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Do you want to get to CodeGarden for free and do you have a cool site or package that you want to show during the open space, then you're in luck.

Microsoft have sponsored 2*2 tickets and all you need to do is to submit a three paragraph description (inclusion of screenshots is a bonus here) of what you'd like to show and mail it to me.

The deadline is the 15th of June 12.00 GMT+1 and the winners will be selected by the hard but righteous jury which is me and Daniel Frost from Microsoft.

Impress us, come to CG for free and get famous :-)))

Unfortunately there was an issue with linking in the WYSIWYG editor in yesterdays release which we completely missed, so we've fixed that this morning and updated the release so we now have an Umbraco 4.0.2.1 aka the "digit edition".

The update service have been updated to automatically notify existing Umbraco 4 installations about this update.

Thank you to our wonderful community who found this error and reported it quickly and sorry for any inconvenience.

Thanks to great response from the community I was able to make the release of 4.0.2 come today. I fixed three bugs in the beta and I've updated the change log.

Introducing the Upgrade Guide

I was finally able to make the first version of an Upgrade Guide that shows you how to do both a patch upgrade as well a major upgrade of Umbraco. I've tried to gather all the details that have caused headaches, but as this is a v1.0 of the guide, I'd love feedback and ideas for changes.

You can download the upgrade guide on Codeplex.

Finally - Umbraco version 4.0.2 is ready for testing (this is not marked as a stable release yet, but it's likely to be within a couple of days). Please report any bugs you find in the Issue tracker. Only bugs related to this release will be fixed, so no need to report any issues already added in the tracker, please vote them instead.

This is a stability release fixing 43 bugs. Most importantly the horrible encoding bug has been fixed, but also a lot of minor quirks reported by our fabulous community via http://codeplex.com/umbraco has been fixed.

Most work has gone into the way Macros are inserted and edited in TinyMCE, so hopefully this should feel much more stable, especially if your macros are rendered in the editor. The Membership Provider has also been fully implemented, so it now supports the full featureset of the MemberShipProvider APIs.

We've also ensured that all events in Umbraco are now correctly wired up - there have been quirks with the BeforeUpdateDocumentCache as well as the Macro save events.

Full change log on the download tab.

We expect v4.0.2 to be released during the first week of June.

Watch this new UmbracoCast to see that our little family will finally get a new member on August 1st 2009. But you'll need to watch three minutes of Per Ploug Hansen and yours truly mumble about CodeGarden 09, Umbraco 4.0.2 and Paul Sterlings US events first.

Missed any previous UmbracoCasts? Now we finally have an archive of all old videos.

While the US and Canada have the largest number of Umbraco users the number of Umbraco related events here is quite low relative to our European counterparts.  Recently there was the Tulsa Umbraco Users Group meeting, and last year Codegarden US 08, but that's about it.  Starting what we hope will be a much more frequent schedule of Umbraco sessions, events, training, and meetups here is where you can find Umbraco in the next few weeks:

• Level 2 Course at Butler University (closed course) : 26-27 May
• Corvallis .Net Users Group : 28 May
• Portland Code Camp : 30 May
• Bellingham .Net Users Group : 10 June
• Seattle Bar Camp : 13-14 June

We are very excited to tell more .Net and web developers about Umbraco.  Like many of us who use Umbraco daily already know, once you realize the limitless flexibility and ease of use it's a rare-day you return to another framework.

In each of the appearances above, look for North America's very own Nabaztag Umbraco Rabbit.

Hope to see you at one of these events and, if you know of other events that will benefit from learning more about Umbraco, let us know.  If I don't see you at one of these, I hope to see you at CodeGarden 09.

-Paul

UPDATE: I was a little too fast on the trigger yesterday - June 1st is a bank holiday in Denmark, so the Level 1 course will start on the 2nd and not the 1st!

By request we'll run the highly praised Umbraco courses again on June 2-3rd and 4-5th.

The courses will follow the very same model that have made the last ten rounds of courses a massive success, and just like last it'll focus entirely about Umbraco 4!

So we'll look at Masterpages, XSLT Debugging with Visual Studio, the new Event model, Canvas Editing, Membership Providers, Package creation and many of the other improvements that have made Umbraco 4 a milestone in Web CMS. By attending the course you'll be among the first to become experts and certified on the new platform.

The agendas for the courses are as follows:

June 2-3rd: Level 1 - implementing websites using umbraco:

• Understanding the umbraco basics - Boost/Nitro, Document Types, Templates and Macros (including usage of the new Masterpages functionality)
• Creating a simple website from scratch
• Understanding XSLT - creating a news "module"
• Creating multi-language websites including coverage of Dictionary Items and Languages
• Advanced properties: Re-use of properties and recursive usage of properties
• Two-way feedback using AutoForms and Notifications
• Optimizing markup for Canvas Editing
• Great Packages: Implementing full-text searching and mail forms

June 4-5h: Level 2 - umbraco for .NET Developers, extending and integrating solutions:

• Usage of .NET User Controls with umbraco
• Debugging XSLT and .NET Controls with umbraco and Visual Studio
• In-depth explanation of the umbraco object model and usage of the umbraco presentation APIs
• Creating, importing and modifying content from .NET using the API
• Usage of AJAX and umbraco
• Extending XSLT with custom .NET classes
• Custom event handling in umbraco using the brand new event handlers in Umbraco 4
• How to integrate legacy authentication systems using Membership and Role Provider

The registration is open and the first seats are already booked - as always we encourage you to register fast as the past courses have all sold out (and as mentioned the last one in 24 hours!).

I'm very excited that I've been invited by the best .NET User Group in Denmark - ANUG - to speak about Umbraco.

It's this Wednesday (April 29th) and as the fine folks have given me a whole evening I'll bring plenty of demos (one of them will feature a lottery where you can win an Umbraco CodeGarden 09 ticket or one of the famous limited edition Umbraco T-shirts).

You'll need to sign up using Facebook (WTF? ;-)) on ANUGs website.

And oh, one last thing... I'll be speaking Danish...

We're really happy here at the Umbraco HQ as we *finally* managed to activate subscriptions on the umbraco.tv. This means new low prices to get started and at the same time we're back at adding a lot of exciting new content. But let me start with the best news:

New low price: 19EUR / month, opt-out and in whenever you want!

