In December I left the employ of Umbraco to restart my freelancing career, so naturally it makes sense that your own website should look great! Well sadly that is not the case currently but that is all going to change very soon.

Coming up in the next week I will be releasing a new version of littlewebempire.com.  It is a ground up rebuild with a new design.  I have chosen to work with the Twitter Bootstrap framework as it enabled me to quickly get my content structures worked out and then allowed me to extend its base styling with my own design.  The new design is also responsive meaning that it will scale to suit different devices.

CMS wise the new site is based on the latest version of Umbraco and uses the new MVC features.

I will do a full write up once its up but for now here is a preliminary screenshot of what should hopefully be live at this address on monday!

Melbourne happens to be one of my favourite cities in Australia, and I'm glad to be returning for another visit next month to run the final round of Umbraco Certification for 2011.   A massive thank you to Gold Partner Next Digital again for helping host the event.

With all the new advances in Umbraco of late these courses are jam packed full of the new features such as Razor and Dynamic Node.  A lot of emphasis has been put in to keeping the course material relevant, tackling real world scenarios to help you click into the efficiencies that Umbraco allows.

Umbraco has become the platform of choice for many developers and now potential clients are asking for Umbraco by name as it grows in popularity.   For the developer Certification is a worthwhile investment to show that you official seal putting you ahead of the rest when pitching for Umbraco work.

For the development houses that use Umbraco as a solution for their clients, certification is a great opportunity to certify you developers and gain Umbraco Partnership.  Partnership carries benefits to help you promote you profile as an Umbraco solutions provider.

Places on the courses are limited so get in and secure yours today. Check out the training section for registration and details.

Only two weeks remain before we return to Sydney to run another round of Umbraco certification courses from the 19th to the 22nd of July. This round we have a change of venue and have moved to a more central location in the city at the offices of Umbraco Gold Partner Next Digital.

I have to say a massive thank you to Next Digital for providing a venue as they have for all of our Melbourne courses. We really appreciate their support and help with logistics.

If your company uses Umbraco as its main CMS platform, I would encourage you to consider certifying developers. We have room on the Sydney course for a company and to become a Certified Partner. This involves having four certifications at either Level 1 or 2. We currently have 2 spots left on level 1 which also means we have 2 package deals available for Level 1 & 2. Having two developers certified at both level 1 & 2 is by far the most cost effective way of gaining Certified Partner status.

I really enjoy teaching the courses as its great to see the "AHA!" moments when a developer discovers something new or for the first time and then seeing the satisfaction a developer gets when they finish up the course and can finally claim the badge of Umbraco Certified Developer. Even greater is when I see that developer become part of the wider developer community contributing on the forum, twitter and in some cases developing packages.

Umbraco is truly more than a great tool that you use to build content managed websites. It is also a community of dedicated developers passionate about what they do. I encourage all newly certified developers to join in the conversation and contribute back as there are opportunities to give input even if you are not a "Core" developer.

Coming up next month we are running another round of the official Umbraco Certification courses in Melbourne Australia from the 12th-15th of April.

This is a great opportunity to up-skill to the new features available in the 4.7 version as well as gain the official Certification badge available only to those that have attended an Umbraco training and Certification event.

Level 1 is being held on the 12th & 13th of April and Level 2 on the 14th & 15th.   For more information on both of these courses make sure to check out the training page.

If you are looking to get the most out of Umbraco and want to get up and sprinting we suggest that you consider taking both the Level 1 & 2 courses together and to make it easier we have provided a discounted package.

We would also like to take the opportunity to thank Next Digital Melbourne for hosting the event.   Next Digital is an Umbraco Gold partner with over 15 certified staff members.

Its been a long night here at Little Web Empire.  We decided that it would be a good time to upgrade our site from an older version of Umbraco (v4.0.2.1) to the latest stable build (v4.5.2).

The upgrade was pretty straight forward. Here's what we did.

• Backup! First thing we did was take a backup because the last thing we wanted was to be in a position of no return with problems.
• Download. We downloaded the Umbraco v4.5.2 from codeplex we used the .net 3.5 as our hosting provider is a little behind and has not updated the .net framework to version 4 yet.
• Compare or follow update instrustions. We then proceeded to do a compare between the downloaded directory structure and our site. Beyond Compare from Scooter Software is really good for this amd was our tool of choice.  We did it this way rather than following the standard upgrade instructions as we had a few custom items we did not want to lose in the upgrade so comparing was our safest bet.  Main things that change are the DLLs in the bin, the Umbraco directory, the umbraco_client directory, some config files in the config directory, you will also notice that Umbraco now uses the App_Data folder for its storeage rather than the data folder. The web.config file changes also.
• Install/Upgrade. Next you run the install step.   You may get confronted by the password challenge.  If you do there is one thing to be aware of between earlier versions of Umbraco and the later versions that the passwords are now hashed.  Because of this hashing your password will no longer work so the easy way to fix this is to modify the web.config file to tell the UsersMembershipProvider not to hash password by removing the following attribute.
  
