Help me make the website prettier
How can we make this new home page for umbraco.org prettier (I'm no designer so basically I just placed the new content items below the green box):
So instead of all the text on the current live draft, I want three boxes listing advantages for editors, designers and developers. After that I want the latest from the blog and various stats and less important teasers in the right side.
Got an idea for improvement or a designer working together with you? Help me get our dear umbraco.org more slick, by improving this draft and mail them to me. The sooner the better - I'll keep this post updated with new drafts...
Full png file here, and photoshop file here.
UPDATE: Amazing response - thanks a lot! I got a very nice proposal this morning, which we'll be working further on. Hopefully it can be revealed very soon as the last details are incorporated.
Written by Niels Hartvig, 27 June 2007 - (25) comment(s)
v3.0.1 released
umbraco version 3.0.1 is released and fixes a couple of minor issues as well as the two serious issues:
- The missing webservices (now updated to a new official location: /umbraco/webservices/api)
- The missing umbraco.macroRenderings.dll
As always you'll find the goods at codeplex with upgrade instructions as well.
Written by Niels Hartvig, 26 June 2007 - (4) comment(s)
First monday with v3 out - 3.0.1 on its way
After a weekend of almost 400 downloads of v3 and massive testing in the community I'm quite pleased how stable v3 seems. However, I made two errors when packing the release which means that a v3.0.1 will come shortly. The two errors are:
- I accidently added the wrong macroRenderings.dll in the distribution.
- The webservices didn't automatically got published (which means that they lack from the distribution)
This means that I'll produce a new build today. Upgrade will be very, very easy. Thanks for all your feedback so far, please keep them coming.
Written by Niels Hartvig, 25 June 2007 - (4) comment(s)
Incomplete bug reports will be deleted
Please do proper bug reports as mentioned in the guidelines.
Any issue reported that doesn't follow these guidelines *will* be deleted - no questions asked. So save your own time and do a complete post - we have no chance of solving issues reported like
"Theres a bug in the final release, when you click on the content, the tag selector (Select Box) disappears."
The bug above isn't re-produceble, contains no further description and contains no information on server, client and browser. In order words - we can't use it for anything. So let's help each other and take the time to do the work thorough.
Written by Niels Hartvig, 22 June 2007 - (2) comment(s)
v3 released!
Finally v3 is released. It's out. It works. Everywhere. On windows, on mac, on linux, on Nitendo Wii, in Microsoft Word and on your mobile phone.
It's a phenomenal release. A stable release. More than 500 (five hundred) improvements.
You should upgrade today.
Over the next weeks, I'll produce texts and screencasts for the new website to explain all the magic that justifies the 18 months of development time. Until then, start asking questions in the forum which I'll start monitoring from next week.
Hope you like it.
Kudos to the whole team for a massive effort. Special thanks goes to Esben Carlsen and Anders "Duckie" Mathiesen for a lot of work and Gert Abildskov from Hasselblad for massive testing and patience.
Written by Niels Hartvig, 21 June 2007 - (28) comment(s)
Packing v3, ETA Cancelled
I'm packing v3 and then I need to run the tests again. If they succeed we'll have release at 13.00 GMT+1 (in one hour). Wish me luck ;-)
I'm testing the client on both MAC + Windows XP + Windows Vista
I'm testing the server part on Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2000, Windows Vista and Windows XP
UPDATE: Party is cancelled, there's massive problems with the XP testing machine (all other machines above works fine) and currently I can't tell whether it's due to the machine (being reinstalled now) or umbraco. No new time estimate, so don't hold your breath.
Written by Niels Hartvig, 21 June 2007 - (20) comment(s)
More than 60mb of docs available
"There's no docs for umbraco" has been a common understanding on umbraco.
Luckly times have changed and this has improved dramatically over the past 18 months. So now there's really no excuse - more than 60mb of docs are available.
From a getting started, to the wiki, to the new book section (which is improving every week) to 47mb of msdn style docs (which also gets improved again and again).
The msdn style docs might seem thin at first, but try dwelve through the umbraco.library class and the umbraco.cms.businesslogic namespaces which are the most important ones. Check out the Document class - impressive, huh?
Over the summer these will be accompanied by online training videos which can be licensed pr. dev or pr. company basis. The contents of these will be very similar to the level 1 and 2 courses.