That's right, getting started with umbraco.tv and more than five ours of videos by me and Per Ploug Hansen will only set you back 19 EUR (~25USD) and you can stop your subscription at any time.

New videos on XSLT Extensions - more videos coming

To celebrate the re-launch we've added two new videos on XSLT Extensions that'll teach you the basics of XSLT Extensions, how to create them as well as more advanced topics such as accessing SQL data from XSLT including sorting and paging data in your presentation layer.

More trial videos and previews

Starting with the two new XSLT videos we'll be adding free three minute previews of the videos as a supplement to the two free full videos on User Controls and Document Types. This gives you a safe way to see if you find it worth the cash.

Existing subscribers will get their periods doubled

For all our existing subscribers - no matter when you purchased the subscription - we'll start their subscriptions on May 1st and we'll double the period. So if you've purchased three months you'll get six months, etc. We really appreciate your early support on this product.

So what are you waiting for - start your subscription today and experience that the lack of documentation is a myth ;-)

Thanks to Søren Sprogø from Afdeling18 we've been aware that there might be a problem for correct Google indexing of certain pages if you use the RSS Community Package.

According to Søren this is due to Google using the guid attribute (ie. /26156) from the RSS to index the Umbraco pages but it detects it as duplicate content if already have indexed the content using the niceurl (ie. /blog/2009/4/7/how-to-migrate-umbraco-40-to-iis-7-and-aspnet-35).

What's the best solution - 301 or 302 redirects?

The solution to this is to make Umbraco detect if there's an incoming guid link (ie. yoursite.com/pageid) and then do a redirect and I'll look at implementing this for 4.0.2 (with the option of disabling it).

The big question is then - should it be a 301 redirect (permanent) or a 302 redirect (temporary). In my logic it should be a 302 as the whole point of a guid link is to ensure it won't change (and the id won't change, but the nice url might if a page title is changed). Søren argues that to fix the Google problem it needs to be a 301, which would be very sad as the whole point of ensuring links over time is then lost.

I've looked at how Wordpress handles this and it seems that hosted blogs (on wordpress.com) uses 302 redirects, while many Wordpress installs uses 301.

So calling all SEO/Google/RSS experts - what should we do?

If you've tried to send us an e-mail since Tuesday, it has unfortunately ended up in the dark nothing. When we moved servers this week our mail server has been configured wrong and as a result our contact form have been failing silently.

This means that we've never gotten your contact enquiry if you've sent it through our contact form on this website!

We sincerely apologize if you've tried to get in touch with us and when we haven't gotten back to you it's not a result of arrogance, but lack of server skills.

We really appreciate if you would contact us again.

Last night umbraco.org was migrated from our tired old windows 2003 server to a new windows 2008 monster server. This meant we had the opportunity to migrate to a asp.net 3.5 setup with integrated pipe-lines using IIS 7. It can seem like a daunting task, but in reality it is a simple operation. This is the walkthrough of how we moved umbraco.org.

Files and database

To make the transfer as fluent as possible we setup a new site next to the old one, and copied over all the files. We backed-up the database, but otherwise kept it where it was, as it was already upgraded to 4.0 and no changes are needed for the database. So we now had two identical sites: www.umbraco.org running asp.net 2.0 which point at the umbraco4Db database, and new.umbraco.org pointing at that same database. The files on both sites are identical at this point.

Websites and application pools

For the new site, we setup a new website in IIS7, and a separate Application Pool, setting it to framework asp.net 2.0 and using integrated pipeline.
(note: asp.net 3.5 is an extension of 2.0 so it has no separate framework settings)

Configuration files

Despite its complexity, umbraco.org is still an unmodified umbraco installation. So the only configuration file we needed to change was the web.config, if you have a more custom setup, your results might vary.

To upgrade the web.config to an asp.net 3.5 compatible version, go to the umbraco source repository and open aspnet35.config, which is located here:

http://umbraco.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/48966#742920

Use this file as a base for your new web.config, copy over custom configuration from the old web.config, such as custom sections, umbracoDbDNS and other custom appsettings, the MemberShipProvider sections, RoleProvider settings etc.

Especially notice if umbracoMembershipProvider (under membership) has a passwordformat ="hashed", this differs between version 4.0 and 4.0.1.

When you've synced the changes between your old web.config and the file from the codeplex repository, you have an asp.net 3.5 compatible configuration file which can run on integrated pipeline. This new web.config file is placed in the root of the new website and testing can begin.

Directory urls and authentication

if you use extensionless urls / directory urls with umbraco as well as authenticating users on your website, you need to add one additional setting to the web.config.

under <system.webserver> all umbaco's httpmodules are listed. Due to the way IIS process extensionless urls, you need to add: runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True" to the modules element, så it looks like this: <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True">

That is all there is to it, copy over files, keep database connection, upgrade web.config file to a asp.net 3.5 compatible version, and you're done.

Things to keep in mind

Make sure that your folder permissions on the new site are setup to work with IIS 7 and your application pool.

Don't do this upgrade on a live site, backup your files and migrate it to a new website, when the migration is done, it is very easy to simple turn off the old site and change the hostnames on IIS7.

You don't need a new database, as no database changes are needed to switch to IIS7 and asp.net 3.5

We'll be moving the umbraco.org website to new ultra fast servers tonight (22.00 - 24.00 GMT+1) so expect a little downtime as DNS will update.

This will only affect umbraco.org and umbraco.tv. The forum will continue to be online.

A sure sign that Umbraco finally is going mainstream is the growing number of jobs available for talented Umbracians. This week I've spotted two interesting job posts that I'd like to share:

• CondeNast (Wired, Vogue, CG) is seeking .NET/Umbraco dev . If you're living near London and wants to work on some of the largest scale Umbraco sites, you should definitely check this one. The team is cool (they got people in the Umbraco core team too) and the challenges are massive. 
• Twins seeking Umbraco specialist. If you're living in Denmark, one of the most prominent Umbraco Certified Solution Providers are expanding their Umbraco team (Danish) .

The coming version of Concierge which is included in all Umbraco PRO subscriptions extends Umbraco 4 to provide exclusive lock and unlocking of Documents and Media items in Umbraco. Here's a little three minute sneak peak of the feature:

Concierge version 1.2 will available in the beginning of April and is a free upgrade for all existing PRO subscribers.

