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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!