2008

Per and I have been working really had the past weeks on getting 3.1 closer for a beta and it peaked this week where I want up to Per's office and we took some very long hours to get 3.1 ready for feature freeze. We're almost there, so we thought we would do a little chat about it. Unfortunately we decided to enjoy the nice weather and went outside, so the sound is quite low except when birds start twitting.

Links to stuff mentioned in the podcast:

• The CodeGarden website
• The Ismail Mayat's blogpost about search and CG08

The Level 1 course next week is now completely sold out - let us know if you want to come on the waiting list. There's still a few seats on the Level 2 but don't wait too long.

Can't wait to see you all - thanks for the support!

Great news for umbracians without MSDN subscriptions. With SP1 for Visual Studio, the free edition for web development called Visual Web Developer Express will get support for Web Application Projects.

This means full support for all the .NET features that umbraco can consume - for free. So finally joys like ActionHandlers, XSLT Extensions and Custom/User Controls can become for everyone which is really, really fantastic news.

There's already a beta of SP1 out there for any daring takers. Kudos to Microsoft for releasing this!

CodeGarden keeps getting better and better and we're finally able to announce one of our favorite events - The Package Coding Contest.

The mighty fine folks from the Microsoft Developer Evangelist team have sponsored a brand new XBOX 360 with Rockband to the best package announced and produced during CodeGarden (there'll also be some prizes for those coming 2nd and 3rd).

The precise terms of the contest will be revealed during the Keynote as they'll need to use some technology revealed there, but start preparing your packages and ideas already (it'll be easy to adopt your package and the whole core team is there to help you). We're looking for simple packages that only does one job.

We're not looking for complete website packages, but smaller things like cool navigation, a vacancy package, FAQ list, a great news system or something like that. It's also a requirement that your package is licensed under the open source MIT License and the html produced is valid and strict (x)html.

If you haven't registered for CodeGarden yet, hurry up - there's only a few seats left.

I just updated the CodeGarden program (our annual umbraco conference) now that more tutorials and talks are in place. Wow - it'll be a good show this year. Per and I are working really hard on getting some nice surprises ready for the keynote, so if we're a little bit less chatty here or on the forums, that's why.

There's still around 15 tickets left, so don't wait too long if you want to ensure a seat for just EUR350. Also, if you're coming make sure to add yourself (including a description in the bottom) to the upcoming page.

See you all in less than a month(!).

With the 3rd podcast coming this month, I can say for sure that this is no longer an experiment, but something we'll keep doing. It's very fun to do and the feedback has been phenomenal. If you got an interesting topic for a podcast and a webcam let me know and you can get some umbraco fame :-)

In this episode I had the great pleasure of talking to Mr. Paul Sterling of Motus Connect from Seattle, US aka the e-commerce king of umbraco.

Paul is the man behind the open source project commerce4umbraco which is a smooth integration between dashCommerce and umbraco. It offers everything you need when it comes to commerce, and even then, Paul claims in this podcast that he'll show at CodeGarden how to get up and running in 15 minutes:

Links to stuff mentioned in the podcast:

• The CodeGarden website
• The Motus Connect - Pauls company
  
• Theh commerce4umbraco website

By default I don't trust companies that produces market analyzes, research, benchmarks, evaluations and likewise (let's just call them benchmarks) and I rarely trust companies who claim to be impartial.

There's exceptions and my rule of thumb for trusting an impartial benchmark is openness and transparency on the economic aspects. That's an easy - albeit not bulletproof - way to test the level of neutrality. A report financed by the American car industry is as likely to promote Japaneese Hybrids as I am to promote Silverlight for the umbraco UI ;-)

This is why I have a principle of never paying to get umbraco evaluated. Today that principle just got umbraco excluded from a Benchmark that usually been good to us. But Benchmarks should be financed by the users, not by the participants that gets evaluated, as it's the only way to ensure neutrality. If we were to finance the report, we would take the money from our (tiny) marketing budget - and I think that says it all. It would no longer be an evaluation, it would become an ad in disguise.

Everybody wants an iPod Touch and we want everybody at CodeGarden. So we're introducing the latest initiative at CodeGarden '08: "umbraco Bingo".

That's right; a cheesy event with bingo plates full of umbraco expressions and your chance to win an iPod or kitch prices like a CD with Ole Erling aka Mr. Keyboard aka the music from our podcast, a signed poster with old umbraco screenshots and more.

