What we've been doing to help...
As announced at the UK
Umbraco Festival by Niels Hartvig, the Founder of Umbraco, we
have been asked to help design the new Umbraco installer process to
be released with Umbraco 4.6 (Juno).
So I thought is was about time I wrote something about what has
been going on.
Why does Umbraco need a better installer?
Historically the installer has been a fairly manual process aimed
at the developer community. This was until Microsoft added
Umbraco to their Web
Platform Installer.
This added an element of automation to the process by providing
all the prerequisites in one place.
However, the process was still a fairly plain, dry experience
only providing a blank Umbraco installation with no real
instructions as to what to do next for the new Umbraco user.
The user was left with a plain white 'Welcome to Umbraco page'
with no real DocTypes, templates or content installed. There
was no example of where to start or what Umbraco can do.
So unless you were familiar with how Umbraco worked or indeed
Microsoft.NET master pages, and the basics of CMS design and
development, then there was quite a steep learning curve to
overcome. Believe me, we had to climb it 3 years ago :)
The Dream Solution
So, Niels's dream was to provide a much more user friendly
installation experience with some level of interactivity and a
means for the first-time user to see how all the separate areas of
Umbraco fit together.
And so the new, shiny Umbraco installation process was
born...
After some great initial work by Tim Geyssens and Per Ploug
Hansen to create the installation process and the skinning
functionality, it was down to Dan Ashton, Creative Director at The
CogWorks, to wave his creative magic wand and take a non-technical
view of the process, both from a user experience and a design
perspective.
What has been created is something that, I'm sure you'll agree
is both visually appealing and easy to use.
The process now flows from step to step taking the user through
the necessary stages, giving the option to install a starter
package or if they are a more advanced user, to run with the
standard basic blank install.
There are 4 starter kits each providing different elements to
get you up and running in no time at all, and also the ability to
be able to skin the kits with one of a number of great new
designs.
The plan is to add more designs skins on a regular basis.
So all in all a great result for Umbraco and The CogWorks...long
may the partnership exist in happy designery heaven...with a
sprinkling of technical cheer :)