  passwordFormat="Hashed"
  
  You should be able to login as normal after doing this.
• XSLT Errors! Follow the upgrade wizard and it will eventually complete after a few steps.  Your database at this stage is updated and in theory the site is good to go, but if you use XSLT for anything you will notice errors all over your site.   This is because the XML schema changed with the release of version 4.5.
• Convert XSLT. To fix XSLT errors due to schema change you have a couple of options.  You can set the schema back to the legacy one, or you can opt to use the new schema which means you will need to modify all of your XSLT files to the new format.   There are some advantages to moving to the new format such as readability and some of the newer packages disregard the old schema so we opted to go with the new schema and update the XSLT.  To aid in the update however there are XSLT schema converters available online, and we went with the one built by Tommy Poulsen. This simple page allows you to paste your old XSLT file in and get a new file out.  It worked on most things but there were some instances that required us to do manual updates, in particular it is unable to convert @nodeTypeAlias.  We had to manually change any statement the used it to something like this:
  
  /* [@isDoc and local-name() = 'NodeType']
  
  which is equivalent to /node [@nodeTypeAlias = 'NodeType']
  
  Hash your passwords. after we had worked through all of our XSLT and cleared all the errors we had a working site.
• The last thing we was to turn password hashing one in the web.config while we were still logged in.   Our session remained intact so it still thought we were authenticated.   We then went to the Users section and reset the passwords for our users to save the new hashed password to the database.

And that was it.  Our site was upgraded.   Hopefully some of this is useful to others.

Announcing Umbraco Level 1 & 2 Certification will be running in Sydney on the 31st Jan - 3rd Feb 2010.

A lot has changed with Umbraco over the past year with the release of version 4.5 and version 4.6 just around the corner the feature set and the flexibility of the Umbraco CMS has improved majorly.   Umbraco has gone from strength to strength being implemented on more than 95,000 websites world-wide and having over 250,000 downloads this year alone with companies now asking for Umbraco by name.  Along with this increase in popularity has come the need to ensure that you have an advantage when pitching for work that involves the Umbraco CMS by becoming an Umbraco Certified Professional or and Umbraco Certified Solutions Partner.

Certification gives you the official seal of approval that you know what you are doing, gives your clients confidence and the ability to use Umbraco to its full potential.

Certification gives those new to Umbraco a kick-start taking away learning curve associated with a new system. For those that have experience with Umbraco it not only solidifies foundational knowledge it also exposes new concepts and best practice.  Don't take our word for it these are comments made by past course attendees;

"I advanced greatly and learnt about a whole lot of advanced Umbraco techniques that I hadn't previously dabbled in. I had a bunch of architectural considerations bubbling round in my head before the course and am now confident about the best approach to take."

"I've been developing with Umbraco for a while and wasn't sure I'd learn much new from Level 1 but I did and it clarified a few things. Well worthwhile."

There are 2 courses.   Level 1 & Level 2. Both can be taken individually or together.

The level 1 course is aimed at developers/html developers who are new to Umbraco or to those developers who want to formalise their knowledge in the form of certification. For full details of what is covered go to the training page.

Level 2 is all about extending Umbraco.  This course assumes that the developer has been using Umbraco for a while and familiar with the Umbraco concepts.   If you are new to Umbraco and are looking at taking the Level 2 only, we would suggest that you also take the Level 1 course to get up to speed with the foundations of the system. For more information on Level 2 go to the Level 2 training page.

If you are serious about Umbraco and want to get the most out of the system we suggest taking both courses together. A package rate applies saving a considerable amount.  We also provide discounts to groups of 4 or more who book together.

Spaces for this course are limited so get in early and reserve your space.  click here to register for level 1 now or click here to register for level 2 now or here to register for level 1 & 2.

Wow what a conference!  Codegarden was 3 full days of sessions, hacking, collaboration and just all round fun.  We enjoyed Codegarden so much that we have decided to keep the special going!  Which means you are still able to get the Umbraco Level 1 & 2 Package at the special rate of NZD$3000 which is an overall NZD$700 saving. For more information and to register click here.

For those that didn't make it to Codegarden heres what it was all about.

Day 1 was the MVC Boot camp lead by Jon Galloway (Microsoft), Simone Chiaretta (ASP.NET MVP, ASPInsider and author of Beginning ASP.NET MVC on Wrox) and Steven Sanderson (Microsoft MVP, author of Pro ASP.NET MVC).  There were 2 streams.  A Beginner and an advanced stream.  I personally have not done all that much with MVC so decided to go on the beginner stream which was lead by Jon Galloway.  It was really great and I learnt a bunch.   I super excited to MVC in action in the next version of Umbraco (V5) which is in development already.

