've recently built, released and discussed on auHangout. We also look to use unit testing where possible.
In summary, the proposed discussion would be on ways to use MVC in Umbraco, and would cover:
quick primer on ASP.Net MVC and best practices in this area
approaches to MVC in Umbraco
surface controllers
route hijacking
custom view models and strongly typed views
mapping from Umbraco and other content to these view models
unit testing challenges and approaches
Q & A (no doubt there's as much to learn in this area as to impart!)
Given my background in the development of both Umbraco CMS and custom web applications using ASP.Net MVC, when MVC rendering support was featured in V4.10, it was the obvious way to go for future projects.
Working at gold partner Zone in London, we've built a number of sites using Umbraco and MVC. We've found that there's actually a number of different ways to do "MVC with Umbraco": the perhaps traditional Umbraco way with a fair bit of logic and data access in the templates or views, using surface controllers and child actions and/or using route hijacking. We've used a number of these approaches and found costs and benefits of each - which I think would make an interesting session.
Currently the model I use - and would focus on in the talk - is to go a more purist MVC approach, using dependency injection, thin controllers with route hijacking, mapping of Umbraco content to custom view models and use of strongly typed views. Tieing all this together is a mapping package (http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/umbraco-mapper) that we've recently built, released and discussed on auHangout. We also look to use unit testing where possible.
In summary, the proposed discussion would be on ways to use MVC in Umbraco, and would cover:
quick primer on ASP.Net MVC and best practices in this area
approaches to MVC in Umbraco
surface controllers
route hijacking
custom view models and strongly typed views
mapping from Umbraco and other content to these view models
unit testing challenges and approaches
Q & A (no doubt there's as much to learn in this area as to impart!)
Planning an Umbraco Build
Pete Duncanson
No code, no Visual Studio session, no developer skill required to attend and hear some good advice on planning an Umbraco build from the trenches.
We've been working hard on getting our setup right for building great websites well. We've picked up some tips and tricks along the way we'd like to share. These cover specing out the site in Trello cards (which fields to add to the doctype, what the template should do, what C# do we need), creating and using a base build, which fields to add as default and how to go about getting the best site you can in the quickest time.
Keeping three developers and a design busy takes some planning so we try to make it so everyone has a job they can take on at any time and ensure no one drops the ball.
Follow that up with all those little jobs that always get over looked (the favicon, the robots.txt, the compression of assets, the tracking code, etc.) these all need to be planned for and done by someone. Once again Trello comes to the rescue and we will show you some tricks on how to get it singing.
No code, no Visual Studio session, no developer skill required to attend and hear some good advice on planning an Umbraco build from the trenches.
We've been working hard on getting our setup right for building great websites well. We've picked up some tips and tricks along the way we'd like to share. These cover specing out the site in Trello cards (which fields to add to the doctype, what the template should do, what C# do we need), creating and using a base build, which fields to add as default and how to go about getting the best site you can in the quickest time.
Keeping three developers and a design busy takes some planning so we try to make it so everyone has a job they can take on at any time and ensure no one drops the ball.
Follow that up with all those little jobs that always get over looked (the favicon, the robots.txt, the compression of assets, the tracking code, etc.) these all need to be planned for and done by someone. Once again Trello comes to the rescue and we will show you some tricks on how to get it singing.
Merchello: Open Source eCommerce for Umbraco 7
After years of working with the power and flexibility of Umbraco CMS, we saw the need for a stable, high performance eCommerce platform that could be driven by community contribution. We wanted to design something that can leverage the advanced power of Umbraco itself, yet easy enough in design and coding for a community of developers and designers to continue improving it.
Inspired by Shopify, AbleCommerce, Magento and others, Merchello brings a fast and reliable online store capability to the latest version of Umbraco CMS.
In this talk we will demonstrate Merchello and talk about how you can use it now for your eCommerce projects. In addition, we will talk about how it was built, our roadmap for the future, and how you can contribute to the project.
Inspired by Shopify, AbleCommerce, Magento and others, Merchello brings a fast and reliable online store capability to the latest version of Umbraco CMS.
In this talk we will demonstrate Merchello and talk about how you can use it now for your eCommerce projects. In addition, we will talk about how it was built, our roadmap for the future, and how you can contribute to the project.