The umbraco Bingo will be on day one between 17.00 and 18.00. So sign up for CodeGarden today and remember to practice ;-)

I had the great pleasure of interviewing umbraco MVP Mr. Douglas Robar aka the most helpful guy I've ever met, this evening. Even though we had some technical difficulties, it turned out to a great podcast covering the community, CodeGarden '08 and the future of Doug's great packages ImageGen and XSLTSearch.

As mentioned in the interview, Doug ask the community which of his tutorial ideas you'd like to see. Write about your favorite and why in the comments. The ideas were:

1. Sharing content between umbraco installations using XSLT
2. Bootstrapping e-commerce with umbraco and PayPal
3. Creating an image gallery using umbraco concepts and ImageGen
4. Search. A review of the different search solutions for umbraco and when and how to use what

Other links to stuff mentioned in the podcast:

• The CodeGarden website
• The Getting training in the US
  
• Douglas Robar's company website - Percipient Studios

The first 40 people have just taken the certification test and more are on their way and that's fantastic (see them here on a very beta'ish map). But that have also reminded us that we need to rename the courses/certifications to something else than Level 1 and Level 2.

The thing is that people tend to believe that Level 2 is better than Level 1 (are people playing too much WoW?), but it’s not. It’s two completely different things and that’s why we need your help to think of something better.

Level 1 is about implementing a website. The things you do when you get a design (whether it’s a photoshop file or an html mockup) and make it work in umbraco. Level 1 is about understanding Document Types, Templates, Stylesheets and basic XSLT macros.

Level 2 is about integrating and extending. It’s about understanding the umbraco APIs, Actionhandlers, Xslt Extensions and how .NET User/Custom Controls and umbraco work together.

Per and I have really tried to work out some new titles, but we’re stuck. So hit us with something cool and we’ll give you either a free ticket to CodeGarden or a free certification test. Add your suggestion in the comments.

Well, a little exaggeration never hurts. Silverlight is a fine piece of software, but the marketing and the perception of Silverlight is really wrong. Microsoft claims it’s the new black and the chorus of MS MVPs and fanboys goes “yeah, baby lets use it for everything”.

I think Silverlight is fantastic at handling multimedia – high def videos and fancy animations. It’s like the new Macromedia Director meant in a very positive way. It’s not the new HTML (as in html+js+rest). Just like Abobe AIR isn’t. But I see more and more people thinking of it as the new HTML – maybe because they never really understood HTML. Maybe because they never spend R&D hours on what’s possible with HTML and JS. Or maybe because there’s just too many drag’n’drop cowboys in the Microsoft world, that are excited about being able to finally do animations in a webbrowser because a new Developer IDE lets them. Yikes!

HTML has come really far and with HTML v5 it’s close as everything we wanted for creating reliable webapps that can replace the desktop. And HTML is a standard. An open standard. Silverlight is a proprietary tool from a company whose desperate at getting back control over the web. Something they lost years back when they dumped the IE team after making IE 6. Microsoft still got the biggest market share in OS and in browsers, but they’re not controlling the browser space anymore. They’re forced to keep improving the browser due to the pressure partly from other browser vendors, but more importantly the increasing numbers of web based apps that are making the OS less and less important (Vista adoption rate, anyone?).

The fact that we’re getting closer and closer to a software market space (the web) where there’s no gatekeeper is incredible and makes it possible for small companies and open source projects to innovate and make a big impact without worrying about keeping “the mom happy”.

Open standards like HTML are the foundation making this paradigm shift possible. They’re not controlled by a single company that needs to keep their shareholders happy. They’re controlled by an independent organization who wants to give us the best possible tools for creating cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device applications. This is why it’s crucially important that we do our best to support HTML. And this is why I like and dislike tools like Silverlight and Adobe AIR. We really don’t need them. And if the amounts of resources spend on Silverlight instead was spend on improving the tools for creating standard based web apps and making a complete implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 in IE8, we would have come really far.

So use Silverlight for multimedia, but don’t drink the Kool Aid. It would make the web sick.

We launched the Motus Connect Store last Friday and are excited about the potential for this offering to further enhance the appeal of Umbraco. The Motus Connect Store is a pre-cursor to the ‘official’ Umbraco Marketplace set to launch around CodeGarden’08. The Motus Connect Store allows Umbraco developers and publishers to list Umbraco related digital products for sale. Items such as packages, extensions, e-books, documentation, editors, and so on can all be easily listed. (You’re not limited to this list of course.)

http://store.motusconnect.com

At this point we encourage you to create a vendor profile here, and to begin creating your product listings. If you have any questions please contact us at any of the listed addresses at the store site.