Did you know that we got some cool reseller deals for consultancies and freelancers offering up to 50% discount on PRO subscriptions? Get in touch!

During this years Microsoft Mix conference (which Niels, Paul Sterling and I attended) Microsoft Translator was announced (along with alot of other great stuff, which you can find on the mix site)

Microsoft translator is a Machine translation webservice, so you simply tell it to translate a piece of text from one language to another, it is very impressive and really really fast.

Integrating it with umbraco was a breeze, actually it was done during the translator Q&A session which took place at mix, half an hour of coding in total, which resulted in near-instant translation of new pages added to an umbraco site into multiple languages from english.

Now sit back, and enjoy the music while you view the video below to see how this works:

And then download this zip file to get the code.

How to use:

Copy the translatehandler.cs to the app_code folder, and setup the different configuration values. And get a AppID from microsoft here (it's free)

Version 4.0.1 of Umbraco - coming anytime now - feature two new improvements to working with XSLT:

1. Automated references to XSLT Extension namespaces
2. XSLT Visualizer

In this short video I'm demonstrating the two new features:

XSLT Improvements in v4.0.1 from Niels Hartvig on Vimeo.

Today Microsoft announced the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) and on the behalf of our awesome community, I'm proud to announce that Umbraco is one of the few applications that are featured as a part of the launch.

The Web PI means an end to complex installs. As from today you can install Umbraco in one single click. That includes installing a webserver, database, Umbraco, permissions, etc. One click on a web page and within minutes, Umbraco is up and running regardless of you're running XP, Vista or Server.

Kudos to the Microsoft team including Bill Staples and Rusian Yakushev and Umbraco MVP Paul Sterling from Motus Connect who helped making this happen! This is a huge step forward - today Umbraco went mainstream in the best possible way. 2009 will be the best year ever to be in the Umbraco business.

So, why don't you try it now. Just click this little button below:

The Umbraco Video Casts are finally back and it sure feels good. We've upgraded the recording equipment and are now recording in HD and in much improved audio, but apart from that the format is the same.

In this episode Per Ploug Hansen and yours truly are talking about the release of Umbraco 4 , the coming Umbraco 4.0.1 and of course the Umbraco CodeGarden 09 Conference . It's approx twenty minutes of either fun or waste of time - we'll let you be the judge but no matter what there's more to come.

Links from this episode:

• Rate Umbraco 4 on Codeplex
• Register for the Umbraco CodeGarden conference
• Tim Geyssens (the guy behind the RenderTemplate() fix)

The super early bid price for the Umbraco conference "CodeGarden" 09 ends today. So to save EUR150 and get two days of sharing, inspiration and umbraco fun for just EUR 250, make sure to register before 23.59 GMT+1.

The registrations for CodeGarden 09 are coming in fast and we'll for sure be more than last year, which I think is phenomenal in recession times. Thanks to everyone who're showing the confidence and I can assure you that we're working hard on making this CodeGarden better than ever.

Sign up today!

2 days ago I was a speaker at AANUG, the local .net user group, giving a talk about umbraco 4.0. About 35 people attended the talk, which covered everything
from new features in Umbraco 4.0, event-handlers, what we do as a commercial company and how the community around umbraco works.

A big thank-you to KMD, who hosted the event in the probably most posh offices around here, and the most advanced conference room I've ever seen, and of-course to the AANUG organisers for inviting me.

During the talk I mentioned a couple of projects and tools, I've listed those below, as well as the visual studio 2008 project which contains a couple of event handlers, an xslt extention, and a usercontrol.

XSLT Helper, to view what data is on the current page

XSLT search, plug and play search engine

Umbraco books, our user submitted documentation

Umbraco forum, to primary place to get help

I'm back from the Umbraco Benelux meetup, which this time took place in Amsterdam, Holland.

The conference room at Mirabeau was packed, all 35 spots available for this event was taken just 2 days after  announcing them, so the organisers: Dirk De Grave, Richard Soeteman, Ruben Verborgh and Tim Geyssens have every reason to be very pleased with the event.

The meetup was in every sense a succes, and a sign of a very mature umbraco community in the Benelux area.

Presentations that day

• Richard Söeteman showing usecases on umbraco event handlers, blog post
• PeterD showed off compression for umbraco, a calendar module and Apache2 running umbraco with mod_aspnet blog post.
• Tim Geyssens showing an Iphone Template package blog post
• Dirk De Grave showing how to do protected files and folders with the umbraco media library,
• and myself talking about creating value by sharing (massively inspired by Tor Nørretranders speech at Reboot10, with the tagline "share your shit"), and showing off selected V4 features, slides

After the planned presentations, an open-space like session / showoff unfolded with demoes of new media uploaders, TinyMCE plugins, UmbImport package and macro picker datatype, and some good discussions on the challenges of handling community projects, and sharing code across the community.

Thanks to everybody for coming, thanks to Mirabeau for hosting it,  and massive kudos to the organisers, you pulled off a great event, good speakers and good knowledge sharing. It is events like these that build great communities, and all it requires is a handfull of passionate people who wants to get together and share their knowledge.

Again, thank you all, I'm looking forward to the next Umbraco Community Meetup, where-ever it might be.

UPDATE: Martijn Maris has posted photos from the event on his blog and flickr

The annual Umbraco Developer Conference - "CodeGarden" - is taken place in Copenhagen, Denmark from June 22nd - 23rd 2009. If you've never attended you'll be blown away. CodeGarden is not an average conference, instead it's more of an Umbraco Festival; two full days/evenings/nights of sharing, caring and mindblowing demos and sessions.

The who’s who of umbraco will be gathered and share their knowledge through talks, tutorials and via un-conference formats like open space or hacking sessions. We have booked a cool industrial venue in Copenhagen where we’ll have one huge room, three rooms for breakout sessions and a Café that serves your taste of espresso.

We'll have anything from beginner sessions, over advanced to pure hacking sessions. Add package developer contests, show-off event and not to mention the very crazy annual Umbraco BuzzBingo(tm). This is not to be missed.

The price for two full days (as in 8am - 11.59pm) including food, schwag and great people is just €400, but if you sign up before March 1st it's just €250 (that's our cost price). We'll have a dedicated site up and running during March but until then you can register here.

Hope to see you - it's going to be a blast (and yes, we'll show you something called Umbraco 4.1 too).

