What Six Months Using Umbraco Has Taught Me
September 13, 2010For a client, I’ve been using Umbraco as a CMS for them and I wanted to chronicle some of the things I learned about it that were not obvious when I first started using it.
1. Umbraco cannot be run in a virtual directory.
This definitely becomes obvious after trying to install it, but was certainly the first hiccup I had with Umbraco. Certainly not a deal-breaker, and when combining that with Helicon Tech’s ISAPI_Rewrite, ended up not being a problem in the slightest.
2. Umbraco’s document/database structure is non-obvious.
I definitely think the engineers over there are bright and did it the right way – it was just a more complex and abstract system than I was initially expecting. I don’t think it’s something they need to work on changing, but it was another hiccup I went through when I first started using Umbraco.
3. Umbraco creates a cache of pages when they are published.
When a page is called in Umbraco, most of the result is served directly from a cached XML file. Certainly was a great call performance-wise and makes sense, but it was not something I realized when I first set out with Umbraco.
4. Umbraco is simply incredibly powerful.
While all of the above might seem like I have reservations about Umbraco. In fact, quite the opposite. Sure, there were bumps in the road as I went along, but in the end, I came out liking Umbraco more and more as I got to know it better and use it more. It’s incredibly powerful and useful, from the template creation to embedding macros. Making changes and updates is far easier than I would have imagined and I cannot thank the Umbraco team enough.