We’re looking forward to working with you and helping to make Umbraco the most compelling open-source CMS with a broad eco-system of community and commercial offerings covering a wide-variety of general and specific applications.

Along with the Warren I too have just joined the Blog team at Umbraco.org. I began working with Umbraco in July 2007 after becoming dissatisfied with DNN for my intended use. I think what did it for me was the 7-part screencast (almost 3-hours!) covering how to create a custom control for DNN. With Umbraco this can be accomplished in a matter of minutes using ASP.NET user controls or XSLT.

In December 2007 I attended Niels’ Level-2 course in Copenhagen (which I highly recommend) and I’ve been an enthusiastic Umbraco devotee ever since.

I run the Umbraco focused company Motus Connect and am the Technical Lead for The Homax Group. I am also the current project owner of the Commerce for Umbraco open-source project. This project, although quite preliminary at the moment, will add commerce capability to Umbraco.

Finally, I am a member of the Umbraco marketplace team creating the repository for all things Umbraco (for purchase) and accessible alongside the existing Umbraco package repository.

Well without further-a-do minutes after my first introduction post, I'm here to tell you about my Twitter package for Umbraco.

If you don't know what Twitter is, well it is basically micro-blogging. Think of your Facebook status as microblogs. Twitter is very useful to tell alot of people what you are thinking, doing or whatever you want to say.

See my Twitter page for an idea of what I Tweet about - http://twitter.com/warrenbuckley

I created this package to display my latest tweet on my blog (which is under re-development), I released this on my blog and I got a follower to my twitter page called Nisse Bryngfors who sent me a reply.

@warrenbuckley just tried the twitter package for umbraco.Great!Is there any way to display people you follow, instead of just your own feed?

So I did just that I created a package that allowed you to display your own twitter feed or a feed which is a mixture of your tweets and tweets of other people you follow (friends).

I then released that package on my blog site and Nisse wanted to be able to make the links in the tweets automatically be anchor tags and that the @warrenbuckley text to link the appropriate users twitter page.

So without further a do earlier today I released v1.2.0 of this package on my blog which includes instructions.

Additionally here is a useful post I made earlier in the year on how to synchronise your twitter and Facebook using MSN Messenger.

//Warren

Hello all, this is my first blog for Umbraco.org. Some of you may not know me so I'll make a quick introduction. Well my name is Warren Buckley and I run the blog Creative Web Specialist which is my personal blog for code snippets in webdesign and umbraco related posts.

I have been using Umbraco for about 3 to 4 years now and think its a great product. In the early days of Umbraco I was using the mailing list and forum to post lots of questions of how to achieve common functionality and other people have learnt from the questions I have asked.

Last year I attended Codegarden (the great Umbraco conference) and was awarded an MVP (Most Valued Person) for my contribution to Umbraco and the community.

I mainly try to create Umbraco packages that the community can benefit from and make life for beginners to Umbraco as pain-free as possible, with my most popular package being the website wizard "Creative Website Package".

Recently I joined the great Web team Xeed in Norway who specialise in Umbraco websites, and that brings up today!

With that over and done with, I plan to blog about packages for Umbraco and snippets and useful posts for the beginners to Umbraco in mind, I hope you enjoy reading my posts.

//Warren

I just found osliving.com which is a beautiful site listing open source products. It's nice to see someone collecting open source products with a nice packaging. Much to often sites like those suffer from the same usability as a command line prompt.

I found it through a referrer as they (or someone) have added umbraco - so go find some nice oss inspiration and while you're there add a (nice ;-)) review of umbraco.

Kudos to Brian Vought and Andrew Eglinton for creating the site.

As promised, v3.0.5 is finally here ready for download. Per made a great five minute video tour earlier this week, which you can watch to see what's new.

And new it is indeed. We've made a good number of performance, stability and load-balancing fixes as well as making umbraco much more enjoyable for all you Firefox-savvy people.

Downloads and a full change log is on CodePlex, an installer and the source can be downloaded early next week.

Enjoy!

An experiment that hopefully will turn into a regular podcast. Per and I are talking about what's going on at the umbraco hq right now and cover topics like CodeGarden, 3.0.5 and Courses in this ten minute podcast with phenomenal background music.

