Umbraco 4, all shiny

By On 18 Dec, 2008 · 4 Comments

Umbraco 4 has gone to release candidate this evening. I’ve been using it during the beta cycle and I’m really impressed with it. The basic concepts are the same as they were in v3, but it’s oh so very much more polished, way faster and better overall. It also introduces some new, welcome features with regards to back-end stuff, especially the ability to cancel events (such as the new beforePublish) in actionHandlers. Package management behave much better too. Niels Hartvig and the team are right to be proud of this release!

I already have a site up and running – a couple of weeks ago I released a new version of jobolito.se using Umbraco v4. It was a breeze to work with. Most of the old packages will work in v4, although some gentle nudging will be required.

I haven’t tried Canvas mode yet, which allows you to directly edit any element on a page without moving into the back-end interface (you know, the old WYSIWYG, but for real this time), but I’m looking forward to it. A friend at EPiServer told me that they’ve tried similar things but dropped it due to the fact that editors weren’t getting it. I hadn’t expected that, but I’ll get back to that when I have had a chance to glean some more insights from him about their experiences.

Umbraco v4 is great. It’s not, however, the hallmark event that I was hoping for. Among other things, I feel it’s lacking integrated multilanguage support (as opposed to separate branches) and stronger media management. Also, a goodbye to the implementational model for even better editorial usability would be welcome.

 
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  • Hartvig

    Great feedback!

    We’ll never have the multi-lingual support you’re asking for. Our research shows that almost no multi-lingual sites are 1:1 translated but often represent different markets and culture, which means different product portfolios, marketing angles and legislation. In a very few and rare cases 1:1 make sense and there are other products that excels for that. One of the things that makes Umbraco great is the courage to be a product that doesn’t try to do it all.

    Better media management is a big wish though and something we’ll work on next.

  • http://ruben.3click.be/ Ruben Verborgh

    Great feedback indeed.

    Could you clarify “a goodbye to the implementational model for even better editorial usability”?

  • http://jonasbohlin.net Jonas Bohlin

    @hartvig – Even with separate structures, being able to associate pages more strongly between language branches would be cool.

    @ruben – Implementational model software is where the underlying technical implementation is directly represented in the GUI. E-mail software is a an excellent example of this – messages arrive chronologically, are stored as individual messages and displayed chronologically even though they are part of conversations. Umbraco is far from alone here, it’s what goes for pretty much all publishing platforms.

    examples:
    *Separate fields etc for page content that is displayed uniformly

    *To preview a post, you have to save it, then preview it.

    * Umbracos url model relys on “pages” – If you run a blog and publish a blog post at 2008-12-30, you have to create structure pages “2008″, “12″ and “30″ in order have your post show up at /2008/12/30/this-post. (regardless of action handlers that do it for you). Comments are stored as individual pages underneath each page etc.

    I’m not saying leaving the classic implementational model behind is easy. But I’d love to see the Umbraco-team take the lead. Canvas is a good start!

    —-

    Thanks for your feedback!

  • http://ruben.3click.be/ Ruben Verborgh

    Very good point.

    These days, I’m philosophizing about Umbraco 5, and one of the things I see is a separate development of UI and business logic. The examples you name are good, and I actually thought of both of them.

    I think indeed we can take the lead here. I strongly believe in Niels’ capacities as a UI visionary.

    But I won’t talk too much about that… right now it’s 4.0 and these thoughts are just mine.