Fine grained management of Users’ permissions isn’t an exciting subject for a blog post, but for websites managed by anything more than one or two people, knowing who does what can be critical. We’ve worked on a number of websites and content management systems where Editors bemoan how locked down the system is, and as a result everyone uses the same super-user login. But with a little thought and effort, tweaking the permissions settings in Umbraco can mean that the right people can do their job with the minimum of effort, and still remain compliant with security best practice. Out…

Onsite or internal search is often a poor relation to other sexier features of a site such as the primary navigation or rich integrations with external systems such as CRM. On average 30% of users will do an onsite search, and doing so is a strong predictor of likelihood to convert (see Moz).  Onsite search is challenging though, internal search engines can never rival Google for quality and accuracy of results - because they can't rely on the many ranking factors that Google uses.  However, the Lucene search engine which forms part of the core of Umbraco does provide a…

With the advent of Umbraco 8.1.0 it is now possible to upgrade a site from a previous version to Umbraco 8.  However, this is by no means an automated process. The new upgrade feature in 8.1.0 works similarly to previous Umbraco upgrades - they upgrade content stored in the database, but don’t provide provision to upgrade custom code written in Templates, Partial Views or Controllers. Umbraco 8 is a substantial breaking change from Umbraco 7, and so the effort needed to upgrade an existing site shouldn’t be underestimated.  Critically the code used by Umbraco Developers to create Templates, Partials and…

This is the million-dollar question for many businesses that use older versions of the Umbraco CMS.  There are substantial business benefits to Umbraco 8: specifically around improvements to editing features for Multilingual sites; and improvements in site speed introduced by Nucache.  And of course Umbraco 8 has a longer shelf life - the retirement of Umbraco has been announced, so while Umbraco 7 continues to be patched for security reasons it isn’t benefiting from future product developments. However, there is a cost to upgrading a site to Umbraco 8.  Umbraco 8 is a substantial breaking change (hence the major version…

TL;DR For most scenarios yes.  #YMMV Umbraco 8 was launched with much fanfair in Feburary 2019, and as with most software there were some initial teething troubles which were quickly fixed.  But with 6 months passing, we began to wonder was Umbraco 8 ready for use in production environments. After much research and testing, including a practical Proof of Concept, we feel that without a doubt the core CMS is ready for use for most production scenarios.  However, there are some scenarios where you should be cautious before continuing, and some where Umbraco 8 is not production ready. One area…

Today I spoke at the inaugural Umbraco Spark Innovation Conference, based on some research that Jamie Pollock and I have done.  Titled How to design a great Content App for Umbraco 8 the talk was really an opportunity for me to research and better understand one of the new features in Umbraco 8: Content Apps.  Over the space of a few weeks I managed to speak to a number of Umbraco devs who have been pioneering the development of Content Apps, and this presentation is the distillation of what I learnt. Transcript Slide 1 While working to design and build…