Umbraco really is for nerds
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By ben -
on Fri Nov 25 2011
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Umbraco probably ranks highest in content management systems (in my opinion... so far...) in terms of ease of use for clients/administrators and in being a complete website management tool (not just a single purpose blog tool or a multi-purpose data editor). But to put into perspective - how equally nerdy it is..
I recently had the task of putting a month's worth of small tweaks
to a website live. Quite a big and stressful task no matter how
well documented your changes are. I decided to try out
'Concierge' which is a core package for keeping track of changes in
umbraco. It is brilliant and detailed and provides a report on all
the dependencies of all your components, provides new functions
like check-in/check-out of content page (really cool actually but
not the point) and appears to have some decent change tracking on
content too. But load it up on a site with dozens of templates,
even more macros and many hundreds of pages and that incredible
detailed report becomes a tad ridiculous.
Fortunately - umbraco is also for nerds. So feeling inspired and
in less time than a prototyping meeting I used all the standard
umbraco class libraries (code) and wrote myself my own report,
which dumps only the information that I want to a text file. Run
that on both new and old versions of your website and with the
magic of a file comparison tool you have a report on all the fiddly
changes myself and co-workers have made over the last month.
Still inspired, a whole weekend later and still making
absolutely no modifications to umbraco or writing any custom
database queries, I decided to re-write that report so that it runs
automatically every time I make changes in the umbraco admin tool,
that text file is now saved to the file system, meaning that our
source-control system is now keeping a history of all the key
aspects of umbraco database (cool). That was achieved in less time
than a trip to the ponsonby food court.
Now, any real developer like myself can look at a content
management system, figure out where all the information is stored
and come up with some way to create a report or view of the
differences between 2 copies of a website, but to work with a
system which exposes all of that through it's basic class libraries
is 'nice'. To be able to create a solution which binds that report
to events occurring whenever changes are made and put that
information somewhere useful, without modifying a single line of
umbraco source code.. that is nerdy.
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