Paul Sterling's Blog

There are lots of words used to describe Umbraco Codegarden09, my two favorite being Ole Erling!  This year's Codegarden had 174 attendees, loads of speakers, 36 open space sessions, 1,000's of lines of code, 100's of liters of beer, and some - one of a kind - bed sheets printed with a goofy picture of the Umbraco Core Team and MVPs taken home by the lucky Umbraco bingo winner.

Venue

The venue this year in Copenhagen was Kedelhallen and it was fantastic - plenty of space to interact and collaborate, a cozy cafe, lawns filled with chairs, and the weather was absolutely perfect (a Codegarden tradition).  Personally, I had a fantastic experience meeting many new people in the community and (finally) meeting people I interact with daily in Twitter and the Umbraco Forum.  I never had a minute where I thought 'what should I do now?' as friendly Umbraco people were eager to share, discuss, and chat - this is one of the things that makes Umbraco Codegarden unique among conferences. 

Real Time Input

Between the Core Team retreat and Codegarden the week spent with Umbraco people was exhausting, inspiring, and extraordinarily productive.  As many know already, one of my main projects is Commerce for Umbraco and I received excellent and relevant feedback from a number of attendees regarding items that work well and items that don't work as well.  This type of feedback is the most valuable for an open source project as it gives us a direction.  Based on the feedback and experiences of the project's users we expect a full release in approximately 60-days - hurray!

Umbraco Store

Another area that I focus some of my time and money in is the development of the Umbraco Store (http://store.umbraco.org/) and this received feedback as well.  During an open space session we discussed integrating the three current package repositories (projects on our.umbraco.org, package repository, and the Umbraco Store) into a  more unified user experience.  From this session we created very clear, actionable items with assigned owners and, with some luck and a bit of work, we'll have prototype of the integrated experience in a few weeks.  Look for more posts from me on this topic as we continue to develop it.  One interesting item is that the reluctance to commercialize one's work by selling packages in the Umbraco Store was noticeably absent in discussions this year.

Our Umbraco

As you no doubt already know, the new Umbraco community site was unveiled at Codegarden09 (http://our.umbraco.org/).  This site sets the standard for a much higher level of collaboration between members of the Umbraco community.  If you haven't seen it yet, go check it out now.

Umbraco ASP.NET MVC

Some of the biggest news is the announcement of Umbraco's adoption of the ASP.NET MVC framework for the v5 release.  At Codegarden this was the announcement that generated the greatest buzz.  At the Core Team retreat this was the focus of our discussions and some prototypes were created to prove the proof of concept.  This is a very exciting direction for Umbraco and one that you'll no doubt see many more posts and discussions about in the coming year.

Scale and Momentum

Finally, as an attendee of past Codegardens one could not miss that the scale of the event was actually, well, big.  I think this year (2009) marks the point at which the Umbraco Project is bigger than Niels, or the Core Team, it is truly a community project that is made by, and for, the people that use it.  I see this as a tremendous accomplishment and one that is irreversible. 

  See you next year!

Here's a cheeky video made at the Core Team planning retreat at the end of a long day spent discussing v.Next of Umbraco.

Hope to see you at CodeGarden 09 on Monday!

-Paul

 

It is with a degree of regret that we announce the v1.0 release of Commerce for Umbraco will not be concurrent with Umbraco CodeGarden 09.  We have taken into consideration the feedback received at the project's issue tracker, the Umbraco Forum, and directly via Twitter and email in reaching this decision. 

 

The Good News

 

We are committed to releasing an high-quality, very-usable project that will enable Umbraco users to create commerce solutions easily and without requiring .NET-skills, recompiling our commerce assemblies, or a great deal of configuration.  With that in mind, we have set the following goals for the v1.0 release:

 

• An installer that accommodates a variety of installation scenarios - but only Umbraco v4.*
• Support for PayPal Standard payments - this is the 'free' account type
• Much better support for non-US/Canada address and tax schemes

 

We will continue to address the issues we are aware of and those that are identified in the Issue Tracker.  A huge thanks (!!) to all those who've taken the time to log issues.

 

See you at CodeGarden!

