Where to start

How-to
Experience in setting up Umbraco and my first website.

Contents

• Introduction
• Reasons for selecting Umbraco
• Some references
• Where to start
• A digression – XSLT
• Event Calendar
• Do some design
• Images
• Rendering the output
• Templates and CSS
• Back to Media Pickers

Where to start

“It always takes longer than you think, even allowing for Hofstadter’s Law.”
(Douglas Hofstadter, “Hofstadter’s Law”)

Installation

I have already installed Umbraco and had a play around with the example website, loaded some add-on packages etc. As a result I am not entirely sure what state it is in, so I will leave that one as a testbed if I need it, and install a new clean site to build on.

• Set up a separate site using the IISAdmin tool as recommended in the Umbraco installation book. This allows one to set up two quite independent websites, though only one can be active at a time.
• Install Umbraco. Follow the instructions in the excellent installation guide in the Umbraco Books section, at http://www.umbraco.org/documentation/books/install-umbraco-30-on-windows-xp. (I actually did it from the other two books before the XP one appeared, but I presume that this is just as good.)

I am not sure if this is now in the XP installation instructions book, but I also found that I needed to perform the following in order to get IIS to serve ASP.NET pages.

Start>Run>cmd
cd %windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727 [press enter]
aspnet_regiis -i [press enter]

• Remember to write down all the various usernames and passwords used at different stages.
• Install the Creative Website package to give a sample website to start from.

Packages

As well as the standard Umbraco distribution, and whatever comes as part of the Creative Website Package, additional add-on packages will be needed. I will record these here as and when.

• the XmlOutput plugin described at http://forum.umbraco.org/14055
• Event Calendar, see: http://ismail.umbraco.net/2007/9/5/event-calendar-for-umbraco-v3.aspx.
• The Umbraco offline utilities package at http://www.thoehler.com/en/projects/umbraco-utilitites.aspx, offers image upload and management, plus other useful goodies. See the website for installation instructions (it puts files into the website and bin folders).  See also chapter below on Image Handling.
• Lefteris’s multiple media picker. See chapter below on Image Handling.

Organise for development of a new site

Having an example such as the Creative Website Package to learn from is an enormous benefit (I would say life would impossible without some such example to work from). However it does leave the question of whether to build one’s own site from a blank start, or to build one’s new pages within the sample site, and eventually delete the unused starter kit components entirely.

I have decided to go for the second option, hence the installation of the starter kit.

Top down, or bottom up?

I already have a starting point for the top down design in the existing, non-CMS website. After trying for a while to expand this to cover the new features enabled by Umbraco, I have decided that starting bottom up would be a better idea. I need to get a better grip on how things work at the lower level before trying to plug them all together into the top down site design.

In particular I will start on the Event Calendar, since I have already found out that this will take a bit of development work, and will influence how all my Event nodes are structured.