Umbraco roots are growing in North America! Flightpathers recently participated in training and sessions at the second uWestFest in Orlando, Florida. uWestFest is the annual North American Festival centered around all things Umbraco. For those that don’t yet know, Umbraco is an open source content management system (CMS) built on the .NET stack with commercial support available from Umbraco HQ based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
At Flightpath we have been using Umbraco since 2009. We love it because it gives the developer complete control over how the site is rendered while providing the content editor with a great, easy-to-use experience. Last year Flightpath became a certified Umbraco partner and with this year’s event we now have three certified Umbraco developers on staff.
uWestFest Highlights
- Umbraco use is growing – particularly in North America which has doubled the use over the last two years. According to Umbraco creator Neils Hartvig, there are 272,428 active Umbraco installations worldwide and over half of new installs are in North America.
- Umbraco is the “friendly CMS” and the core team has focused on improving the user experience. We (Umbraco developers) need to do our part and focus on the user experience for content editors and not just the web site.
- Umbraco 7 leverages AngularJS in the ‘back office’ which makes it easy to create custom data editors. Tomorrow we will have a post by our newly certified Umbraco developer Michael Feola with an example on how he created a custom editor to improve the back office experience for content editors.
- The new Grid Editor in Umbraco 7.2 can replace the Rich Text Editor and works well with responsive frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap.
- “The concept of the Rich Text Editor is in direct conflict with the direction the web is going”(https://twitter.com/bootnumlock/status/573866665349378048).
- There were two sessions on e-commerce for Umbraco. I joined Nik Wahlberg and Rusty Swayne for a session on Merchello, an open source e-commerce system for Umbraco (credit shirley). Anders Burla, CEO of Tea Solutions, came from Denmark to present a session on Tea Commerce.
Up Next
Flightpath is hosting the next Umbraco meetup in New York on Tuesday, April 28. This meetup will feature Heather Floyd of Mindfly giving a preview of her Codegarden presentation on upgrading to Umbraco 7.