Core Internals for Website Development
Stéphane Gay
The Session
Spring '14: Umbraco is Belle and beautiful, can smell it in the air, flowers everywhere and crazy new packages that just raise content creation and editing to new heights. Yet down under, in the dirty and smelly machine room, obstinate dwarfs have also been at work all winter to architect, refactor, improve and extend the engine that powers it all.
Not everything has surfaced, though. Maybe because it just works, or due to a lack of documentation, or because it's all internal at the moment and you don't even know it's there: yep, that complex work-around you're working on might very well almost exist already in Core!
This session focuses on some of the new or modified components of Core that impact the front-end part of a website. Starting from real-life challenges such as "how can I customize my urls", it details how Core's internals work, and the various solutions it can propose.
Come hear about PublishedContentRequest, content finders and "not found" handlers, IPublishedContent and the content cache, property value converters, ways to navigate the content tree and the status of strongly-typed content, MVC views models and more. Learn how it works and become more efficient at using it!
The Session
Spring '14: Umbraco is Belle and beautiful, can smell it in the air, flowers everywhere and crazy new packages that just raise content creation and editing to new heights. Yet down under, in the dirty and smelly machine room, obstinate dwarfs have also been at work all winter to architect, refactor, improve and extend the engine that powers it all.
Not everything has surfaced, though. Maybe because it just works, or due to a lack of documentation, or because it's all internal at the moment and you don't even know it's there: yep, that complex work-around you're working on might very well almost exist already in Core!
This session focuses on some of the new or modified components of Core that impact the front-end part of a website. Starting from real-life challenges such as "how can I customize my urls", it details how Core's internals work, and the various solutions it can propose.
Come hear about PublishedContentRequest, content finders and "not found" handlers, IPublishedContent and the content cache, property value converters, ways to navigate the content tree and the status of strongly-typed content, MVC views models and more. Learn how it works and become more efficient at using it!
The future of ASP.NET web tooling
Mads Kristensen // Microsoft
With all the advances in web technologies over the past years, it seems that web development has become more complex and fragmented than ever before. Join Mads as he discusses how the ASP.NET and Web Tools Team will tackle this challenge today and in the future.
With all the advances in web technologies over the past years, it seems that web development has become more complex and fragmented than ever before. Join Mads as he discusses how the ASP.NET and Web Tools Team will tackle this challenge today and in the future.
Supercharge your Umbraco
Chris Gaskell // Detangled Digital
So you want to scale your beautiful Umbraco install? The site you've built has become so popular that you need to handle 500+ concurrent users. You don't want to increase the number of Umbraco servers and what you implement has to be affordable.
Well how about boosting performance? We'll have a look through the different options available from within Umbraco and .NET such as macro caching, output caching,donut caching and other performance options. We'll see how you can easily implement these and how you can manage them.
But what when those options just aren’t enough? Or you're scaling an application which you can’t alter?
Rolling in Varnish. Varnish is a reverse HTTP proxy and sits between the user and your application server. Varnish is REALLY FAST and it'll help you scale hugely. It'll also give you some redundancy. You'll have more control, have the ability to develop more complexity and it's cost effective. We'll see that running Umbraco on a modest application server with Varnish will allow you to scale to the demands of the web today.
So you want to scale your beautiful Umbraco install? The site you've built has become so popular that you need to handle 500+ concurrent users. You don't want to increase the number of Umbraco servers and what you implement has to be affordable.
Well how about boosting performance? We'll have a look through the different options available from within Umbraco and .NET such as macro caching, output caching,donut caching and other performance options. We'll see how you can easily implement these and how you can manage them.
But what when those options just aren’t enough? Or you're scaling an application which you can’t alter?
Rolling in Varnish. Varnish is a reverse HTTP proxy and sits between the user and your application server. Varnish is REALLY FAST and it'll help you scale hugely. It'll also give you some redundancy. You'll have more control, have the ability to develop more complexity and it's cost effective. We'll see that running Umbraco on a modest application server with Varnish will allow you to scale to the demands of the web today.
