Umbraco is a very easy to use Content Management System. A well built and configured Umbraco website should make it super easy for Editors to make changes to their site, as well as adding new content. For those starting out on their journey with Umbraco editing journey there are plenty of resources to enable them to get started including: Umbraco Editors Guide; and Umbraco.tv. The Umbraco community is very strong and, while it's very heavily developer focused, it's incredibly helpful, and advice and guidance can be sought from the forum Our Umbraco or on the community Slack group. If you…

The most effective way to find an Umbraco Developer is to work with Umbraco HQ who will help to source a Partner Agency, who all have certified Umbraco Developers, and ensure that they best meet your needs with their matching service.  They will ask a few questions about your project and will then match you against the skills and demonstrable experience of their Partner agencies. You can also browse through the list of individual Umbraco Developers on the Umbraco Website, which lists all Umbraco Developers who have undergone certification training. We are an Umbraco Gold Partner which means that we…

I've touch typed since I was 12 years old, and any who does knows that stopping to pick up the mouse to click a button slows you down dramatically, I remember memorising all the keyboard shortcuts in WordPerfect 30-something years ago.  Keyboard shortcuts save a huge amount of time, especially when I've got my editing hat on and I'm writing posts or starting a skeleton site for a client. Last week a post by Owain @ScottishCoder when he found the keyboard shortcut for Save and Publish sparked my curiosity.  What are the other shortcuts available?  So I dug around and…

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…

The California Consumers Privacy Act (CCPA), is a landmark privacy for Californian citizens due to come into force in January 2020. Somewhat akin to the EU’s General Data Protection Legislation, the new Act will provides Californian citizens with: a right to be informed what types of data are being collected by an organisation and what it will be used for (a notice at collection);  the right to request a copy of the exact data collected about them in the last twelve months (a Request to Know - similar to a Subject Access Request); the right to request deletion of that…

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…

An Umbraco Gold Partner is a business that typically provides website design, development and support services for the Umbraco CMS. Umbraco Gold Partners have been certified by Umbraco HQ as being knowledgeable about the Umbraco platform and how to install, build, configure and extend the product  All Umbraco Gold Partners have to employ at least two staff who are Umbraco Certified Developers who have achieved at least 400 Certification Points which are earned by attending a training course and passing end of module exams.…

This is a real "piece of string" question.  There are many factors that influence the cost of building a website, and the fact that the project is built using Umbraco makes little difference. The key factors that we aim to understand during the early Discovery phase of a project are the size and complexity of the proposed website.  The complexity of functionality and volume of work have the greatest influence on project cost.   The key questions we use to understand this complexity factor are: How many types of pages will be in the final site; and How complex is the…

The core Umbraco CMS is free to download and use for any website, it is free and Open Source. There are also many hundreds of add-on packages that have been written by the community which extend the functionality of Umbraco. Umbraco are completely committed to the Open Source model for the core Content Management System, and have always maintain that the CMS will remain free forever. This means that a large proportion of the Total Cost of Ownership of a website is substantially reduced, making it a tool well suited to business, academia and the not-for-profit sector. Alongside the free…