The News Curator Plugin for Umbraco is a new plugin we've developed to enable Site Editors to curate news articles from across social media and news websites and convert these sources into Umbraco content.   …

Umbraco's Public Access feature enables developers with very little experience to build a membership site, with pages protected with usernames and passwords.  If you're logged in and have permissions you see the content, if you're not logged in you're challenged for login creds, and if you're logged in but don't have permission you see an error message. However, there are use cases where a site needs to show more fine grained options for password protected content.  In the learning portal we developed for Download Learning, a training module should show the video if you're logged in and have permission, if…

So with CodeGarden 2015 over and everyone beginning to get CodeGarden blues I thought I’d take a look back at the infamous Umbraco developer festival. As always the conference was jam-packed full of inspiring talks, great ideas and an awesome community. As well as the keynote with Niels I saw presentations by, among others, James South and Shannon Deminick. WebAPI 2 The announcement that Web API 2 will be incorporated into Umbraco at the keynote provoked excitement around the conference hall where the core team explained how the REST API for Content, Media, Members, and Relations using HAL format for…

There are lots of options for setting up and running the database behind Umbraco, and in this post we’ll look at some of the technologies Umbraco supports and the design constraints you should consider. Umbraco is a Microsoft stack CMS so it stands to reason that its database of choice is SQL Server.  It is possible to run Umbraco 7 on MySQL, but at Orcare we’ve never done this, and to be honest I’m a little skeptical – I never like running tiny minority configurations, bugs are more likely and often harder to resolve. You can run Umbraco on any…

How often do you log into an Umbraco site and see the speech bubble telling you a new version of Umbraco?  In this article we’ll look at what’s involved in an upgrade to the latest version of Umbraco and what are business benefits? The effort involved in upgrading Umbraco often depends on a number of factors – the size and complexity of your site as well as which version of Umbraco you’re going from and to.  The biggest factor that affects the cost of an upgrade is the differences between two versions.   If your site is currently on Umbraco 4.7…

You’ve looking to buy a website built using Umbraco, but your existing site is built on a different platform.  How do you safely and effectively migrate to Umbraco?  In this post we’ll look at some of the issues you will face.   For many legacy websites migrating to Umbraco, the biggest issue is with their existing content.  Any successful website which has a reasonable Google ranking will likely have lots of quality content which you’ll want to move this across to Umbraco.  As will all things Umbraco there is rarely a single answer to this problem, it will very much depend…

Performance is so important for the success of your site, and with Umbraco you have a number of levers to pull to optimise the performance of your site. Over the last 2 weeks we’ve written about how to squeeze better performance out of your Umbraco site, covering in Part 1 image and css/javascript optimisation and in Part 2 caching and database tracing and tuning. In this final part we look at stress testing tools and tuning infrastructure performance. Use a stress test tool For some projects, performance is so critical, and load on the site so significant that performance stress…

Last week we started a series of posts about performance tuning Umbraco sites, where we discussed Image Optimisation, Client Dependency Framework, Mini-Profiler and implementing caching.  In this article we’ll look at the relative performance of @Html.RenderTemplate and @Html.Partial, and also look at database profiling and tuning. Consider using @Html.Partial() rather than @Html.RenderTemplate In a previous Umbraco project we had a scenario where we had a shop page and needed to iterate over a collection of products, data of which were stored as nodes. On the product listing page, we chose to render an alternate template for each product the snippet…

Site performance is always a critical factor when building a new web project. Site speed has, for a long time, been a critical ranking factor for Google. So how do you go about tuning performance of an Umbraco site? In this series of blog posts we look at different ways of optimising Umbraco site performance.

Image optimisation

Many sites fail to effectively use images.  Fat bloaty images that are resized on the fly by the browser or which haven’t been properly compressed, can slow down individual page load times, and also put unnecessary strain on servers and bandwidth costs.

Always make sure that the site u…

We’ve been working on a project over the last few months migrating a website from an older version of Umbraco up to the latest Umbraco 7.  Our work with PostgreSQL has been in two areas: firstly creating a customer Management Information System which provides real time reports of sales from the company’s PostgreSQL ERP database; and secondly integrating Umbraco Membership with data from the Customer Accounts data in PostgreSQL. This has been somewhat of a challenge as the tooling on .NET for PostgresSQL isn’t great.  Throughout the rest of the project we’ve been working on home turf using Entity Framework…