The sky is the limit
Antoine Giraud and Leandro Benitez // Lecoati
During our session we are going to present a set of Umbraco 7 packages we have created to revolutionize the content creation and editing experience. We have imagined and developed a new way to manage and create amazing websites in a few short steps with Umbraco. Umbraco is already the best and friendliest CMS in the market; we have hand-picked the best ingredients and packaged them together, offering on the fly, à la carte, content creation. We will showcase how easily this kit allows a website’s content to be created and customized in just a few clicks, and how dynamic the resulting content can be, pushing the limits of imagination. We will discuss how we carried out this project and how these tools fit like a glove with Umbraco. We will also discuss what we are expecting from the project and which are the commercial values it adds to Umbraco.
During our session we are going to present a set of Umbraco 7 packages we have created to revolutionize the content creation and editing experience. We have imagined and developed a new way to manage and create amazing websites in a few short steps with Umbraco. Umbraco is already the best and friendliest CMS in the market; we have hand-picked the best ingredients and packaged them together, offering on the fly, à la carte, content creation. We will showcase how easily this kit allows a website’s content to be created and customized in just a few clicks, and how dynamic the resulting content can be, pushing the limits of imagination. We will discuss how we carried out this project and how these tools fit like a glove with Umbraco. We will also discuss what we are expecting from the project and which are the commercial values it adds to Umbraco.
Going native with Umbraco and Phonegap
Theo Paraskevopoulos / Grow Create
Mobile-optimized web design does not solve all problems, and sometimes a native app is the way to go. The good news is that apps can be created with standard web development tools and Umbraco.
In this session, I will take a responsive Umbraco 7 website, prep it up and convert it to a native app with Phonegap. Attendees can then install it on their Android and iOS devices, in real time.
In the process, I will introduce Phonegap and code up a REST API for Umbraco content and navigation. I will talk about why I avoid jQuery Mobile, and use alternatives which are flexible as well as easy-to-use. Finally, I will touch on the notoriously fussy processes associated with testing, debugging and releasing to App Stores.
The subject matter is not exactly revolutionary, but things are moving fast. My approach builds on personal experience, based on very recent projects and I am sure the community will find useful.
Mobile-optimized web design does not solve all problems, and sometimes a native app is the way to go. The good news is that apps can be created with standard web development tools and Umbraco.
In this session, I will take a responsive Umbraco 7 website, prep it up and convert it to a native app with Phonegap. Attendees can then install it on their Android and iOS devices, in real time.
In the process, I will introduce Phonegap and code up a REST API for Umbraco content and navigation. I will talk about why I avoid jQuery Mobile, and use alternatives which are flexible as well as easy-to-use. Finally, I will touch on the notoriously fussy processes associated with testing, debugging and releasing to App Stores.
The subject matter is not exactly revolutionary, but things are moving fast. My approach builds on personal experience, based on very recent projects and I am sure the community will find useful.
The Secret to Getting Paid for Your Open Source Project
Anne-Marie Faiola // Bramble Barry Making Supplies
What was your most recent brilliant idea? Have you fantasized about having the time and the freedom to build that project you've been talking about? Perhaps it's a web app, Umbraco package, or beer drinking game that everyone's going to love. What is the one thing you wish you could do? There just may be a way to keep your doors open for business and to work on that pet project.
With a non-developer, non-designer perspective, Anne-Marie, who is soon to be an Umbraco client, will be speaking about her experience as an open source project sponsor. Even better, the project is scheduled for completion later this year, so she's right in the middle of it. She'll give you the skinny on what convinced her that Open Source was worth the investment, steps she took to mitigate risk and how she keeps tabs on progress.
The success of Umbraco is all about you, the community - and your drive to take open source projects to the next level. Use this time to find answers to your nagging questions, and consider what possibilities await you.
What was your most recent brilliant idea? Have you fantasized about having the time and the freedom to build that project you've been talking about? Perhaps it's a web app, Umbraco package, or beer drinking game that everyone's going to love. What is the one thing you wish you could do? There just may be a way to keep your doors open for business and to work on that pet project.
With a non-developer, non-designer perspective, Anne-Marie, who is soon to be an Umbraco client, will be speaking about her experience as an open source project sponsor. Even better, the project is scheduled for completion later this year, so she's right in the middle of it. She'll give you the skinny on what convinced her that Open Source was worth the investment, steps she took to mitigate risk and how she keeps tabs on progress.
The success of Umbraco is all about you, the community - and your drive to take open source projects to the next level. Use this time to find answers to your nagging questions, and consider what possibilities await you.