So why are you still reading this? Go sign up now!

After we've released we've seen a lot of focus on the major improvements in Umbraco 4 from the previous versions like support for MasterPages, MembershipProviders, Canvas Editing, Runway/Modules, etc.

But Umbraco 4 is also the most polished version ever with a ton of small - or even tiny - details that makes Umbraco 4 a much improved user experience. Every now and then I plan to do a little blog post about some of those and today I'll start with a tiny detail with a very convenient result:

Section links and improved titles in the back office

When you bookmark the umbraco back office in your browser, it'll remember the section as well as adding the domain to the title. This means that it's easy and fast to quickly open several tabs with the different sections you need quickly. No longer a need to open the back office and click the various sections.

This is not a revolution, but it's so convenient and after a few days you can't imagine living without it.

This morning umbraco.org just got a sister for all of our German Umbraco users. Say hello to umbraco.de. It's a mirror of the most important parts of umbraco.org, made by Thorsten Hoffman of Sitepunkt.com.

Hopefully this will help raising the adoption of Umbraco to our neighbors down south and hopefully this will be a great resource for starting a great German community.

Thank you to Thorsten for his unbelievable work. Needless to say that the bar to get MVP'ed just got lifted this morning.

Ladies and Gentlemen, raise your glasses and head over to codeplex to download the result of 18 months of amazing work by the core team. In other words, we proudly present the release of Umbraco 4!

The ultra solid release of Umbraco is raising the bar in the Web CMS industry. The stability, the clean and user friendly UI, the beautiful and simple Canvas editing, the inclusion of community work, the integration to the .NET framework and the absolutely control over markup is second to none.

A massive, massive thanks to the coreteam and to our fabulous community who've helped with testing the past six months!

Now, it's time for celebration. Anyone who fancy are welcome to join us at Chainbox tonight. They got free beers from 20.00 and we'll be joining around 23.00.

Time to party!

Fantastisc news: Last night we made the last commit to the Umbraco 4.0 branch, which means that Umbraco 4 is now ready for release, which will happen tomorrow. That's two days before planned!

We'll spend the next two days with extensive tests, preparing intro videos for Umbraco 4 and polishing Runway modules to make sure they all behave as they should.

We'll only update the source in the case that we encounter a show stopper bug, so this means that nightly build #74 is probably the release (it'll bear the internal version number 4.0.0RC3 until it's released).

Help us!

If you want to help us making this release stellar, then download the build #74 and report any issues to our Codeplex tracker. You can also help us and fellow umbracians by updating languages files.

Celebrate

There's release celebrations going on in both Copenhagen and London tomorrow (Friday) evening. In London it's Darren Ferguson who's arranging so let him know if you want to join. In Copenhagen me and Per is inviting you to join us for some late night beers on us.

While Per and I are inviting people to join us in Copenhagen, Denmark late Friday evening for some celebration beers (e-mail us if you want to join), Darren Ferguson thought that everyone in the London area should do the same. So his inviting you to celebrate the launch of Umbraco 4 this Friday together with him and fellow umbracians in the London area.

Free beers and an improvised Umbraco meetup - what more could you wish for?

Details and sign up on Darrens blog

As Umbraco 4 is coming on Friday it's a good idea to start preparing upgrades. We've gone to great lengths to make sure that Umbraco is as compatible with Umbraco 3 as possible and Umbraco 4 includes an automated upgrade wizard that will convert any existing Umbraco 3.0.5+ installation to Umbraco 4, including converting your old templates to the new MasterPage syntax. For most installations, upgrading shouldn't be a problem and should take less than an hour.

In general it's very few items that aren't supported, but if you're using any of these features, upgrading is not straight forward:

• The XSLT helper method RenderTemplate(). As we've switched from the old proprietary template model in Umbraco 2 and 3 to ASP.NET MasterPages in Umbraco 4, the RenderTemplate can no longer be used. If your site depends on the RenderTemplate functionality, you need to disable MasterPages as continue to use the old template model which is still supported in Umbraco 4 by editing /config/umbracoSettings.config and set "useAspNetMasterPages" to false. It's crucial that you change this setting in the Umbraco 4 distribution before you copy the Umbraco 4 files.
• UltraSimpleMailer / Newsletter. This is not compatible with Umbraco 4 as it relied on a very old WYSIWYG editor and the old template model. We're working on making a new version of the UltraSimpleMailer, but it won't be ready for the release of Umbraco 4 on Friday. If you're using the UltraSimpleMailer we suggest that you don't upgrade yet.
• 3rd party datatypes. In general all old data types should work with umbraco if they're made using best practices. However, we can't give any guarantees that they'll work and you should make sure to test them first.

How to upgrade

First of all the upgrade wizard only supports Umbraco 3.0.5+ installations (while 3.0.3 installations apparently work too). If you're running an older version of Umbraco (2.0, 2.1 or <3.0.5) you should first upgrade to Umbraco 3.0.6.

Secondly, make sure that your site doesn't use any of the un supported functionality described above and if it does make sure that you follow the suggestions above.

Upgrade:

1. Before you upgrade make sure to backup your files and your database and make sure that you run the upgrade on a local development server and not in a hosted environment.
2. If you have special settings in your web.config or in your config files in the /config directory such as XSLT Extensions or localized url replacement characters, make sure to have those changes nearby as you'll need to update those settings after the upgrade. You might want to use a diff tool to see the differences.
3. Extract the Umbraco 4 zip somewhere local outside your development environment.
4. Copy the /web.config, /default.aspx, /bin, /config, /masterpages, /umbraco and /umbraco_client from the unpacked files to your umbraco 3 installation.
5. Update the web.config and the /config files if you had any special settings (from step 2)
6. Start a browser and point it to the root of your site (ie. http://localhost or http://mysite.com)
7. Follow the installation wizard - it should upgrade your database and your templates automatically

If you have any troubles upgrading, let us know in the comments and if you encounter any bugs add them to the Codeplex tracker.

• Umbraco v4, a brief overview
• Umbraco show cases (presented by Mirabeau)
• Canvas (Live Editing)
• Datalayer model
• Event model
• Umbraco extensibility model
• ... Suggest a topic!

The final release candidate of Umbraco 4 is out and available for download at CodePlex.

The focus the past week have been on stability and fixing any serious issues. The last Release Candidate added error when deleting files and macros via the context menu and we’ve made sure that all that is working again.

