Andy Butland

Over the past couple of months I've been working with the open source .Net CMS Umbraco , and been very impressed with the breadth of features and opportunities for extension and customisation that it provides. Operating as a one man band, it's very straightfoward to work with the product using the web based UI for most of the development tasks. However one concern it gave was how to set it up such that in can be used within a development team - with multiple developers working on the same project and how to integrate it with source control systems . Issues arise from the fact that whilst some content is saved as files on disk (e.g. templates, XSLT macros), others are held in the database (e.g. data types, document types, and the content itself of course). In order to get around this, we've set up and used the following model - which seems to ameliorate the concerns: Firstly, a single database is set up on a networked server for access by all developers. This means any cr...

Although for reasons I won't go into it looks like there's a good chance the project isn't going to see the light of day, I've been fortunate in the past couple of months to have chance to properly get to grips with the .Net open-source content management system Umbraco . Having heard good things about it from colleagues and the web community, I was hoping to find in this product the right balance of providing a rich framework for the generic requirements of a content-rich site , whilst retaining the ability to extend as necessary without running into the limits of the product. And I have to say after spending this time working with the system, I haven't been disappointed. I plan to blog a few specific developments where I've found need to extend the product to fit the needs of the web-site I'm building, but firstly just wanted to highlight the key benefits for me that I've found. Custom Document Types Even quite recently I was pitched a commercial CMS...