-Paul

We are excited to announce that we released the v1.0 Alpha package on 8 May 2008.  You can find it at the project's home on CodePlex.  We'd be thrilled if you would take the time to evaluate the package and provide us your feedback, either in the form of very useful issue and bug reports or in the also useful (but not quite as) general feedback.  Please take two-minutes and read through the brief document we've provided so you know what to expect - this being an Alpha release and all.

We are quite proud of Commerce for Umbraco and feel that it provides a viable choice for commerce scenarios on Umbraco. 

Kudos go to Tim Geyssens and Matt Perry for significant (and excellent) contributions to the project. 

Look for the Beta release on 22 May 2009 and we'll see you at Umbraco Codegarden 2009 in Copenhagen for the v1.0 release.

-Paul

At the end of this very productive week I made a quick screencast overview of some of the cool features coming with Commerce For Umbraco v1.0.

Check it out here:

http://screencast.com/t/8IFJSXl6nF

At the current pace we plan to have an Alpha Package ready in one-week, and a Beta Package in three weeks.

Thanks to everyone who has provided constructive support for this project over the last year.

-Paul

Mai-lan from the IIS7 team created this very nice video overview of using the Web Platform Installer to install required components (SQL Express in this case) and Umbraco.  Check it out, shows just how easy getting up and running with Umbraco can be.

 

Following is a sidebar from an interview Niels Hartvig did with Prosabladet in the 4 April, 2009 edition. (http://www.prosa.dk/)  I used Google Translate to get the bulk of the translation as the original work is Danish-only, but added some content where the translation was ambiguous.

::::

1 - You are never more than in the start-up phase. Learn the basics of place in the beginning. Write documentation - the devil! I never finished it. Umbraco would be twice as prevalent if there had been proper focus on evidence. 

2 - Be 100 percent open about everything in the project. It's no disgrace not to make money in the beginning of the project. If you are honest about it, you'll go to the the users and they'll give you that. 

3 - Be clear why you want to build a open-source project. The good reasons are to be more capable and to get more input and to create software jointly with others. 

4 - Sit down and carefully review the license options.  Do not just take GPL because all others do. 

5 - If it is a commercial project then get a trademark. It is the only asset you have. You need this to obtain a share of the profits from training companies, etc., which wish to use the trademark. If you don't, people will stand and laugh at you.

5 1/2 - Have a natural user environment. Low team meetings and conferences - it is easy. Write it on your blog.

We've made tremendous progress on Commerce For Umbraco over the past two weeks - thanks in part to the sharpened focus from the community and in part to me carving out a a few days to get the project framed for v1.0.  With just more than two-months until Umbraco CodeGarden09 and with some awesome project members I'm feeling really good about what we'll deliver to the community in June.     Commerce For Umbraco has a time-tested transaction-core (based on dashCommerce 2.2) that is in use on almost 100 commerce sites (and growing).  The v1.0 release focuses on the Umbraco integration for the Admin Section and a simplified set of .NET User Controls and Xslt-Extensions.  We hope the included controls will serve as a guide for creating custom controls on your own sites.  However, we will deliver a fully functional sample site that will have you selling products via your Umbraco installation in a very short period of time.

Following is the list of features we'll deliver with v1.0.  If you see something missing, please let me know so we can evaluate the effort.  Feel free to comment below or send me a message here.

Admin Section

• Orders - Grouped in Date Folder Format
• Products
• Categories
• Manufacturers
• Configuration File Editor (via Tim G's ConfigTree package)
• • Address Validation
  • Fulfillment Provider Settings
  • General Commerce Settings
  • Domain Specific Settings
  • Payment Provider Settings
  • PayPal Specific Settings
  • Subsonic Specific Settings
  • Tax Provider Settings
• Mailer Settings
• • orders, payments, shipments, etc….