As promised in the podcast, we also produced a five minute tour of v3.0.5 with Sir Per Ploug Hansen as your guide.

Other links to stuff mentioned in the podcast:

• The CodeGarden website
• The Courses page
  
• Tim Geyssens great umbraco blog

Nikola is asking in the forum how people setup their dev environments when doing team projects with umbraco. That's a good question, so join the discussion and hopefully it could turn into a book on best practices for team development.

Both the courses next week has sold out - thank you for all your support. We'll be running the Level 1 and Level 2 courses again on May 22-23rd and registration has opened. But hurry, they'll probably sell out again.

For more information about the courses, visit either the level 1 or the level 2 pages.

We're happy to announce a new initiative at CodeGarden - the umbraco awards. There's a lot of great umbraco work going on in our community with people using umbraco in many impressive ways. Now it's time to get all that fantastic work out in the limelight.

We've made it free to participate and we'll have the following categories:

• Best technical solution
• Best design (weight on semantic/compliant markup)
• Best collaboration/community solution
• Best integration
• Best package

For more information on categories, deadlines, rules and to submit a solution, visit the new umbraco awards page.

We - finally - got 3.0.5 ready for testing. Among performance fixes, load balancing fixes and firefox fixes we also added some extra love to the Rollback and import package dialogs as well as a "Copy document type" context option.

You can DOWNLOAD and view the full change log as well as UPGRADE INSTRUCTIONS here:
http://www.codeplex.com/umbraco/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=9591

We're preparing an installer, but would like to get last minute feedback on this release, so please test it out and shoot in the comments.

The 31st of March is last chance to get that sweet EUR100 discount on your CodeGarden ticket. So hurry and come join the fantastic umbraco conference in June.

We're already exceeding the number of attendees from last year and we have attendees coming from:

• USA
• Great Britain
• Scotland
• New Zealand
• France
• Sweden
• Norway
• Denmark
• Belgium
• Germany
• Holland
• Switzerland

So don't wait - it'll be the best umbraco moment ever. 30 hours of sheer umbraco experience.

Sign up today to get your discount.

Already signed up? Let everyone know you are coming on upcoming.org

3.0.5 is almost ready to release, so I wanted to show-off some of the improvements we've made this time. Niels has already mentioned that property descriptions have been added to the edit view, but we have some other improvements coming as well.

Roll Back dialog updated.

The old dialog was a bit crammed and it was hard to actually spot the differences between 2 versions. So we've simplified it a bit, and added DIFF capabilities, so it's easier to see what has changed between 2 versions, green text will be added, red text will be removed (compared to the current active version):

(click for larger view)

Import package dialog

The import dialog has been updated to reflect that the repository has matured a lot the last 12 months - thanks to the great work by the package repo group.

Copy Document type

We've added a dialog for copying document types. This is something that the community has been wishing for, for some time, and we're really excited to finally getting this feature added.

Plus lots of other improvements

This was just 3 of the new things in 3.0.5. We've done plenty of other things, which you see in detail in the change-log on codeplex. We are really looking forward to this release, and hope you do too.

Yesterday Jesper Ordrup (of forum and http://jesper.com fame) came by the office to discuss his session on CodeGarden. Luckily I had the video camera with me and even more lucky he was willing to do a ten minute interview.

His session will be about having a toolbar of multiple and very re-usable macros for mashing up forums, intranets, etc. very fast. Think of it as AutoForms on steroids. He literally showed me some fantastic ways of building umbraco solutions in a very short time - yet completely open for being heavily customized later on (for advanced security/permissions etc). Think of it as mashing up a prototype in an hour, but it isn't a prototype - it's a fully working intranet, but in the exact way you want.

The video doesn't really show the whole potential as Jesper wasn't really sure how much he was allowed to show (it was a customer website - hence the black squares covering logos some times), but I can tell you that his one hour session alone will be worth the EUR250 CodeGarden fee.

The keynote is over, and the break-out sessions have started here in Las Vegas. As soon as I get the photos from my iPhone onto my Laptop I'll get those uploaded to flickr to keep all of you up to date.

From umbraco's perspective the most interesting thing so far has been the Beta 1 of IE8, I'm really impressed by it, fantastic debugging tools, much better performance and I'm happy to report that Umbraco is running smoothly on it. You should try it out, it's at: www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8

And as soon as the keynote is up on visitmix.com go see it - if you ever doubted that microsoft could pull of something really great with silverlight, you should absolutely see it! (the demos begin after about 30 minutes I think.

