Adding content to umbraco?

Question

I recently made the decision to develop our new company website (http://www.idealcode.net:8005/AboutUs.aspx) with Umbraco. I hired an Umbraco developer and we started work.

Please don't flame me or anything but I'm starting to worry about my decision.

The main reason why is because I seriously cannot find anything that explains in simple terms the workflow for creating a new page. As a web developer, it seems as much work to create a page in Umbraco than creating one outside of a CMS.

The workflow as we have it is:

1. Create a master page (probably not required for every page, but in practice seems to be on almost every page)
2. Create a document type with the PRECISE content areas that will be on the page
3. I guess at this point our end users can actually create a page...

We spent about 10 hours implementing the blog module and it STILL does not work and the dev needs to customize the template.

As a web developer, I honestly wonder how this is going to save us time? I'm not trying to diss Umbraco--I'm just worried about explaining this to my superiors. I could have created a site with some dynamic areas and blog in ASP.NET MVC in the roughly 20 hours we've spent on this so far...

Answer 1

The best way to get up to speed quickly on Umbraco is to look at the screencasts made from Umbraco corporate:

http://umbraco.tv/products/umbracotv

After that, the Umbraco community is quite good at answering questions and helping out:

http://our.umbraco.org/

As far as your specific question:

I could be wrong, but I think the thing that you aren't leveraging is inheritance. This makes things easier in Umbraco.

First, DocumentTypes can have parents and they inherit the data fields from those parents. For example, a Content Page DocumentType could have the meta information, main content area, and intro text.

Many pages within your site will likely go no further than that. Basically a rich text editor page (think "About Us")

Then when you add the News Item DocumentType, it can inherit all of those fields from Content Page and simply add a Date and Image field (as an example).

DocumentTypes can have many templates available to them. So if the data doesn't change, but the markup (design) does then you can set a new template in the Properties tab.

Templates can have parents as well. So you can build them up like this:

Main Template

|____One Column Layout

     |____Generic Content Page

     |____News Area

|____Two Column Layout

     |____Product Compare

This works just like master pages in ASP.NET.

So this is pretty long winded. Maybe I'll think about a blog post. Does this help at all?

Answer 2

I second your thought, but consider following scenarios: Umbraco or any CMS is no ideal solution, if: 1) The complete site will end up having only 20 pages 2) There is only a single user / editor of the site 3) The content is not much dynamic and once created will not change over couple of years 4) The site have only maximum 10 end users 5) The data is not pulled from any external source or/and all are static pages

Where as a CMS / Umbraco is solution for: 1) The is dynamic and still growing after first 1000 pages 2) The client have multiple editors and want to maintain history of publications 3) The content is pulled from various external sources 4) Site end users/contributors are 100+ and still growing 5) Last but not least, the site have 1000+++ visitors daily

I can go on and list all the possibilities of having CMS at the first place, but you need to decide and analyse your own requirements. There is no point in deploying a Samurai to kill a mouse, but definitely you should have proper equipment if you are going to hunt a tiger :D, joke apart just don't deploy any CMS for sake of learning.

Mean while, have a look in books available on Umbraco site to get started (http://umbraco.org/get-started/for-developers) or install Runaway module to start with.

Sanjay Zalke

Answer 3

>As a web developer, I honestly wonder how this is going to save us time

It will save you time once you become proficient. It has a learning curve for sure, but once over that hump it will save you time - (that is not unique to Umbraco). I have used other CMS products that were easier to get my first site up - but then I was disappointed that I pretty much maxed out what the CMS could do for me - so far it doesn't appear that I will outgrow Umbraco's capabilities anytime soon.

Answer 4

Start thinking about your site in terms of what is in common from one page to another. If every page in your site needs its own master-page than something is wrong. A good site layout will include the flexibility you need from one page to the next, but still enforce consistency and a common design.

Once you have the common elements of all the similar types of pages, start defining document types for this various types of pages. For example, you might have Basic Page document type, a News Item document type. You can define the various other pages, like "HomePage" or "Section Home", etc. If you have a slideshow, you could create a document type for each "slideshow Slide", etc. Umbraco allows you to build out a very flexible content tree very quickly, and is one of its biggest advantages.

Even if I am the only developer on a site, I still prefer using Umbraco over building a non CMS site. Once the site architecture it determined, development becomes very fast.

Answer 5

Umbraco can be a wise choice if your site content is very dynamic with lots of pages. The USP of Umbraco is the re-usability of the document types and a clear seperation of mark-up and content. It greatly reduces the headache of the site editor. Although initially it may seem a bit confusing or i would say intimidating, but with the help of web-casts on http://umbraco.com/help-and-support/video-tutorials and the user forums things can get simpler.

I started using Umbraco a month back and so far experience has been good.