I've been having a play with Umbraco 5.1 recently, particularly the memberhip functionality. One thing that had me stumped for a while was how to hide protected node or mark nodes as protected in a navigation.

I had a trawl through the source of 5.1, which as every good knows is the best source of documentation.  Learn to read the source Luke...

Umbraco 4 had the concept of IsProtected and HasAccess properties, so as you iterated through the ndes you could easily hide nodes that a user didn't have access to or mark them as protected. I used these in ...Read More

A happy new year to one and all, my first blog post of 2012 hopefully more to follow projects permitting.

I have used the excellent CMSImport on numerous projects both with SQL server and CSV data sources.  In many instances the data is not always in the correct format and needs to be massaged.  If using CSV as the data source typically you would use Excel or some simple text editor with a bit of search and replace, however there is a much better and powerful free alternative, enter Google refine.

Check out the videos especially the third video on data ...Read More

Well, not really a shocker...more a reality check. This is in reference to a recent article published on CMSWire about mid market web CMS vendors raising prices.

Having used a number of content management systems over the last 10 years including Reef (ironically this 'sank' without a trace), Microsoft Content Management Server, Obtree, Immediacy (gulp) and Sharepoint (if you can call this a CMS) and sat through a number of other platform demonstrations such as Sitecore and episerver. I am aware of the weird and wonderful world of vendor pricing models.

Some are per server, per domain name, per developer seat, ...Read More

Following hot on the trail of the regular London meetup and first ever Preston meetup we present the first Umbraco Manchester meetup.  Hopefully will be a regular monthly event. See Manchester meetup home page for more information. You can also follow us on twitter @ManUmbMeetup.

Just a quick tip for all you xslt cowboys.  I am currently working on an existing Umbraco installation. This site utilises webservices that return datasets.  The display of data has been done using .net usercontrols that make calls to the webservices, unfortunately for me alot of the layout has been done with codebehinds and stringbuilder.

The client wanted new subsites with different layout, so rather than hacking around with the existing usercontrols I decided to use xslt macros instead this gives me greater flexilbity to customise layout without having to also rebuild and deploy dlls.

As all you umbraco gurus know ...Read More

So last night was our inaugural Preston Umbraco meetup held at the excellent Indian restaurant East is East.  Considering Preston is a bit of a backwater compared to that London we had a good turn out.

The swag (we still have loads of it knocking around in the office) and curry went down very well. Topics ranged from Umbraco to .net in general, there was a running joke throughout the evening that Phil was some kind of Sharepoint expert you had to be there to get it!

The really strange thing for me last night was the amount of six ...Read More

Over the last couple of months I have been regularly listening to the excellent podcast This developers life by Rob Conery (He of Subsonic and Tekpub fame) and Scott Hanselman (Microsoft Senior Program Manager).

The podcasts cover a wide range of topics and you get to hear from leading industry gurus and wizards, plenty of funny stories and insights.  Its free and also available from iTunes. If your in the IT game its a must!!

I had what can only be described as a mouse induced panic attack yesterday.

I was adding content and moving nodes about in the Umbraco editor with reckless abandon, when pow all of a sudden all my nodes disappeared!

EEEK! I navigated away from the content tree into another section in the hope that they were just shy and if I stopped looking at them they may re-emerge. Nope, I returned to the content section and they were still gone (Sort of the opposite of Schrodinger's cat).

Then I had one of those ...Read More

The CogBlog, our staple bastion of informative comment (at least some of the time!), is powered by the Blog4Umbraco package. There are a couple of additional modifications that we've made here and there to get it running just how we like it. These modifications were a chance to look more deeply into xslt extentions and showcase just how easy it is to implement them; all thanks to the power of Umbraco.

Blog4Umbraco

Fist thing's first; as a package, Blog4Umbraco (b4u) isn't updated too frequently. Additionally; there are several versions out there which produce different levels of stability depending on which version of Umbraco ...Read More

It was the end of November 2010, and the days were cold and dark, work was piling up and we were about to be buried under one of the worst snow storms for years.

Well what could bring us out of this gloom and despair...

Well, A nice shiny email from the founder of Umbraco, Niels Hartvig...all glistening in the cold morning gloom...and what, you may ask, was the email about?

The title certainly woke us up...'Partner News: Introducing the Gold Partner Program'.  It got us interested :)

Umbraco Gold Partner I ...Read More