About Umbraco

If you are someone who is not too familiar with Umbraco, it is a commonly used Content Management System. An open-source tool built on the Microsoft ASP .NET framework, it has registered as many as 200,000 installations till date and ranks as one of the most popular open-source tools. It features incredible extensibility and allows complete customization. This makes it a desirable tool for all agencies who are looking to build custom web development projects.

While a number of CMS tools exist that have been developed based on the .NET framework, we will focus on the latest release of Umbraco- version 7- and analyse all the good and bad that it has to offer.

Let us start by getting all the dislikes out of the way first.

The dislikes

Timeout:

The timeout needs to be set explicitly if you want to have full control over management of your website content. You may write tons of content and then forget to save it. This will log you out and take you back to the root content node. Apparently, this is a kink in the logic of the CMS tool that will lead all your content to be deleted and your effort to go waste.

Responsive design:

The new mobile layout is pretty slick and when used on a tablet it looks pretty nice. However, the same cannot be said of its application on a phone where it proves to be simply unusable. While it is unlikely that website owners will be administering the stacks of website content from their smartphones, this new design hinders smooth flow of even the simplest features. Whether you wish to check a status, switch a template, or toggle a checkbox, everything becomes seemingly difficult on the new responsive layout of Umbraco 7. A new left-to-right UX experience prevents the right view panel from loading owing to the limited menu width.

The new website:

While this is far from being a technical drawback, it is hard to fathom as to what exactly Umbraco have in find as far as their new website is concerned. The lady and the man, stairs and photos (replacing the previously seen toothless kid) all seem out of place for the website. However, considering how well it is working for the company, there is not much to complain about in this regard.

The positives

The new layout looks great: The old unfaithful UX has finally been done away with. In its place, now we have a fluid backend office to work with. Not only does it look stylish but is also fast. One of the most prominent updates in the latest release, it is also probably the most significant one that Umbraco has launched till date. Moreover, its responsive layout allows the backend office features to be used on various screen resolutions and sizes. The nav icons can cleverly shift based on their priority and size while the menus slide in and out, the perfect combination for an excellent UX experience. You are sure to become a fan of it!

Media picker: A single click of a button in your article and the new media manager will slide in from the right! You have a slick “folder explore type navigation” in front of you now that allows you to sort through all media with ease. Moreover, it also gives you the opportunity to add a media item then and there, making for a significant improvement! Now you don’t have to follow a multi-step procedure anymore, everything can be done with a single click. Simply add your media file and it will append not only to your article but also to the media manager tool. Definitely, an improvement that is worth admiring!

Umbraco 7 is fast:

To put it in simple perspective, with everything already loaded in via Ajax during the development of the CMS tool, clicking through the backend offices of Umbraco is a seamless procedure. It is built on the popular .NET frameworks that developers are adept at using, pointing to a bright future in the market for this CMS tool. Umbraco have fallen back on the use of Twitter Bootstrap and AngularJS for their respective CSS and JS frameworks. This allows an incredibly easy customisation of components and views. Moreover there is a massive developer community that supports these couple of frameworks alone so if you ever encounter any problem, help will be close at hand.

Search navigation:

This is probably the biggest of all updates featured in the Umbraco 7 release. Even if your content structure features deep, complex and large number of nodes, you need not have cause for worry. The “search” function will get you out of the mess and, if reviews are to be trusted, the feature works wonders. A few simple tweaks to its existing layout has resulted in one of the most outstanding updates from the Umbraco CMS developers.

To summarise the analysis the good certainly outweighs all the bad from the latest release of Umbraco and this is certain to improve the fanbase for this CMS. Undoubtedly, Umbraco developers will look to take care of all the negatives and rectify the errors. If that can be done, then the future of Umbraco as a CMS undoubtedly looks bright!