Now, stop complaining and start implementing ;-)
Written by Niels Hartvig, 15 June 2007 - (10) comment(s)
What comes after v3 - announcing two new products in the making
Just like you probably do, I'm looking very much forward to ship v3. Once that's done, I'm finally able to finish off two exciting new products, umbracoCourier and umbracoForms. I've been working on these for more than a year, but naturally they've been stalled a little because of v3. As more and more people use umbraco, I see a bigger need for these two products which makes me really excited. Let me explain what they do, so you might be able to share my excitement ;-)
umbracoCourier - sync, diff and transfer between umbraco installations
umbracoCourier is the missing link for many of you who're doing umbraco work. It's a tool for diff’ing, syncing and package umbraco installations. So you can use it to sync a development environment with a production environment, to get the latest content from your live environment to your dev environment or basically just use it to create a package. It's able to transfer all types of umbraco objects including content, templates, document types, etc. It can also automatically update umbraco setting schemas like if you've changed document types in your dev and want to transfer those settings to a stagning/production environment.
umbracoCourier is a commercial product that can be licensed on either a per installation basis (domain) or unlimited (useful if you have many clients). Current launch date is late August 2007.
umbracoForms - create, export and integrate form data
umbracoForms is basically a tool for creating accessible forms. Upon install a new icon will appear in the section list (the lower left corner) and from there you can either create new forms or see reports from the existing ones. New forms can be created by drag/drop'ing form fields on a canvas (multiple steps are supported). When you drop a field you can add validation rules and populate pre values. Forms can be created either from scratch or three wizards:
- Form templates (pre-defined xml documents populates the canvas for things like a questionnaire, contact forms, etc)
- Based on an existing table. Point umbracoForms to an existing table in a database (support included for access, mysql, mssql and oracle) and umbracoForms will analyze the table structure and build a sample form including basing pre values on foreign tables. This can be edited afterwards
- Based on a webservice – the same as above.
When a form is created you can select actions/workflow afterwards. This includes sending e-mails, storing data in umbraco or foreign tables or calling webservices. The reports can show stats on form usage as well as export data for Excel or xml.
umbracoForms is also a commercial product that can be licensed like courier. Current launch date is beginning of July 2007.
I hope you're as excited about these two great coming products and please let me know if you're interested in beta testing.
Written by Niels Hartvig, 12 June 2007 - (8) comment(s)
Deadline for bug submittion for v3 is June 14th
Please submit any issues big or small you've discovered in v3 before Thursday as this will be the final date for submitting bugs. Even if you're insecure whether something is a bug or not, do add it to the issue tracker. Things of special interest is issues with the tinymce editor and issues in Firefox. Make sure you follow the bug submittion guidelines and posting screenshots have shown very useful.
v3 will be released on Thursday the 21st 2007 at 12.00 GMT+1. We'll announce a little celebration event in Copenhagen later this summer.
Written by Niels Hartvig, 11 June 2007 - (11) comment(s)
RC2 is out
Now things are getting very close to release, RC2 is out. It includes 54 fixes and last polished features that were requested the past two weeks. If not show-stoppers will appear over the next week, we'll have release next week!
Among the interesting things in this release candidate is improved support for new features in Live Writer 2, improved security, notification e-mail with editing options (now you can edit, delete and publish directly from the e-mail) and of course fixes for all the bugs reported. It's really sweet now!
The new notification message with direct edit links
Go download at CodePlex. To upgrade from rc1 to rc2 use same procedure as when upgrading from v2 to rc1:
- BACKUP files + db(seriosuly)
- If you've installed any packages that has own create dialogs (like the RSS module), make sure to keep a copy of /umbraco/config/ui.xml nearby
- Unzip v3rc2.zip
- Copy /bin, /config, /install, /python, /scripts /umbraco and /umbraco_client from the zip into your v2/rc1 installation (yes, to overwrite)
- Update web.config and the new /config/*.config with the settings from your old /config/*.xml files if you've changed those (Make sure that you base the web.config on the new one and just copy your changes. The new one includes lots of important references!)
- Copy the ui.xml back in place if you had that changed
- Go to your website and the upgrade process should begin automatically
Written by Niels Hartvig, 08 June 2007 - (66) comment(s)