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.

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.

 

Not many Umbraco users or developers know about this feature even though they have used it in their pitch material and have sold it to clients as a feature.

Umbraco has the ability to interface with Microsoft Word or liveWriter via a set of popular blogging APIs.  This is a feature that we teach developers how to use on the Level 1 Umbraco training course.  It allows you the ability to hookup 3 fields (Description, Category, Excerpt) to Umbraco fields.  For example you could manage your News, Blog, or any other simple repeated content.

Check out Content Channels in the Users section of the back office sometime and try hook it up yourself.

BTW this post was posted from liveWriter :)

Over the past few months we have been super busy at Little Web Empire and thought that it was high time that we told people what we have been up to.

Firstly the Umbraco Worldwide Training week back in October was a major success with courses being run around the world in five cities (Copenhagen, London, Seattle, Auckland and Sydney).  Little Web Empire held the courses in both Auckland and Sydney seeing many new developers added to the Umbraco Certified Professionals list.  We also saw Terabyte Interactive (Auckland) and Next Digital (Melbourne) attain Umbraco Solutions Provider status.

Site releases.

Around the busy training schedule we also released three new Umbraco based sites.

Collective Edition www.collectiveedition.com

Nuts About New Zealand www.nutsaboutnz.co.nz

Minti Clothing Store store.iloveminti.com

What's coming up?

We are busy finalising the details for the next round of Umbraco training in Australia and should be able to announce something regarding this shortly.  The interest in the courses has been massive.  We look forward to being able to provide a complete schedule for 2010 sometime soon and

I wrote this a few weeks back for an email that went out to the Asia Pac Umbraco newsletter subscribers about the benefits of becoming an Umbraco Certified Professional but I thought that I would share it here also.

This is what I wrote:

"There are many benefits for both the developer and their employer when becoming fully Umbraco Certified Professionals.  With Umbraco fast becoming one of the leading open source .net CMS worldwide, being an Umbraco certified developer is a great barter card for any developer when seeking work, both as an employee or as a contractor. For the employer and certainly their sales team, being able to tell clients the team are certified gives both credibility and assurance.  If four or more employees within an organisation are certified, they then become an Umbraco Certified Solutions Provider, gaining a profile on the Umbraco website and exposure to many of potential customers."

I became an Umbraco Certified Professional approximately 2.5 years ago in Melbourne Australia when Niels Hartvig came and ran a Level 2 course.  The course was a complete sell out with people travelling from as far away as China to attend. At that stage the only way you could gain certification was to travel to Denmark, so when the opportunity arose anyone who was using Umbraco seriously jumped at it.

Since then I have been full time developing with Umbraco.  Certification gave me a kick start into knowing the system well and having the confidence to attack projects.  At that stage in my career I was also heavily involved in the sales process.  Certification was something that the larger corporate clients appreciated.  It gave them both the confidence that they were using someone who knew what they were doing, and also that they were buying into a system that had a community of developers prepared to invest in a product through a certification program.

Umbraco has grown exponentially (in terms of installs) since then and is now the top download from the Microsoft Web Platform installer in the CMS category. Clients are now aware of Umbraco and now more than ever are looking for Umbraco Certified Professionals and Certified Solutions Providers to help them through the development process.

I now offer training for developers, leading them through the Level 1 training course and equipping them with the knowledge they need to pass their Level 1 Certification test on completion.

I fully encourage anyone interested in getting their certification to do it. If you are interested in becoming an Umbraco Certified Professional check out the training page for more details.