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Douglas Robar did it again - took the time to write yet another of his amazing and detailed books on how to install umbraco. Following the series that already includes installing 3.x on Vista and 2.x and XP comes a long waited guaranteed  bestseller: Installing umbraco 3.x on Windows XP.

It's probably the most comprehensive guide to installing a piece of software ever made - nothing is missed. Even guides on how to install pre-requisites are explained step-by-step with screenshots included. You can even print the complete install guide, by clicking the print link on the home page of the book.

Doug, you're simply amazing - this will help a lot.

Douglas Robar is a freelancer and umbraco wizard with a vision to improving the communication of complex ideas. He has already used this vision to create two fabulous extensions to umbraco - XSLTSearch and ImageGen. Doug is available for hire through his company Percipient Studios, Louisville, KY.

Morten Bock has arranged an umbraco meetup in Århus after the Silverlight event. Leave a comment on his blog if you wanna join!

BONUS: The meetup place has a minigolf count on the top of the roof - so for the first time, we'll have the official umbraco mini-golf championships (there'll be a t-shirt for the winner).

I'll be doing a little bit of speaking this fall:

• August 28th + 30th. I'll be talking about Silverlight together with Microsoft Denmark
• September 7th. I'll be talking about my experiences with running an open source project at the .NET Erfa Group (experience group) at Danish Techonology Institute
• Some time october. I'll be talking about umbraco at the Norwegian .NET User Group

Anyone wanna hook up in either Århus or Copenhagen after the silverlight presentations to talk about umbraco, let's do it.

Do you have an event where you'd like me to talk, send me an e-mail and let's see if we can make it happen. I love talking ;-)

Finally I found the time to upgrade umbracoStats, but there's more news than just a little upgrade.

I decided to make the "light" version free and with instant delievery. So if you're a non-profit or just wants some nice integrated stats to your personal website, you can get it for free. If you think you'll need the real thing, I also decided to extend the trial period from 7 to 30 days.

And what is a better way to celebrate this little release than making the upgrade free for existing users and offering 15% discount for new-comers. If you use "1.1" (without the quotes) as the coupon code, you'll get the standard version for just around 210$ and the premium for just around $295.

Now to the enhancements:

To order your own copy, go to the umbracoStats website.

To upgrade, download the 1.1 upgrade package here.

Douglas Robar have created some excellent and detailed "umbraco books" on how to install umbraco 3 on Vista and umbraco 2.1 on XP. Douglass is by the way the creator of both ImageGen and XSLT Search, two fantastic add-ons to umbraco and he's even available for hire!

If you need to install v3 on XP, you can combine information from the two books. Kasper Ulvedal is working on a book on installing v3 on XP, but that's work-in-progress and not completed yet (we need a way to mark a book "in-progress" to ensure that people don't get confused about empty or semi-empty books).

If you need to upgrade v2.x or a pre-release version of v3 this is the process:

1. BACKUP files + db(seriosuly)
2. 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
3. Unzip the downloaded release file v3xxx.zip
4. Copy /bin, /config, /install, /python, /scripts /umbraco and /umbraco_client from the zip into your v2/rc1 installation (yes, to overwrite)
5. 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!)
6. Copy the ui.xml back in place if you had that changed
7. Go to your website and the upgrade process should begin automatically

Today the webbureau Jesper.com made a significant donation to help improve the documentation. This donation will allow me to spend 30 hours to add sample code to the most important areas of the APIs as well as creating an umbraco book with an introduction to the api.

Here's some official information:

A great donation from the webbureau Jesper.com will improve the official umbraco docs significantly over the next months.

Jesper Ordrup from Jesper.com:
"Umbraco has done a great deal for me and my company and I thought it was about time to give something back. The best place to spend the money seems to be on documentation. Umbraco has (almost) everything we need in a CMS - now it's time to document and show it all."

umbraco founder Niels Hartvig adds:
"Donations like this are amazing for both umbraco as a company and for the community. It clearly proves that open eco-systems like this works much better than traditional software silos. Jesper.com was in need of more detailed documentation and with this generous donation, it'll satisfy not only his needs, but benefit the whole community."

For more information on how to donate, please contact Niels Hartvig

First day after the vacation is usually a nightmare of administration, but this years is different - I actually got things done. Version 3.0.2 of umbraco is out and it's a service release fixing 11 reported bugs. None of the bugs are major, which proves that v3 is the most stable release ever, so upgrade when it makes sense. The issues fixed are:

• content from macro's not previewable
• Final Release Bug - Content Editor
• V3 Release: Unsupported MetaBlog method "wp.newPage"
• umbraco.library.DateAdd in version 3.0.1
• Logged in member, deleted in backend
• TinyMCE set as mandatory generate Server/application error
• Splash page have wrong link to Package Repository
• Error when adding validation to controls that have a validation control associated
• Problems with unzipping certain packages from repo
• library methods may not return null
• Excerpts missing when editing posts through metablog api

Rest of the week will be less productive and more administration as I have over 350 non-spam e-mail in my inbox after 2½ week vacation. So please be patient if you've sent me an e-mail and I haven't gotten back to you yet!