Sharing implementation experiences and discussing how to support web builders even better

MIsc
13 Core/mvp people met at a country house in Denmark prior to CodeGarden 08 to discuss "What is umbraco". We used the format "Open Space Technology" and these are the minutes from the different sessions.

Chapters

• Chapter 1: What Needs Doing that Isn’t Being Done?(or, how you can help the umbraco project)
• Chapter 2: The Umbraco “elevator speech”
• Chapter 3: Keeping Tabs On Direction - the balance between community and company
• Chapter 4: Improving documentation from the point of a new user/developer/architect
• Chapter 5: Dividing Umbraco be divided into to separate projects
• Chapter 6: Sharing implementation experiences and discussing how to support web builders even better

Sharing implementation experiences and discussing how to support web builders even better

Attending: per Plough Hansen, Thomas Höhler, Douglas Robar, Jesper Ordrup (host)

Web builders and developers love Umbraco because it is so easy to work with. With this session I wanted to discuss whatever experiences we have. Are there anything we can do to make the webbuilders love Umbraco even more.

Comment stream:

• Docs should be improved (yay) ...
• Having intellisense would be great - specially in xslt
• Online XSLT debug would help the process of developing features.
• Being able to get xml feed from umbraco to process from Visual Studio.
• Common problem when working on xslt is building the xpath. An xpath builder would be valuable.
• Report tool. It would be valuable if you could generate a report describing an installation allowing you to get a big picture of an existing implementation.
• Doctypes/media types should be filebased making it a lot easier to edit/reuse/copy ... using your favorite tools.
• Doc types should be supporting inheritance thus making it easier to update common fields. If implemented as a multilevel xml file holding (hey ... doctypes.config)
• Media access via webdav
• Media should be cached (meta data)
• Media folders has strange names. Why?
• New media type suggestion: Mediapicker that allows uploading to media lib.

Smaller issues:

• Main content node should only expose the allowed subnodes.
• Put standard doc types and properties in a boot/nitro would would give us a common vocabulary in the forums. 

Tip of the day:

Importing site content can actually be done by using a package. Using your favorite tool to organize an xml file - copying / pasting, reorganizing is much easier this way.

Having a Package xml schema would be great.