That evening the Umbraco HQ treated the conference attendees to an Midsummer party on the canals.  We floated our way around the Copenhagen canals taking in the atmosphere and watching the locals burn effigies of witches.  Was a great night had by all and thankfully no one fell in.

Days 2 and 3 followed on from the format of previous years.    This year started with a session presented by Alexander Kjerulf - Chief Happiness Officer on Happiness at work.  It was awesome as it got the crowd interacting and happy. View a short video here. (quality is low as it was shot on my iPhone.)

The keynote followed presented by Umbraco founder Niels Hartvig and Umbraco HQs Per Ploug Hansen and was full of news regarding the community, growth and the success of the previous year but most importantly were the two releases. One was the release of the our.umbraco.org update.  This is a significant upgrade to the community site bringing in many of the most requested features.  Our is the hub that connects the Umbraco development community and has proven to be one of the most important tools for developers.   The other release was version 4.5 which although a point release on the Umbraco framework is major in the fact that so much optimisation work and new features were added such as Examine, Linq2Umbraco, new tree, new datatypes, and an all-round system tune up.

The session for the rest of the day covered topics such as Search with Examine presented by Shannon Deminick from TheFARM Digital Sydney, crowd sourcing via Facebook put together by the guys from SkyBurd A/S, TDD with Umbraco presented by Aaron Powell from TheFARM Digital Sydney, I've downloaded Umbraco what now? presented by Bob Baty-barr, ARR & the Rave Engine which was a session run by Tommy Messbauer the lead developer of ASP.Net, Importing content presented by Richard Soeteman, Design Contour forms with Tim Geyssens of the Umbraco HQ to name the few that I managed to get to see part of.

That evening we played the always popular Umbraco Bingo. Ole Erling provided the accompaniment and the Umbracos did the Bingo calling.    It was strange evening with Umbracos pausing the proceedings to say "Bring in the Horns!" as a Danish Horn band marched through the venue and out the door again.  Weird but in the spirit of the evening was awesome.  Prizes presented included a Umbraco door mat, an Umbraco biker vest delivered by a biker, and the grand prize was a  framed canvas of the core team.
Photo: Douglas Robar

Day 3 was the open space sessions.  This was a time for all conference attendees to get involved and give them an opportunity to contribute.  Sessions ran all day on all sorts of subjects including Training & Certification, the Umbraco Core Values, the Hackathon where they built a new datatype from scratch, Snapshot which is a upcoming project by TheFARM Digital allowing the export of a fully working databaseless ASP.Net site. (more info on www.farmcode.org) and much more.

Photo: Douglas Robar

Day 3 ended with the package and skin contests.  The winning package was the datatype built by Shannon Deminick during the Hackathon and the winning skin was a tribute to GeoCities built by Warren Buckley.

Codegarden is a key event on the Umbraco calendar.  I look forward to attending again next year and encourage those from Australasia that if you can make it you should.

To celebrate the upcoming Umbraco Codegarden conference, Little Web Empire Ltd are offering a further $200 discount for any level 1 & 2 combo training seats for August purchased before Codegarden ends (25th of June 2010).   Thats a massive NZD$700 saving! To take advantage of this you need to signup before midnight on the 25th of June 2010. Spaces are limited. Click here for more information or to register.

What is Codegarden?  Codegarden is the annual Umbraco conference held in Copenhagen, Denmark.  This year's line up is phenomenal and better than ever with 30+ sessions across 3 days all relating to Umbraco. If you are considering going It's not too late but tickets are selling fast.  For information on Codegarden see http://codegarden10.com

Announcing Umbraco Level 1 & 2 Certification will be running in Sydney on the 3rd - 6th of August and then in Melbourne from the 9th - 12th Aug.

These coures have been highly popular and even more so since we started offering the Level 2 course earlier this year. These are the official courses that are taught in Europe by Niels Hartvig.   To see what some of the past attendees have said about these course go to the training page.

The level 1 course is is aimed at developers/html developers who are new to Umbraco or to those developers who want to formalise their knowledge in the form of certification. For full details of what is covered go to the training page.

Level 2 is all about extending Umbraco.  This course assumes that the developer has been using Umbraco for a while and familiar with the Umbraco concepts.   If you are new to Umbraco and are looking at taking the Level 2 only, we would suggest that you also take the Level 1 course also to get up to speed with the foundations of the system. For more infomation on Level 2 go to the Level 2 training page.

If you are serious about Umbraco and want to get the most out of the system we suggest taking both couses togehter. A package rate applies saving a considerable amount if you choose this option.

Spaces for this course are limited so get in early and reserve your space.  click here to register for level 1 now or click here to register for level 2 now or here to register for level 1 & 2.

 

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Check out this years Umbraco Christmas Calendar at http://www.umbraco.org