That's all for now, I'll check back in regularly during the week. 

We're getting reports of random performance hiccups in umbraco v3. If you experience the same, we'd like to hear from you so we can solve this ASAP.

The typical way to identify this issue is that your site in general are running very fast, but sometimes it does respond at all for a (very) short time and after that it runs fast again. Also, recycling the application pool will also make the site instantly run fast again.

We're only interested to hear about this particular issue (other issues are handled via the pro subscriptions), so please make sure. We'll also ask of access to your server via remote desktop, so if this is not possible, there's no reason to get in touch.

You can contact us via our contact page.

We'll keep everyone updated via this blog about the progress and we're hoping for a hotfix as early as next week.

I hope that you appreciate our open approach in solving this issue. All software got bugs, but critical issues like this needs fast solving which is why we're using our fantastic community to get as detailed reports as possible, thus ensuring faster fixes.

I promise that this will be the last post about how fast tickets are selling (at least this week ;-)), but 30% of the tickets are sold now, so you better not wait if you want to join the event of the year.

And what an event - we've started doing video interviews with the speakers and they're even more excited than we and I think the stuff some of them are going to show will redefine "cool". I'm blown away when I see and hear how people are using umbraco in so many ways. So whether you'd like to experience the skills of XSLT ninjas or see how to implement a complete intranet with front-end editing in less than an hour - join today.

Updates to the speakers pages, program and video interviews will start appearing next week.

I'm pretty confident that all seats are sold by the end of this month. Wow and thanks!

If you want to come to CodeGarden, book now! We've already sold 15% of the tickets and the registration has only been open for 10 hours.

There's a 100EUR discount if you order before March 31st (30 hours of umbraco joy for just EUR250!), but there's a big chance that there's sold out before then. So ask your Boss today - looking at the registrations so far it'll be some fantastic people who'll be coming to Copenhagen.

Also, if you're coming make sure to let people know in the forum - we've updated profiles with a setting where you can check that you're coming and a little badge will be added to your posts:

See you in June!

Registration for codegarden 2008 in Copenhagen has just opened, so to be sure to get a spot at the hottest Umbraco event of the year, book your spot early.

Don't know what Codegarden is? Read more about it here

Or watch the first video in the series of videos we'll be doing about codegarden. In this first episode we're talking about Codegarden moments, germans, the upcoming keynote, magic spoons and finally Niels has a good laugh.

Codegarden Moments - the video

(the video does not work in the RSS feed, so go old school and visit the actual site if you are reading this in a rss reader.)

As mentioned here, your favorite open-source .net based CMS will be at the Microsoft Mix '08 conference in Las Vegas

I'll be in Las Vegas March 4 - 8 and afterwards in New York March 8 - 11

So if you want to meet up during the conference or during my stay in New York you can get a hold of me via:

Email: pph (at) umbraco.org
msn: Ltl@e-mail.dk

Our long awaited product - Courier - for handling umbraco deployment is getting more and more mature and is finally close for beta release.

Instead of having one major product, Courier will be spitted into two products; "Courier for Content" and "Courier for Development" with the first one coming in a beta release next month. Both products will revolutionize umbraco deployment and makes it possible to transfer content and functionality between servers just by dragging and dropping - it's really Drag. Drop. Deploy.

It has taken an incredible long time and almost three years of R&D with a ton of failed attempts to solve the deployment issue in a stable and intuitive matter, but now we've nailed it and it's actually fun to deploy.

The Courier for Content does what it says - it lets you transfer umbraco nodes related to content (including Media) from one place to another - usually being between Dev/Stage/Prod environments, but the perspective is even bigger. With Courier for Content you can plan new editions of sites behind a firewall and publish the whole section in one transaction with a single drag'n'drop operation. It's hard to describe in words (especially with my limited vocabulary ;-)) so I can't wait to get some screenshots/video uploaded.

Courier for Development will follow in Q2.

Sign up for beta release and news on the Courier product to be the first to get hands on experience.

Even though we have a lot of really good tutorials in the umbraco books section, there are still a lot of knowledge out there in the community that not very many people know about. For instance the other day I stumbled upon a nice Action Handlers 101 tutorial, a screenshot from the dashcommerce plugin for umbraco and a how-to on protecting your umbraco back-end with IP filtering.

