Umbraco News & Articles

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.

Welcome to the November 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact for your project updates.

The web content management space is not homogeneous. And while the recently released Open Source CMS Market Share Report clearly highlighted the ongoing dominance of LAMP-based content management systems -- these systems are not the only game in town.

In this article I look at brand leaders who have chosen to build their content management software on the Java or .NET technology stacks. Systems with strong brand awareness and adoption rates include Alfresco, Jahia, Liferay and OpenCMS on the Java side, and DotNetNuke and Umbraco from the .NET camp.

Following on the heels of the 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, this year we collaborated with water&stone to produce an improved 2009 version. The report is an interesting study of 20 dominant systems in the market. It's really not about which CMS is best, nor about relative comparisons beyond brand strength, sentiment and adoption patterns. We're aware of this.

Traditional and Social Media Analysis

What the study did was sniff around the nooks and crannies of our increasingly electronic and publicly broadcast lives and endeavor to quantify the relative brand strengths, brand sentiments and adoption patterns for the top 20 most popular content management products. In addition, we ran a survey on CMSWire.com a little ways back. With this tool we were able to directly pose questions to our readership -- and more than 1200 of you took to the task (thank you!).

This year's analysis looked at Alfresco, CMS Made Simple, DotNetNuke, Drupal, e107, eZ Publish, Jahia, Joomla, Liferay, MODx, OpenCms, phpWebSite, Plone, SilverStripe, Textpattern, TikiWiki, Typo3, Umbraco and WordPress.

Key Conclusions: 3 Dominate, Many Are Vibrant

What jumped quickly out is that The Big Three -- Joomla, WordPress and Drupal -- led the survey set across a wide range of measures. However, the top slots are not static, Joomla has gained market share over Drupal, and WordPress with its hosted version has what looks like a smoother path to adoption.

The report identifies less obvious stars. Alfresco, a vendor focused on both document management and web content management, performed well across a number of categories, and led the Java-based open source CMS race over its nearest rival, Liferay. DotNetNuke led the .NET-based open source CMS category, though Umbraco is up and coming.

The report goes on to identify reasons why DotNetNuke's position may soon be changing. In addition to naming the market leaders, the study identifies projects whose market share and brand metrics indicate they are at risk or facing a closing window of opportunity. A metric we found of particular interest was the product evaluation rates versus the adoption rates.

The 90+ page report is available for free and includes profiles of each of the systems covered.

How much work goes into reviewing and selecting a web content management system for your organization? A lot. We know.

Now we can't help you define your specific needs or map out your usage scenarios, but we can provide some insights into several potential options. Here are 5 must read Web CMS reviews covering Umbraco, Day Communique, Vivvo CMS, SharePoint Online and Digitalus. All are different, yet quite interesting in their special ways.

DotNetNuke (news, site), an open source Microsoft.Net web content management provider, offers both a community and professional version of their solution. The professional version contains some features and functionality not available in the community version, features designed for the enterprise.

The latest version of DotNetNuke Professional hits the streets today. Get the scoop on what's new in the Web CMS.

Not all products are built with loads of venture capital in the coffers. Many are grown slowly and painstakingly over a number of years. A labor of love? Maybe. Some unseen driving force pushing them? Most likely.

During the work for our recent Umbraco CMS Review we stumbled upon the story of how this product came to be. It struck us as notable and inspirational, so we thought we'd share it more broadly.

In this article we bring you the history of the Umbraco Web CMS, from a .NET toolkit used as part of founder Niels Hartvig's consulting business to being one of the most popular .NET open source web content management systems in the market.

Welcome to another installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact for your project for updates.

Umbraco is one of only a few open source web content management systems built on Microsoft's .NET technology stack. This CMS is no "out the box" solution. To the contrary, it's a content management system for .NET web developers. And while it's relatively straightforward to use, one must first deal with a steep learning curve.

We took a close look at the latest version of Umbraco (v4.01) and here's what we found.

Umbraco is one of a few open source .NET web content management solutions on the market today, but it isn't the only one. DotNetNuke (news, site) is another popular open source solution for the Microsoft community and they have the stats to prove it.

Is it a sign of the times? People want an easy way to install applications on their PCs. Microsoft's Web Platform Installer (news, site) is certainly looking like just the ticket.

Released to the public in January of this year, Microsoft has announced that the Web Platform Installer has reached 1.5 million product downloads. This includes free, core products to run websites on the desktop like ISS7, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition and SQL Server 2008 Express Edition. In addition you can download ASP.NET and PHP.

The Windows Application Gallery alone has had 100,000 application downloads. This is where you can pick web content management systems like Umbraco, Drupal and Silverstripe, along with some blogging apps like Subtext.

The Web Platform Installer is Microsoft's vision of a place where the development community can get access to the best open source .NET and PHP-based solutions.

“In 2008, we placed a large bet on the fact that the Microsoft Web Platform and interoperability with Open Source community applications, together, would be something that would benefit both open communities and developers for building Web applications," said Lauren Cooney, group product manager, Web Platform & Standards at Microsoft. And they have been extremely happy with the results. 

Just think of how many downloads they would have if Windows SharePoint Services was among the list of applications.

There was a lot of interesting news coming out of MIX09 yesterday. A new beta release for the Microsoft Web Platform Installer was one of them. What's new in Beta 2? And what's this we hear about the Web PI now installing PHP and some popular open source content management applications?

It's official. Just as they promised, Umbraco has released version 4.0 of their ASP.NET Web Content Management System.

After 18 months of hard work, here's the highlights you can expect from v4:

• Developers: Support for ASP.NET Master Pages, Membership & Role Providers, AJAX, any .NET language. Event Model, Documented API and full source code available
• Designers: Built on W3C Standards, Accessibility Section  508 compliant, a template engine yet complete design freedom and support for RIA-powered websites based on Flash or Silverlight.
• End Users: New, easy to use interface, MS Word integration, Media Library, Content Versioning and Scheduling, Notifications and Tracking, built-in translation management, multi-lingual and supports all major browsers.

Remember, the upgrade is supposed to be painless, unless you have a few features implemented such as the XSLT helper method RenderTemplate(), UltraSimpleMailer / Newsletter and 3rd party datatypes.

And for those German-speaking fans, there is now a sister site to Umbraco.org: Umbraco.de which contains a mirror of the important parts of the Umbraco.org site.

You can get the new release on codeplex now.

The excitement is building in the Umbraco camp as they get days closer to releasing version 4 of their open source .Net-based Web Content Management System.

It has been a while since their last full version was released - June of 2007 to be exact. That one involved the move to the .Net 2.0 framework and a number of new features and enhancements.

You can get the latest release candidate, v4 RC3 now. This candidate release fixed some problems with the last release related to deleting files and macros via the context menu. Other enhancements include:

• The internal search engine was upgraded to Lucene 2.0 search
• The Membership Provider is now 100% compatible with Umbraco content and members for security trimming
• Word is compatible with Umbraco Content Channels
• Content Channels now support the tagging control

So you can head over and get the latest candidate release, or you can hold off just a little while longer and start preparing for the final release of v4 which is expected to come any day now according to the Umbraco website.

They are suggesting you start preparing for the upgrade and are providing some pointers to get you going. There is an automated upgrade wizard that will convert your existing installation (v3.0.5 or greater) to v4. This will make the upgrade easy - unless you're using the following functionality:

• The XSLT helper method RenderTemplate()
• UltraSimpleMailer / Newsletter
• 3rd party datatype

Have a read of their upgrade process or just spend time perusing the Umbraco version 4 section of the site to see all the new things that will be available.

Is that a ripple of excitement we just saw run across your face?