While working on the upcoming site for umlaut (umbraco solution provider run by fellow umbraco addict / MVP Dirk De Grave and me), I needed to add a blog section to the site.

And since umbraco makes it super easy to package up your work. I thought I would spend some time into resurrection the umbraco blog package.

So here you go, a blog package for umbraco 4.

Current Features:

• Posts with paging and filter on category
• Comments (custom usercontrol)
• Datefolder (using the eventmodel)
• Categories (using tag datatype)
• Archive (collapsable, only showing lastest months)
• Latest comments
• Blogroll (using related links)
• Rss Feed
• Gravatar

A small demo screencast:

Download package and sourcode on codeplex (also submitted this to the umbraco repo, so expect to see it there soon).

To continue with the why umbraco rocks posts. Umbraco starts rocking at step 1, the installation. It’s just a matter of minutes to complete the easy and fast installation process.

To showcase this I did an installation time attack: Umbraco v4 installation on vista (from download to complete installation) in 3 minutes and 20 seconds. (detailed installation instructions on umbraco.org).

View the evidence here:

A couple of weeks ago I released the related links package for umbraco v3. Recently the related links datatype has also been added as a default datatype in umbraco v4 (a more polished version).

I recorded a screencast wich will show you how to use the datatype in v4.

The link checker is a tool designed to identify broken links within your umbraco website. It will check all links (internal, from the same host, and external, outgoing link to different domains) found in the properties of your published content pages.

It has tree stages:

• Start, options to search only external / internal links, search for all url’s (not only the ones in <a href=”">) and option to set the start node of the search.
• Running, nice little progress status (the crawler runs async so it’s possible to do another action and check back later)
• Report, once the crawler is done it will display a report of found broken links

Check out the demo:

This will be my first ‘commercial’ package, stay tuned for more info.

I’m back from Denmark and had an amazing week ! First with the retreat and then with codegarden08. For the people who couldn’t make it, you can download my flash and umbraco presentation below.

Most importing part of the presentation was the release of a new umbraco package. NibbleFX (flash express).

In short: Have an xml driven flash movie you would like to manage with umbraco? This package will do all the work for you, just upload your xml file and documenttypes, templates, xslt and macro’s get created automaticly, you can even import the content.

Check out this screencast ( of a beta version) if you want to see a demo.

Enjoy ….

Umbraco rocks! Why ?

Reason one:

It’s extremely easy to add custom .net usercontrols to your umbraco site. So you can still take full advantage of the .net framework when working with umbraco. I made a quick screencast showing how to add a .net usercontrol to your umbraco site.