All fantastic stuff, and of great value to the community, but hard to find for someone new to Umbraco.

So as a complement to our Books section we now have a blog aggregation section under our blog called snippets along with a ATOM feed for easy syndication, hoping that it will tie our wonderful community together even more, and that it will be easier from now on to find quality content in umbracoLand.

We finally found a date for the next round of the highly praised umbraco courses in Copenhagen, Denmark. Both the Level 1 and Level 2 courses will run on April 10-11th.

They tend to sell out pretty fast, so we encourage you to book in good time to ensure a seat.

The instructors will be Per "objects.dk" Ploug Hansen on the Level 1 course and me (Niels Hartvig) on the Level 2. Here's a little topic appetizer for what we'll cover:

Level 1 - implementing websites using umbraco:

• Understanding the umbraco basics - Document Types, Templates and Macros
• 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
• Great Packages: Implementing full-text searching and mail forms

Level 2 - umbraco for .NET Developers, extending and integrating solutions

• Usage of .NET User Controls with umbraco
• Debugging .NET Controls with umbraco
• 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
• Extending XSLT with custom .NET classes
• Usage of AJAX and umbraco
• Custom event handling in umbraco using ActionHandlers
• Walkthrough of Members and their APIs

Full details on training as well on how to order at the training section.

I love listing to music when I finally get some time to do some coding. Currently I got Burial's "Untrue" on A-rotation. It's an absolutely brilliant album with stunning moods that I discovered via my emusic.com account (brilliant service btw - highly recommended). Hot in the heels is the Daft Punk Alive 2007 album - it's the soundtrack of a party that I wished I had been a part of and of course Mr. Marvin Gaye (but that's nothing new - his been around since umbraco v1).

What's on top of your track list right now?

Apparently we had pretty severe issues with our e-mail yesterday. So if you've sent an email yesterday, please do it again. I have no clue whether the error is due to dns problems or our Google Apps for Domains account where all email are stored.

Sorry for any inconvenience!

When you need to debug your macros, either xslt or usercontrols you do this by appending some text to the querystring on the page you want to debug.

Instead of appending this manually, you can start debugging with the click of a browser button in Internet Explorer or Firefox.

See more at Umbraco debugging made easy at www.cpalm.dk

All seats are taken for the down under course in two weeks. Can't wait to meet all of you, and an e-mail with all practical details are coming next week.

Did I mention that I can't wait?

Great news. We finally settled for a place and date for the annual umbraco developer conference CodeGarden '08.

We're going back to the roots and will be using the same venue as CodeGarden '06 - Kulturhuset Islands Brygge - this time just many more rooms and bigger rooms. It's situated in central Copenhagen just by the canals with a beautiful view and a very cozy atmosphere:

The date will be June 3rd - 4th 2008 and because of the friendly venue we can keep the price low and still have great food and fantastic facilities. The price will be just 250EUR (including food) before March 1st and 350EUR after. That's 100EUR cheaper than last year and insanely cheap for a two day conference.

We'll have booking form ready soon and early registrations makes it much easier for us to plan and organize the event, so please, please, please book as soon as possible.

If you're interested in speaking or demoing at CodeGarden, don't hesitate to get in contact. We'll have a limited number of free tickets for people speaking.

About CodeGarden

CodeGarden is a developer conference. This year we have a huge main room and three smaller rooms with full wifi-coverage and projectors. And we have them all evening as well, so expect loads of hacking sessions. We're still planning the event, but it'll be a mixture of keynotes, open space sessions, demo sessions and tutorials. It's the number one place to be if you're interested in umbraco and the who's who of umbraco will be there.

Microsoft Denmark invited me to speak about how umbraco has grown from a hobby project to a full time business for me (and now Per). It's on the 24th of January in Copenhagen at their "Open Sovs" event where also super friendly Mads Kristensen from BlogEngine.NET will come.

It's a pretty good challenge for me. Looking back at experiences, mistakes, etc. I'll talk about selecting a license, my opinions on respecting the community as your biggest asset, why it's okay to charge for things and most importantly the excitement and joy an open source project gives you.

I'll also try to answer why it's possible for just one (oops - two) people combined with a stunning community to change history and to make an impact. How the world of software development has changed so fast that you turn old-school if you don't keep up constantly. Why the price of developing software has dropped at insane rates and how the cost of distributing software is as near null as possible.