We’ve also polished the Membership Provider, so that it’s 100% compatible with the umbraco content and members for security trimming. Word is also 100% compatible with Umbraco Content Channels including uploading images and charts and speaking of Content Channels, it also supports the umbraco tagging control now.

The internal search index have been upgraded to Lucene 2.0 and it’s better at auto correcting any errors and you can now also activate internal search dialog by pressing SPACE in the search box. Apart from this we’ve made a good bunch of UI polishing and upgraded jQuery to 1.3.1.

We’re confident that we’ll have a release of Umbraco 4 on Friday - YAY!

Download and full changelog at CodePlex.

Today we're launching a new tool on umbraco.org: A community based translation tool for the umbraco UI files.

The umbraco backend is already 100% translateable so it can work with any language. This is done by storing all UI text in a seperate file, so to make umbraco available in another language, you basicly just translate that single file and a new language is available.

Untill now, it's been a hassle to keep track of the different language versions floating around on different blogs, wikis and 3rd party sites, and it's been a hassle to maintain these files on each new release.

But no more, today we're opening up for our wonderfull community to be an even more active part of umbraco developement. Directly on umbraco.org it is now possible to edit and manage different language versions of the UI files. Everyone can take part in editing these files, and anyone can start working on a new language and get help from fellow community members.

When a file is completed it can be downloaded directly from umbraco.org, and will also be available in the package repository as a language package for umbraco version 4.

We believe our community is without any doubt umbracos greatest assett, this language tool is the first of many new things we are planing for our community to take even greater part in making and defining umbraco.

We launched a beta on twitter 2 days ago, at the time of this posting, 7 language projects has been started and contributed to by the community, impressive!

The language tool can be found at "language files" in the documentation section

It’s for real - Umbraco 4 RC2 is out. As we’re approaching the final release date it’s all in the details now. We’re so happy and proud that after three months of intense testing no show-stopper bugs have been found. Umbraco 4 will be the most polished and tested Umbraco release ever and with this release candidate we’re finally revealing how it’ll end up looking – yes, we’re introducing a new consistent scheme:

We’ve also done yet-another massive clean-up in all client markup, images and JavaScript which means even faster load times, cleaner code and compatibility with all modern browsers: Microsoft IE7, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Sticking with client code we’ve also upgraded jQuery to the just released version 1.3 and after some initial quirks it’s working and screaming.

TinyMCE3 is also integrated beautifully with the new umbraco UI with Link, media and macro handling receiving the final polish and “Send to Translation”, the overlooked feature in Umbraco, finally has its own room plus an improved UI, Workflow and a handful of bug fixes.

Finally the Member section have gone through a well-deserved round of TLC so the Umbraco UI also support creating, editing and deleting members stored in 3^rd party systems as well as maintaining Roles.

Full changelog, upgrade instructions and download on codeplex

Once again it's course time and if you want to become an umbraco ninja taught by me and Per, you'll need to come to Copenhagen, Denmark on February 10-11th and 12-13th. Last course sold out in 24 hours, so don't wait too long to bug your boss!

The courses will follow the very same model that have made the last nine rounds of courses a massive success, and just like last it'll focus entirely about Umbraco 4 which will be released on January 30th!

So we'll look at Masterpages, XSLT Debugging with Visual Studio, the new Event model, Canvas Editing, Membership Providers, Package creation and many of the other improvements that'll make Umbraco 4 a milestone in Web CMS. By attending the course you'll be among the very first to become experts and certified on the new platform.

The agendas for the courses are as follows:

February 10-11th: Level 1 - implementing websites using umbraco:

• Understanding the umbraco basics - Boost/Nitro, Document Types, Templates and Macros (including usage of the new Masterpages functionality)
• Creating a simple website from scratch
• Understanding XSLT - creating a news "module"
• Creating multi-language websites including coverage of Dictionary Items and Languages
• Advanced properties: Re-use of properties and recursive usage of properties
• Two-way feedback using AutoForms and Notifications
• Optimizing markup for Canvas Editing
• Great Packages: Implementing full-text searching and mail forms

February 12-13th: Level 2 - umbraco for .NET Developers, extending and integrating solutions

• Usage of .NET User Controls with umbraco
• Debugging XSLT and .NET Controls with umbraco and Visual Studio
• In-depth explanation of the umbraco object model and usage of the umbraco presentation APIs
• Creating, importing and modifying content from .NET using the API
• Usage of AJAX and umbraco
• Extending XSLT with custom .NET classes
• Custom event handling in umbraco using the brand new event handlers in Umbraco 4
• How to integrate legacy authentication systems using Membership and Role Provider

The registration is open and the first seats are already booked - as always we encourage you to register fast as the past courses have all sold out (and as mentioned the last one in 24 hours!).

Everybody talks about the need of documentation and 2008 has indeed been a year where it has improved a lot. But I want to work more on documentation in 2009 and I want to know what you need. So here's a pretty good offer:

Mail me your top three of articles you want or wished was there when you started. You'll need to be very specific (a how to build a website or how to make a Facebook clone won't do!) and you should also tell me why you need it to help me get a better understanding.

In return there's not only a very good chance that I'll make sure it gets written, but the five best/most thorough ideas will also get the exclusive super cool Umbraco T-shirt from CodeGarden 08 (I got sizes from medium to extra large - I'll ship world wide).

Mail me at nh AT umbraco [.], add doc2tshirt as the subject.

Hi Umbracians! I’m Ruben and after the splendid Umbraco 4 announcement, I have a small milestone of my own I want to share. Today is my first anniversary in the Umbraco community, an excellent occasion for looking back on my experiences so far.

How it all started

December 2007, my home-brewed CMS required more customized than standard code for new websites. Searching an off-the-shelf CMS was a tough job: I wanted .Net, low-budget (= free) and most importantly: total freedom over input and output.

Umbraco offered all of this features, combined with a functional and user-centric backend I had never seen before. One exception: it required SQL Server, not present at my low-budget server. My first post on the Umbraco forum was a reckless one, but quite determined at the same time: I knew I wanted Umbraco, and quickly.

How things changed

Umbraco enabled me to take both my web development skills and the quality of my websites to a higher level. It combines the flexibility of a custom site with the functionality and quality of any other major CMS. I’m now a proud administrator of 15 small Umbraco websites, including my own blog where I post Umbraco goodies from time to time. Be sure to check it out!