Front End

User Controls

• Single Product Display
• • Product Cross-Sell Display
  • Product Descriptors Display
• Category Products Display
• Featured Product Display
• Product 'Box' Displays
• Shopping Cart
• Multi-Page Checkout
• Single-Page Checkout
• Address Entry (Shipping and Billing)
• Payment Entry
• Login
• Create Account
• Recover Password
• Reset Password
• Order Summary List

Xslt Extension

• Single Product Display
• Category Products Display
• Featured Product Display
• Cart Item Count Display

dashCommerce.Net - Revisions

• Removed dependency on Enterprise Library Logging and Exception Handling mechanisms
• Relocated *.config files to reduce web.config size and allow editing via UI

Installer

• Support for full installation via an Umbraco Package - including database creation
• Optional sample site installation

 

Simple .NET User Control Markup

<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"

Inherits="CommerceForUmbraco.usercontrols.FeaturedProduct"

Codebehind="featuredProduct.ascx.cs" %>





    <div id="featuredProduct">

        <h3>

            <a href='<%=productUrl%>' title='<%=ProductName%>'>



                <%=ProductName%></a>

            <br />

            <%=RetailPrice.ToString("c") %>

        </h3>

            <img src='<%=ImageFile%>' alt='<%=ProductName%>' 



                width="250" />

        <p>

            <%=ShortDescription %>

            <br />

            <strong>Part Number:</strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;<%=productSku %>

        </p>

        <p class="featButton">

            <asp:LinkButton ID="AddToCart" runat="server" 



               CssClass="aAddCart"



               OnClick="AddToCart_Click">Add To Cart</asp:LinkButton>

        </p>

        <div class="clear"></div>

    </div>

Integrated Admin Section

Integrated Configuration File Editing

 

See you at Umbraco Codegarden09!

-Paul

A super quick post to let you know we've retired the Motus Connect Store and will direct all of our efforts to the Umbraco Store.  We've updated the domains and redirects already and the content will be updated this week to remove reference to the former Motus Connect Store.

Best,

-Paul

After a whirlwind 3-days at MIX 2009 in Las Vegas the .NET web developer and designer community is a little bit better for the Umbraco love they were shown.  With Niels Hartvig and Per Ploug Hansen present, attendees were able to feel the love and admire the t-shirts - surprisingly we heard dozens of compliments on the Umbraco t-shirts from CG08 and CGUS08.  I helped spread the love as much as I was able, but the Danes really know how to do it!

Windows Web Application Gallery

Umbraco made its big-conference-keynote debut with its presence in the Windows Web Application Gallery and the Web Platform Installer v2.0 - both which launched at MIX on 18 March.  Umbraco is now available via the Web Platform Installer and its various outlets; Windows Web Application Gallery, IIS 7.0 add-ins, Control Panel apps cPanel and DotNetPanel, and the publically available ATOM feed.  In addition to dramatically increasing the exposure Umbraco receives, the Web Platform Installer streamlines the Umbraco installation process significantly.  No more are there dozens of steps to be completed before actually 'installing' Umbraco - now, the database creation and setting of Acls is performed by the Web Platform Installer's robust installation handlers.  If your web server is running IIS7 you can install Umbraco remotely, without requiring you to log on to the server, using IIS7's remote management capability and the Web Platform Installer integration.

We're excited about what this means for Umbraco adoption - it's very cool!  Go check it out next time you need a fresh Umbraco installation.

'Open Space' Demo and Guerilla Recruiting

In the Umbraco tradition of open-space we set a session at MIX's 3rd Place (sort of a room with too loud music and couches).  As with open-space we didn't know who or what to expect and we were pleasantly surprised by number of MIX attendees who stopped by for a demo or to ask questions.  Niels promoted the session with his special style of guerilla marketing by placing 'cards' in each toilet stall where they would not be missed.  It worked! 

In addition to Umbraco, the MIX conference included some excellent sessions that we thoroughly enjoyed - although I wasn't able to convince Per to attend the "Next Gen Web Commerce" session, we all managed to find content to suit our interests.

Umbraco Futures

It was a true pleasure to discuss the vision that Niels and Per have for Umbraco in the future.  Some of this is underway already (LINQ to Umbraco for example) and some of it is not, but all in all Umbraco's future is very exciting.  Look for Umbraco to start showing up in even more high-profile installations (as if Wired, NAIAS.com, and others were not already high-profile); look for a bigger, more tangible Umbraco presence in North America; and look for a (possible) Umbraco book in the one-year timeframe.

I'm looking forward to CodeGarden 2009 on June 22-23 in Copenhagen and I hope to see you there.

-Paul