Thinking in Seven
Per Ploug Krogslund and Niels Hartvig // Umbraco A/S
Umbraco 7 is all the rage, but it's more than just a new pretty face. With 7 it's easier than ever to not only tailor the website implementation, but also the editing experience for editors.
Get a fast paced introduction to how the new User Experience is thought and designed and how you can adopt the patterns in your solutions to give your users the optimal experience. Per and Niels will guide you through both theory and practice and leave you with knowledge and tools on how to get the most out of 7.
Umbraco 7 is all the rage, but it's more than just a new pretty face. With 7 it's easier than ever to not only tailor the website implementation, but also the editing experience for editors.
Get a fast paced introduction to how the new User Experience is thought and designed and how you can adopt the patterns in your solutions to give your users the optimal experience. Per and Niels will guide you through both theory and practice and leave you with knowledge and tools on how to get the most out of 7.
Embrace, Extend & Enrich: The Analytics for Umbraco story
Warren Buckley // Cogworks
During this session Warren will demonstrate how he developed the recent ‘Analytics for Umbraco’ package and how writing custom applications for your clients can make them happy content editors, which in turn makes us a happy dev's!
He will take you through the various components contained in the package and discuss the challenges he faced and mistakes he made on his V7 journey so far. Hopefully helping you to avoid making the same mistakes yourself!
The session will provide a nice balance between technical implementation & actual use-case scenarios as Warren breaks apart the Analytics package and demonstrates how can write your own property editors & custom sections in V7, to deliver great business value to your own clients.
During this session Warren will demonstrate how he developed the recent ‘Analytics for Umbraco’ package and how writing custom applications for your clients can make them happy content editors, which in turn makes us a happy dev's!
He will take you through the various components contained in the package and discuss the challenges he faced and mistakes he made on his V7 journey so far. Hopefully helping you to avoid making the same mistakes yourself!
The session will provide a nice balance between technical implementation & actual use-case scenarios as Warren breaks apart the Analytics package and demonstrates how can write your own property editors & custom sections in V7, to deliver great business value to your own clients.
User Friendly Web Apps for the Clueless, the Creative, and the Technical
Janae Cram and Erica Quessenberry // Mindfly
Web applications come in many forms and sizes, and they all focus on a specific audience. Using Merchello as a case study, we want to take you through our process of designing on top of Umbraco's back office - from defining user personas all the way through wire-framing, building out the design & interface, and finally discovering and iterating changes based on user feedback after release. Our adventures in Merchello will give you tools and processes you can use to give your next app's users an exceptional experience.
Web applications come in many forms and sizes, and they all focus on a specific audience. Using Merchello as a case study, we want to take you through our process of designing on top of Umbraco's back office - from defining user personas all the way through wire-framing, building out the design & interface, and finally discovering and iterating changes based on user feedback after release. Our adventures in Merchello will give you tools and processes you can use to give your next app's users an exceptional experience.
40+ different high traffic sites from a single Umbraco installation
Alex Bailes and Jiri Banas / Countrywide
This session is of interest to anyone who is thinking of scaling up their Umbraco offerings using the concepts of shared and bespoke content on a single Umbraco installation.
We will explore the mysteries of load balancing high traffic Umbraco websites, as well as moving changes across development, staging and production environments, using Umbraco Courier and out of the box components.
We will share with you the various implementation challenges we have faced when migrating from our in house build .NET platform onto CMS, and describe how we effectively created a scalable Umbraco powered web front end communicating with a large back end application server.
Examples of our Umbraco-powered sites: http://www.hamptons.co.uk and http://www.sothebysrealty.co.uk
This session is of interest to anyone who is thinking of scaling up their Umbraco offerings using the concepts of shared and bespoke content on a single Umbraco installation.
We will explore the mysteries of load balancing high traffic Umbraco websites, as well as moving changes across development, staging and production environments, using Umbraco Courier and out of the box components.
We will share with you the various implementation challenges we have faced when migrating from our in house build .NET platform onto CMS, and describe how we effectively created a scalable Umbraco powered web front end communicating with a large back end application server.
Examples of our Umbraco-powered sites: http://www.hamptons.co.uk and http://www.sothebysrealty.co.uk