I also witnessed an ongoing shift in the core team towards better documentation and cleaner code. This approach has been really visible in both the development process of Umbraco version 4 and last week’s release candidate. An important example is Runway (formerly Boost), which helps anyone getting started in no time.

How the community cares

Talking about Umbraco as a couple of software files is nonsense. From day 1 onwards, I felt the support of a caring community and I was very happy to meet many of these inspiring people at CodeGarden ’08. I came to understand how free and invaluable go hand in hand. An stimulating example for me are two fellow Belgians who started making a living out of Umbraco this year.

Looking back at 2008, I had a great time helping develop Umbraco. Open source is a hot topic nowadays, and being part of this project made me understand why. It’s not about giving: it’s a about sharing, which is a two-way thing.

A special memory is the feeling I got when working together with Niels and Tim back in August: just a crazy idea and far too less time. But the right spirit and the we-can-do-it mentality resulted in Canvas (formerly Live Editing): a super cool new feature which I hope you all are going to use from now on!

I hope the we-can-do-it spreads again in 2009 over the Umbraco community.
And rest assured, we have some neat stuff up our sleeves for you!

A giant milestone was reached today. After 18 months of development, Umbraco 4 is in Release Candidate and what a candidate. It's the most stunning, fast, polished and flexible release of Umbraco ever and it's super stable. We recommend this to all new projects and we've made it the default release (you can still download 3.0.6 though).

In the last run we’ve concentrated on polishing the last bits including the installing experience, enhancing the support for validation of generic properties and we’ve also added an update checker than will check for updates every 7 days (configurable in the web.config) and show a message about upgrade to administrators.

But why have you read all this, when you should be downloading!

We've just released Take V of Umbraco 4, beta 2 and this means that we're finally feature complete and a release candidate is just around the corner (this will be the last beta). We’ve added the final touches to TinyMCE3, implemented changes in conventions (see below), added categories to modules (was: Nitros) and fixed the last serious bugs in Canvas (was: Live Editing).

New conventions (renaming)

We’ve changed the codenames of Boost, Nitro and Live Editing (none of them was ever meant to last this long). We’ve worked together with Bjarne Tveskov (http://tveskov.com) – an experienced naming guru – to come up with names and conventions that are easy to digest while still makes it possible to “brand” some of these great new features.

The packages that have been called Nitros in this beta stage was the easiest one to name – we should just call it what it is; a “module”. Boost has been renamed to “Runway” as a metaphor for a fast way to start your project journey and Live editing is now called “Canvas” to emphasize that it’s a surface where you simply touch the items you want to change. So welcome these new words and forget about those codenames ;-)

TinyMCE / Rich text editor

The integration of TinyMCE3 is now finally done and it’s stellar. No other Web CMS features such a smooth integration of a WYSIWYG editor:

· You have 100% control over formatting. Instead of allowed styles, headers and colors, we simply have one “Choose style” dropdown. It combines headers and special styles, so the editor doesn’t need to worry about which is what and items are easily added to the dropdown by adding substyles on a stylesheet added to umbraco (simply right click a stylesheet and select create)

· You can configure size (width/height), associated stylesheets and the buttons that should appear in the Rich Text Editor (RTE). You can even choose which user types that should have access to advanced options in the link and insert image dialogs.

· Whenever you paste any dirty markup will automatically be converted into valid xhtml strict markup and only headers (h1-h6) that’s in the “Choose style…” dropdown is allowed. Any other header will be converted into a strong paragraph.

· We automatically server-side scale images inserted in the richtext editor and make sure the proportions are constrained

· You can insert and preview macros directly inside the RTE. Simply check the “Use In Editor” box when editing a macro and your editors can place them wherever they want to in the RTE.

· It’s easy to link to pages or media in umbraco by simply selecting the page or file in the “Insert link” dialog. When you do an internal link in umbraco you’ll now see the “Nice url” instead of the old “{locallink:xxxx}” syntax. Of course internal links are updated if naming changes.

· We’ve also made it possible to add any new TinyMCE plugins in the tinymce.config file and we’ve even added support for custom config options, that’s added when umbraco initialize the editor. This means that any plugin in any configuration is possible without modifying any code!

· You can create multiple instances of the RTE (right click DataTypes in the developer section and select create. Give the RTE a name and select “TinyMCE3” as the rendercontrol.

Updates to modules (was: Nitros)

We’ve added categories to modules and to make it easy when you install we’ve added an “Editors picks” category with the most exciting and relevant packages you can choose during the install. To make it easier to understand what the different modules does, we’ve prepared a demo link on each module that’ll open a modal window with a little screencast showing the functionality. These links will automatically appear as videos streamed from the central repository server.

Updates to Canvas (was: Live Editing)

Canvas is finally stable and works without any showstopper flaws in Internet Explorer and Firefox. TinyMCE works smoothly, including context menus and dropdowns in the toolbar, which previously have caused loss of focus.

Grap your copy of Umbraco 4, beta 2, take V here.

Since the last beta release (beta 2, take 3, released November 16^th) we’ve continued towards getting V4 ready for a release candidate status. This means more polishing of the UI, getting rid of performance issues, doing the final tweaks on the backend and simplifying where possible.

Especially TinyMCE received a lot of love and care for this release and is now almost feature complete.
Style insert now works, better then ever. Links and media handling has been fixed, so the only thing missing from being 100% complete is the paste functionality

Version4 is now compatible with SQLServer 2000, both for new installations and for upgrades.

We’re continuing on working on getting the UI visually 100% ready. There are still areas we would like to update before a final release, but it is all related to the UI, not functionality.

Get the release on Codeplex

Since Friday we’ve made some significant changes to the event model in Umbraco version 4. This means that it is not backwards compatible with Beta 2, take 3.

We’ve introduced these breaking changes a bit late in the development cycle, but due to the lack of focus on events so far we hope that it is a minimal number of installations we will affect with this change. From a technical standpoint they are absolutely worth it. We’ve added 2 major changes:

Simplified

We’ve simplified the way you hook into events by adding an extra level of abstraction. So no more working with an interface with 10 unused fields.

Cancellable

All before events can now cancel out the associated action. So the BeforePublish event can actually stop the publishing from happening.