Because the world has changed. Just looks at the post about bigger organizations using umbraco. Who would have thought that a year ago? That "enterprises" doesn't need an enterprise cms - and what the heck is ecms anyway, besides bloated features, cluttered work-flow systems and ridiculous license terms and pricing?

The change will continue in 2008 and umbraco will make huge waves. We have potential to make history. To become one of the first open source projects that makes a piece of free software the default choice in an area on a Microsoft platform. To democratize wcms. umbraco is available for you, me, your school, your work, the huge company in your city, the ngo.

And everybody has access to the very same piece of software. This is not pseudo free, where you'll need to pay for svn access, tracker access or even to a working official version. And the community alternative is a partly working, not updated version. That's not free, that's milking the viral marketing potential of open source without really wanting to swallow the pill. And that's the route to failure. And I'll make sure to emphasize that on the 24th! Go all the way or stay away.

I'll make sure to translate and publish my presentations to English when they're done. If you have time and understand Danish, join the event at Microsoft.

This was originally posted on objects.dk. But due to the comments mentioning even more big umbraco sites, we decided to move the conversation to umbraco.org.

It's always hard to see how great a success an open source project has, as there is no real license sale statistics. But looking at the umbraco sites we do know about, we can see:

- Bilzonen.dk is using umbraco, and is the 43rd biggest site in Denmark, according to fdim.dk - ahead of big media sites like computerworld.dk, dating.dk and ofir.dk

- Peugeot.com is using umbraco, which has an alexa traffic rank of 14.946

- Hasselblad.com which produces probably the coolest cameras in the world use Umbraco to run all their regional sites (on a single umbraco installation)

Umbraco is gaining alot of traction among bigger and bigger companies and advertising agencies.

Update:

Thanks to all the people posting comments to this post , there are a couple of other sites worth mentioning aswel:

Sjors Pal says: Funda.nl, with a Alexa Rank of 4503. Funda has 3 Million Unique visitors a month, with about 210 million page views a month for a interview with the funda ceo - who also mention some stats, go here

Casey Neehouse says: Another site of interest is the Philips / AT&T Williams Formula 1 Racing Team. "...they have a tremendous number of visitors, use a 2 server install, and have 7 languages live..."

umbraco MVP Per Ploug Hansen aka Mr. "objects.dk" will join umbraco (the company) as a partner from February 1st. This is absolutely stunning news and a sure sign of what 2008 will bring.

Both Per and I have worked hard on making this possible over the last couple of months. Per is one of the most talented people in the umbraco community and have been around since the very start.

The umbraco project grew more than 990% last year, which was great but also meant that more and more time is spend just keeping up with all the great mails, requests and questions coming. As many of you know it was the plan to launch several new products last year, but none of them got done. I simply couldn't find the time to do it.

With Per coming we'll be two. That's a huge difference. We can share the load and both get "free weeks" where we can have full focus on development. It'll be great for the business, but also great for the community and the project.

We've made documentation the number one priority for 2008. This means that products Forms and Courier will be further postponed, but in return we'll release some fabulous new documentation and learning products that'll make it much easier to discover and master all the power in umbraco - without having to travel to wonderful Copenhagen, Denmark for a course.

Thank you Per for joining - let's get back to work and make 2008 "the year of umbraco".

One of the things that never got implemented in umbraco for some odd reason was showing property descriptions when you edit a page. As you might know, you can add a description on a property when editing a Document Type. This could contain handy information that could be of great use for the editors.

However, in the current released version of umbraco it's not used at all, which I got reminded by an "umbraco Pro" customer who asked why? The answer is simple - it was simply forgotten. The fix was easy and I've just committed the change to CodePlex.

Now there's an option in /config/umbracoSettings.config to show descriptions as text, help icons with tooltip or no descriptions at all :

This change will be a part of the 3.1 distribution. I hope you like it and if there's similar things you wonder about, make sure to submit a frustration!

Happy New Year! New core team member Ruben Verborgh have given us all a very special treat - real MySQL Support for umbraco. Yes, real as in a non hacked, beautifully implemented new data-layer for umbraco.

As many long-time followers know, this has been a HUGE wish for a long time and then out of the blue comes Ruben. Bang, bang, bang and two weeks later he has committed a working beta verson of the datalayer including a complete MySQL implementation. If that's not huge talent then tell me what is :-)

The datalayer will become a part of umbraco version 3.1 which is due in March. A complete roadmap of the new feataures of 3.1 will come very soon.

Thank you Ruben - fantastic work!