Umbraco CMS review

Umbraco CMS

I have for some time been looking into Umbraco to see if I can use it for my own CMS system. Unfortunately, my time is limited and thorough testing have not been done.

First impression of Umbraco

I downloaded the installation of Umbraco version 2.1 from their homepage. My first impression of the installer was that it was very good. It installed cleanly in about 10 minutes.

After the installation I looked into how to publish my templates. It's quick to learn the fundamentals of Umbraco. But it's not easy to do anything creative with it. You need to learn XSLT or program ASP.NET controls to do anything but publish simple content. Either way you have to spend some time write code for your needs.

Documentation and example code does not come easy. It's hard to get started and the documentation is at best half-done. The developers also charge money for add-ons to Umbraco. If you download the ASP.NET control document described above you'll see that. Because of this I'm not sure where Umbraco is headed.

How this CMS fits into my requirements

You can read my requirements here. Requirements in italic is not from my list but something I came out with when looking into Umbraco.

Requirement	Conclusion
Cache ability		This CMS set the cache-control headers to private. If the headers can change, it have to be done by a developer.
Scalability		I have done some tests with OpenSTA Umbraco seems to perform well.
Readable URL's		The filename (.aspx) are made from the title of the page.
RSS/atom feed from articles		It can be done - no problem at all. But you need to develop this feature.
Content editor		A WYSIWYG content editor with templates wrapping around your text.
Menus and navigation		The structure of the menus are directly related to how you place your document within the tree. You can move your documents as you want.
Mobile content		There is no easy way to produce mobile HTML code.
Index and search		Umbraco have their own site indexing tool in umbracoUtilities. (See links.)
Web community		I can't tell how good the community is. Umbraco is open source and published under the GPL license. But except for the developers I have not found any community.
Blog functionality		For other to make comments you have to develop this functionality yourself.
Platform		Umbraco requires .NET and is because of that limited to Windows Server 200x and Microsoft SQL Server. Umbraco forum mentions Mono support, but it's not straight forward at this time.

Relevant links

• Umbraco documentation at Wikibooks.
• Umbraco official homepage.
• How to change content-type for specific documents. The package umbracoUtilities is the package that you need.
• My requirement list for a CMS.
• Umbraco blog.

Tags: cms, umbraco, .Net