Code sample

To hook into umbraco’s events, you need to register your code when umbraco starts up. You do this by using the umbraco.BusinessLofic.ApplicationBase class and an empty constructor. A sample application could look like this:

public class AppBase : umbraco.BusinessLogic.ApplicationBase {
public AppBase() {
umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Document.BeforePublish += new umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Document.PublishEventHandler(Document_BeforePublish);
}

void Document_BeforePublish(umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Document sender, umbraco.cms.businesslogic.PublishEventArgs e) {

umbraco.BusinessLogic.Log.Add(umbraco.BusinessLogic.LogTypes.Debug, sender.Id,sender.Text + " is about to be published");
//cancel the publishing
e.Cancel = true;

}

}

The above code subscribes to the BeforePublish event, logs the document about to be published, and then cancels the publishing by setting e.Cancel to true.

Umbraco will automatically detect all ApplicationBase classes and instantiate them on start-up, and thereby ensuring that the events work.

Boost / Nitro compatible

Files placed in the App_Code folder will also be detected by umbraco. This means you can redistribute your event handlers as basic .cs files, and be Nitro Compatible (Nitros forbid compiled code)

Intelli-sense support

Finally, umbraco events are fully supported by intelli-sense in visual studio. So after adding the Umbraco dll’s (businesslogic.dll & cms.dll) to a project it is possible to just write:

umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Document.BeforePublish += and then hit the tab button twice. This will generate all the plumbing code to subscribe to the BeforePublish event.

Future reference

For future reference, the sample code has been placed in the API Cheatsheet book under documentation.

Per and I are working hard on getting Umbraco 4 ready for Release Candidate and as a part of testing, we've added some additional "Nitro" packages for testing to get a better feeling on how the whole new Boost/Nitro (still codenames which is will change) concept works.

So yesterday we added Dropdown menus and Gallery - both using jQuery and both are very clean and integrates very smooth with the barebone Boost templates. The Gallery supports multiple albums and you can either upload pictures manually or simply upload a zip file with images on the album itself. An event handler will then create all images in the zip as photos in your album.

It's been lots of fun to make these new packages and even more fun to test them and discover how smooth they work. From creating them using nothing but umbraco objects, to package them using the new package creator bundled with Umbraco 4 to submitting them to the central repository and finally install them on a clean umbraco install.

Extra credit also goes to jQuery which I simply love more and more everytime I use it. As you probably know if you've followed us on Twitter, jQuery is the new black in the umbraco UI and we're updating (almost) all old client script code to use jQuery where it make sense. We also like to encourage package developers to use jQuery and there's no better way to encourage this than conventions. So yesterday we added a new method to the umbraco.library that you can call from XSLT (or .NET): AddJquery(). It'll simply add a reference to the jQuery javascript in the header of the page if it's not already there. It only works in the latest nightly, so our latest nitros doesn't use this before RC.

We need your help

While two additional Nitros is cool, we want more and we think this is an area where the community can help a lot. We've created two free videos on umbraco.tv that describe how to build and submit Nitros as well as a pdf with documentation on the different Actions that a Nitro can use. If you want to help with this let me know on nh AT umbraco . dk. Feel free to add ideas to usefull nitros in the comments - on my own wishlist for new Nitros is:

• News list (including automatically add year/month folders)
• FAQ (including submit a question)
• Event Calendar
• Job postings
• Polls

For inspiration on referring css/js in your nitro xslt, take a look at the gallery or the dropdown menu nitros - it's very easy and without limitations. It's a lot of fun to see functionality you've build install very smoothly on a clean install and it's loads of fun to make a clean install of umbraco and just add a few clicks in checkboxes and see a complete, customized site ready for styling in a couple of minutes. Let's work together on making this a success!

On behalf of the fabulous core team, I'm happy to announce that take 3 of Umbraco 4 beta 2 is out.

In the past week we’ve focused on updating the tinymce3 implementation (the richtext editor), maturing the LiveEditing as well as various usability improvements in the template section.

Most notable is that macros are back in tinymce and working better than ever. You can also add more than one tinymce editor to a tab now and we’ve upgraded tinymce to the latest version which means that it works flawlessly with IE8 as well. We’ve also added two new buttons in the template editor to make it easier to understand relationships between content and contentplaceholder controls.

LiveEditing has also matured and is so stable now that we’ve added a new contextmenu item on every
content node that enables liveediting with a single click.

With this take 3 we’re very close in having all features completely implemented and this means we’ll soon be able to release the Release Candidate. It’s a matter of one or two takes more.

There are still areas that doesn’t visually look as good as we want them to, but in this take we’ve been
focusing on getting the functionality in place and move improved icons, styling and copywriting to the next take.

Download at Codeplex and keep the feedback coming in the forums (if in doubt what's going on), in the issue tracker (if you're sure something is not as it should be) or in the comments. The more feedback, the faster the final release.

Get testing!

In the past week we’ve focused on removing serious businesslogic bugs, cross browser compatibility and polishing the UI.

Most remarkable result this week, is a reduction in back office load times of 70% compared
to Umbraco v3!

This means that any issues with backwards compatibility in the APIs are solved, we got full support for WebKit based browsers in the backend (Safari/Chrome), IE6 works again and quirks with Firefox andediting document type properties are solved.

We’ve also “leaned” the javascript library usage in umbraco, so we no longer rely on a lot of different libraries. 

At the same time we’re compressing client script files in our build process to make the umbraco UI much more lightweight – the complete size of client files have gone from 7.8mb to 287kb!

The release is available on codeplex with a full list of changes

Due to overwhelming demand, we have decided to run an extra batch of courses in November. The last time we sold out in less then 24 hours, so act fast to get a seat.

New course dates in november

The extra level 1 course will run on November 25-26th More

The extra level 2 course will run on November 27-28th More

These 2 courses will also focus on the new version 4 and all it's new features, as well as the regular course program which, for the last year and a half, has made our courses a sold-out success every time.

Register here

Act fast

There are only 12 spots on each course. We want to keep the classes small and the quality high. By having the number of attendees low, we have more time for each individual persons questions and ideas.

So register today, since closing registration on the last course we received a lot of emails from people wishing to sign up for the waiting list.  

Register here

Both the level 1 and level 2 of our highly-praised courses have been completely sold-out in less than 24 hours!

