Posted on Monday, October 13, 2008
It's been a fabulous month! Lots of stuff has been going on in the umbraco world:
° umbraco v4 is about to enter its beta 2 status.
It should be the last beta release before we go into the alpha stage. It has been a great release so far. New features which were introduced for v4 have been further developed and polished including the Live editing feature, master pages support and support for document type inheritance. Each one of those features makes umbraco a real CMS killer application. Oh, and for those who don't twitter, Niels has also announced xslt debugging for umbraco from within vs.net and svn/tfs versioning support. Can't wait to see that happen.
umbraco has also be nominated for "Best Other Open Source CMS". It's no longer possible to vote for it!
° Release of umbraco Pro.
Excert taken from the umbraco.org website:
"Umbraco pro is a commercial offering for every professional or company working on a professional level."
umbraco Pro includes both the "Courier" and "Concierge" products. If you don't know about those new products, have a look here.
° CGUS08
Last week, CGUS08 was held at Chicago. More than 30 participants have gathered to talk about all things umbraco. More info and presentation slides can be found on the official umbraco.us website.
And, Richard who's also contributing to the forum4umbraco project has won the Package contest. Congrats Richard! Great job! Ace package. Hope to see a live demo at one of our next Benelux umbraco user group meetings.
° Doug Robar has joined the umbraco company as Evangelist.
Best man for the right job. Our top most poster on the umbraco forum has been appointed Evangelist. As from now one, Doug will spread the word about umbraco all over the world. He's start conquering US... Congrats Doug and good luck on the job.
° Last but not least, umbraco.tv has been launched...
"Get instant access to more than 5 hours(!) of Umbraco Video tutorials made by umbraco founder Niels Hartvig and umbraco guru Per Ploug Hansen."
If you haven't signed up yet, this is the time. Look here for more info.
And, what have I been doing lately. Hmm, I've been evaluating umbraco even more, been setting up some proof-of-concepts for our forum4umbraco project, in co-operation with Billy Koch and Richard Soeteman and have been thinking about some new cool 'features' I'd like to work on during the coming weeks. Here's my personal wish list:
A validation framework allowing to add validation to standard/custom datatypes. Image you need a date for a document, but wishes to restrict that date to a date in the future... Currently, this is not supported. I'll be looking into this to see what is possible within the existing setup.
I'm also having a closer look at the new .net event model. Haven't played much with it, but one thing I'm missing already is the ability to cancel events. For example, what if you wish to cancel a save operation because of... whatever. Could be anything. Might do some code hacking to prepare a proof-of-concept. I really think it would be a bonus to the system. Just need to convince others... ;)
Lately, we've had a discussion on document type inheritance. I didn't like the idea at first as I've always found it more intuitive to create 'Property sets' which can be reused by multiple document types. Ok, my idea didn't make it, but I have been thinking about how to extend this functionality using the existing code base. So, I've been thinking about extending the existing data types to allow for a 'Combined datatypes', ie. having a custom datatype that is made up of other existing datatypes. Need to sort out some things first, but I might give it a shot sometime.
"forum4umbraco". Although it has been quiet lately, it surely doesn't mean we haven't been progressing. We've not written a single line of code, but we do know where we want to go. More about this later on.
Enough for now. Need to get to work again.
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