This review of Umbraco was initiated by our search for a new CMS. This review is going to be fairly critical, but I suppose when you claim to have the best CMS in the world that's fair. In addition to being a review, it is also an installation and learning guide for Umbraco that I created in case our staff will end up using this product.
How To Install Umbraco 4
I downloaded Umbraco 4 from Codeplex
In order to get it to work on Windows XP Pro, IIS5, ASP.NET 3.5, you will need the attached web.config file.
This web.config bug could be easily fixed so I suggested a solution on the Codeplex Issue Tracker
You then need to configure IIS so that http://localhost points to the Umbraco directory. This is another configuration issue that could be easily fixed as I spent an hour back in 2007 trying to get URLs like http://127.0.0.1/umbracotest/ to work. Simply analyse the server application path and give the user an error. I have done this myself in other projects and its 5 minutes work.
I then followed the wizard at http://127.0.0.1/ and connected to my database. Installation worked. I did hit one error at the database connection wizard which could have been more specific. Instead of telling me my connection string was not valid it should have said " the database does not exist" or similar.
At step 5/5 I installed without a foundation as I seem remember an issue when I selected the other option.
Document Types
I then watched a blog about Umbraco 4 where the founders(?) tell me there are few issues with the product after I had encountered 2 immediately. As an experienced developer, this suggests to me that this product has not had extensive usability testing eg watch a developer who has never heard of it try and use it.
I then looked at the Umbraco documentation and noticed there is no clear user guide for a newbie. There are a series of videos but only a few are free. There are a series of what they call "books" but they are seem to be produced by differing users in no clear order. Many are incomplete. The videos seems to be organized from newest to oldest which doesn't help a newbie.
I watched one of the free videos on Document Types. This was well done but would be better as a web page with screen shots. Videos take time to download and its hard to go back to a particular section.
User Controls
The second video to watch is on User Controls. This starts by creating a Web Application which is not possible in Visual Web Developer Express. A standard User Control in an ASP.NET website will do though.
Midway through the video my website crashed with this error:
Error creating control (/usercontrols/HelloWorld.ascx).
Maybe file doesn't exists or the usercontrol has a cache directive, which is not allowed! See the tracestack for more information!
Googling the error I found the trick was to add this:
http://127.0.0.1/?umbdebugshowtrace=true
Which then showed the error to actually be:
The type or namespace name 'Linq' does not exist in the namespace 'System'
Which I was familiar with. I removed:
using System.Linq;
using System.Xml.Linq;
From the ascx.cs file and the page worked.
If you need Linq, then open the Umbraco Application in Visual Web Developer 2008 and change Website/Start Options/Build/Target Framework to ASP.NET 3.5
Next I tried to get the TextBox control working but crashed because I did not have a form in my very minimal MasterPage. This was remedied by adding a form runat server tag into either the MasterPage or the Control.
Templates
After you do this video you will hit a wall as none of the other videos are free and you don't have enough knowledge to use Umbraco.
At this point I had the feeling I was dealing with an "Open Source" (read as a pejorative) product - unstructured documentation, little usability testing and lots of configuration issues. But as per most open source projects, there is help in the forum if you have the patience to find it.
I decided to purchase the 3 month 90 Euro tutorials. But midway through the first tutorial on Templates I realised the tutorials were for Version 3 of Umbraco and I was using Version 4. I used my knowledge of ASP.NET to try and get MasterPages working but failed.
Then I found this tutorial on MasterPages for Version 4 on YouTube. This was looking good except my version of Umbraco was auto inserting stuff that wasn't happening on the video. How could that be, we were using exactly the same product Version 4.0.0?
Then I tried reinstalling the product.
I found the error after Googling many other related error statements in my crashing page to no avail. MasterPages need a structure like this:
You would not normally construct a MasterPage by putting a ContentPlaceHolder in Content. If its required and against convention, why can't Umbraco produce a default for these non-typical structures like Visual Studio? If you are not prepared to do that then at least parse my MasterPage for an error and tell me.
The 10 minute tutorial took 90 minutes. This was all a very frustrating and exasperating experience typical of Open Source projects I dealt with years ago and miles from the seamless experience of learning MVC just recently. Anyway, onwards....
Stylesheets
Stylesheets allow you to add styles to the tinyMCE editor that is supplied with Umbraco. At last I had encountered something that is a much better solution than we had in our own CMS. And it worked. But...
I then had a look at the tinyMCE features that came with Umbraco and saw a limited set of icons compared to the full tinyMCE options. I search for "umbraco spell check" on Google and was led to this post:
"It's readily apparent that the tinymce spellchecker plugin, which worked fine in Umbraco 3, is no longer working in U4. A spell checker is a mission critical aspect of putting content up on the web. While the add-on IESpell works with Umbraco 4 in IE, the Firefox spell checker does not recognize Umbraco content areas. Therefore, there is essentially no spelling capability in FF for U4. As a manager of a large number of Umbraco sites, I am reluctant to upgrade any of my users until the spell check problem, ie. the inability to take advantage of the the tinymce spellchecker plugin in U4 is resolved."
and this reply by the founder of tinyMCE:
"@rnbarg: Would you consider sponsoring this feature so it could be a part of the core and be supported in the future? For now it has been an unofficial and unsupported add-on, but it would be nice to see it as a part of the core. Feel free to e-mail me on nh [at] umbraco . org"