The response to these courses have always been fantastic, but this is the first time we've sold out this fast. 

If you want to get on the waiting list for the course, in case we get more seats open or someone cancels. You should sign on to the course waiting list at once.

I'm very much looking forward to meeting you all in November. 

We're finally running a round of courses again - on November 17-18th and 20-21st. Short notice, but a lot of things had to click to make this happen.

The courses will follow the very same model that have made the last eight rounds of courses a massive success, but this time it'll focus entirely about Umbraco 4 which will be released by the end of this year and which gained use-for-new-projects status with the release of Beta 2 last Friday (more on that later this week).

So we'll look at Masterpages, XSLT Debugging with Visual Studio, the new Event model, Live Editing, Membership Providers, Package creation and many of the other improvements that'll make Umbraco 4 a milestone in Web CMS. By attending the course you'll be among the very first to become experts and certified on the new platform.

The agendas for the courses are as follows:

November 17-18th: Level 1 - implementing websites using umbraco:

• Understanding the umbraco basics - Boost/Nitro, Document Types, Templates and Macros (including usage of the new Masterpages functionality)
• Creating a simple website from scratch
• Understanding XSLT - creating a news "module"
• Creating multi-language websites including coverage of Dictionary Items and Languages
• Advanced properties: Re-use of properties and recursive usage of properties
• Two-way feedback using AutoForms and Notifications
• Optimizing markup for Live Editing
• Great Packages: Implementing full-text searching and mail forms

November 20-21st: Level 2 - umbraco for .NET Developers, extending and integrating solutions

• Usage of .NET User Controls with umbraco
• Debugging XSLT and .NET Controls with umbraco and Visual Studio
• In-depth explanation of the umbraco object model and usage of the umbraco presentation APIs
• Creating, importing and modifying content from .NET using the API
• Usage of AJAX and umbraco
• Extending XSLT with custom .NET classes
• Custom event handling in umbraco using the brand new event handlers in Umbraco 4
• How to integrate legacy authentication systems using Membership and Role Provider

The registration is open and the first seats are already booked - as always we encourage you to register fast as the past courses have all sold out.

Per and I survived the keynote where we showed of Umbraco 4 beta 2 which is feature complete. As always our ambitions of always showing the most edgy stuff gave us a couple of bumps but in general it was great. We got the following Umbraco 4 demos done live:

• Easy install
• Automated upgrades from v3 to Umbraco 4
• Boost and Nitros - a common convention for building umbraco sites
• Improved UI, much faster and cleaner code - and much prettier
• Much easier and cleaner extension of the umbraco UI
• The new integrated package repository and submission in Umbraco 4
• Better security and easier administration of permissions
• Masterpages support including using SVN to manage history and rollback
• Master document types along with the story of how it got evolved (my personal favorite)
• Membership Providers, including use of the default ASP.NET member/role provider to protect pages in umbraco with personalized navigations
• The new event model. How to respond to new media created and how to add context menu items to the content tree for Check-in/check-out without modifying the core
• Live Editing, including macro containers, inline XSLT and new nodeId attribute on Item fields for accessing media and member information without macros

So it was ambitious and if we actually manage to get the video out, you'll also see that not everything worked as planned. But we did get all the demos done and that was awesome. Umbraco 4 is a killer and the reaction was really good.

And hey - American umbracians are as friendly as the European ones and thanks to TimG we'll have bingo running tonight, including the taggy music. How did that became a tradition :-O

Love,
Niels...

Btw: Here's my slides (they don't work with the default previewer if you're on OSX - use acrobat).

Wow - CodeGarden US starts tomorrow where we'll be around 30 American umbracians gathered to exchange knowledge, talk about promoting umbraco in the US and of course see all the great stuff that Umbraco 4 has got to offer. Boy, I'm excited!

Per and I went out with Bob and Casey yesterday and tonight a lot of the CG attendees will be gathered at the Best Western River North and I think we'll got out for a dinner. Per and I got a lot of great stuff to show and we're also looking forward to present Umbraco 4 like we did in June - this time, it just got even better.

We'll try to give updates on this blog during the event - we didn't really have time for that at CG in June, but this time we're lucky that Paul, Bob, Doug and Casey are the organizers so we shouldn't really have an excuse. I'll also be posting pictures on my 23 account and I'm sure that pictures will start coming up on Flickr (use the cgus08 tag if you post) soon as well.

See you all tomorrow!

We are overly delighted to present umbraco.tv  today.

umbraco.tv is an online training resource with more then 25 videos available at launch - that's more then 5 hours of quality video on umbraco covering every imaginable topic, and this is just the beginning.

umbraco.tv will keep on growing, new videos will be added every month, ensuring that you will always have access to relevant learning materials on uptodate topics.

Umbraco.tv has been in development the last 18 months, based on feedback from more then 200 participants on the sold-out umbraco courses we've put together a wide selection of videos on the the most sought after
topics, from the fundamentals to the advanced, from basic XSLT to obscure c#, everything is or will be covered on umbraco.tv.

Umbraco.tv is instantly available today, with 2 free videos to show what umbraco.tv is all about, one on document types and one on .net user controls.

Umbraco.tv and Umbraco Pro (which was launched a couple of weeks ago) is something we've been looking forward to launching for a very long time.

With these 2 launches we've shown that umbraco is the choice for a cms solution. Nowhere else can you find an open source cms with such comprehensive commercial support,
developer tools and online training materials as umbraco, there's simply nothing that gets even close.

We hope that you will enjoy umbraco.tv, and look forward to feedback on how to improve it even further.

The work of Umbraco 4 is maturing and we're getting closer to Beta 2, which is the final beta of Umbraco 4 - the feature complete version. The improvements of the past week includes:

• Live Editing (podcast)
• Master Document Types (screencast)
• Document Types and Templates are now shown hierarchical in the tree view (screenshot)
• (Much, much, much) Better markup in back office
• Massive performance enhancements

As we're getting closer and closer, chances are that the automated nightly builds (available here) might have some quirks. After all, automated means that they get build by a machine every time the clock reaches 1am, not when we think so. That's why I've made a new category in the forum for feedback on the nightly builds as well as the specific issues that relates to Umbraco 4.

Exciting times...

BTW: At CodeGarden US here in October, Per and I will come and talk about all the cool new stuff in Umbraco 4 - you don't want to miss that, do you?