theothermy

May have finally come to an end. If you are wondering why the previous post has been struck off, then blame it all on my CSS wizard. I listen intently to what she speaks, and the point was subtly drilled home that a site made in Wordpress was going to look more or less like this blog. A site made by an amateur. A site not befitting the status of the organisation. Which actually summarises to a "Don't be nuts", or even a mere "hah"!.

Open-source Umbraco 3.02 (the current version has been released, and from what I read, this may turn out to be another gem similar to the Dasblog 1.6 engine running www.hvacindia.com .



Umbraco 3.02 build:
http://www.codeplex.com/umbraco/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=5136

What can Umbraco do? Basically, everything I want, plus the fact that the it has a flexible template design, and also CSS templates for documents.


Here's a summary:

Create document types with whatever properties you want.
Add/edit content on your site.
Set your XHTML and CSS templates for different document types.
Upload and use photos and other images.
Create a basic membership system, to allow logged in people to view certain sections of your site.
Create separate user accounts with customizable permissions to access the back-end to write, edit and publish content.
Have a multi-lingual site.
Create dynamic navigation and pull your content dynamically (aka showing "latest" items on the homepage).
Have your site consume RSS feeds.

The additional feature of creating a membership system, and create separate user accounts can be a very valuable feature for a Society website, going forward.

Frankly, the thing which really got me excited was the fact that Umbraco was 100% compatible with Windows Live Writer which is Beta 3 now, and looks pretty good.
http://get.live.com/en-us/betas/writer_betas

There are a huge amount of plug-ins available for Windows Live Writer Beta 3 here.

Take a look at Sites running Umbraco 3.x

You need, For local development and production hosting:

A Windows 2000+ computer with an installed web server (either IIS, or other that supports ASP.Net)
Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) or Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE) or SQL Server 2005 Express
Edition.
ASP.Net 2.0 (to run umbraco v.3.x) installed.
Internet Explorer web browser to interact with the CMS back-end (websites created are viewable on any
browser your HTML code supports)

Finally, a website "package" to check out, which would demostrate the amazing power of Umbraco: (rename zip to umb before importing the package).
http://www.creativewebspecialist.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/creativewebpackage_v096.zip