The UK Government Digital Service Standards require all new source code to be released as open source code. Point 12: Make all new source code open and reusable, and publish it under appropriate licences. When we developed a new website for UK Central Government we were required to release our code as Open Source.  This presented challenges we've not faced before, such as how to preserve private information such passwords and access keys. In this article written for 24Days.in our Technical Director, Paul Marden, talks about how to develop websites as open source.…

A website saddled with a bad Content Management System can often really impact the site from being developed to meet your needs. As Umbraco specialists, we’re often approached by potential clients asking for their current site to be migrated to Umbraco. What we’ve learnt is that the impact of failing to properly brief an agency during a migration project can make a huge difference to the quality, timescales, and budgets of what’s being delivered. It can be very difficult for an agency to provide an accurate or effective quote if presented with a brief of “move my site from platform…

Those in the market for an Umbraco website are presented with an often mind-boggling number of options when shopping around for providers: the most common being sole developers and large agencies. Each comes with its own pros and cons, so it’s essential that those looking to source services have the inside track on what to look for and the right questions to ask at the procurement stage. There are plenty of great sole developers out there, in fact, some of the highest profile and most competent Umbraco Developers in the community fall into that category. We think that working with…

Like any piece of modern, evolving software, Umbraco - and its users - benefit from regular release updates.  These could be new patches for specific issues, which come out on a weekly or monthly basis, minor version updates which are released anywhere between a monthly and quarterly basis, or major version releases, which come out every few years. But each release, no matter how major or minor, is always an improvement on what existed before. So when commissioning a new site, it’s crucial to understand what your prospective agency's support policy is regarding applying updates. If your new site is…

As specialist Umbraco developers, we often get called into projects when they hit a crisis. Either something has gone badly wrong, the relationship had gone sour, or there’s no single issue to point the finger at, but a million small cuts. So we’ve got a lot of experience in what can go wrong on a project. And one of the things we see time and time again is websites and webapps built by agencies that don’t follow best practice like using source control systems. Why does this matter? Source control systems like Git and Subversion are databases for the code…

When you’re commissioning a new Umbraco site, it can be useful to start planning for the task of testing what has been delivered by your developers.  A planned and thoughtful approach to User Acceptance Testing can reduce the time taken and ensure better coverage of the system as well as one that is ultimately better at the end. During the early product planning stages, it’s worth discussing acceptance testing to understand the agency’s standard approach. Will they develop the system in an iterative way and expect you to contribute to acceptance testing during the project, or will they instead…

If you’re going to build a website or app you need to face facts: it’s going to have bugs.  Bugs have existed in software since Grace Murray Hopper found her punch card program failed because a moth got trapped in the reader.   Bugs are a fact of software life, because humans are fallible. We make mistakes, we misunderstand specs, we write algorithms incorrectly, or we use the wrong variable.  We believe that instead of trying to write perfect code, we should spend as much time trying to write a good trap.  Testing, therefore, is the saviour of poorly-written code. But…

I presented at Code Garden for the first time today, talking about developing with Umbraco for a Chinese market. This was a lightening talk where I discuss some of the challenges of developing Umbraco sites that will be used by people in China, including getting the infamous ICMP License …

This morning I read a post from a Dev Evangelist at Oracle, who wrote about all the talks he is looking forward to at Oracle Code.  It was a great post, but it got me to thinking, there’s so much more to look forward to about Code Garden than just the talks. So here’s the things I’m gong to enjoy at my CG18 experience. My first Gold Partner Summit The summit is the opportunity for all the Gold Partners worldwide to get together to learn about the roadmap for the next year, to discuss issues and opportunities and to influence…

This is an old, old, old article.  But still completely relevant today.  You see, human perception hasn’t evolved substantially since 1993, and so neither have our expectations of the response time of the systems we interact with.  Those systems my have substantially evolved as the web became mainstream, and then smartphone apps became ubiquitous.  But our expectations remain the same.  If the system responds to a users action in under 1 second, then the users flow of thought remains unaffected. Read on... Response Time Limits: Article by Jakob Nielsen.…