OK, Umbraco

Umbraco is a Content Management System (CMS) and it's great - mainly because it's free! This makes it a great choice for your next website project. I'm not going to read you the manual or go through every button, "this does this", "that does that". I am going to walk you through the journey from an idea on a piece of paper to a fully functioning website delivered through Umbraco. I've done my best to do it in an engaging and friendly way that presents the fundamentals as we build the site!

We will create a website in Umbraco which exercises the following features:

• Document Types - these are the blueprints for creating pages of content

• Templates - the "razor" (ASP.NET MVC) html page templates

• The use of document types to hold data - site settings, email templates

• The Rich Text Editor - create your own custom formats in CSS

• The Umbraco "Grid" - a flexible page layout (it's built on Bootstrap!)

• Macros - wrap up your views into widgets that can then be added to the "Grid"

• Dependency Injection - Umbraco 8 comes built in with a DI framework. Use it for referencing your own custom services

• Separate custom code out into a separate project

• Surface Controllers - just like ASP.NET MVC controllers but they play nice with Umbraco

• Form posting - create forms that post to surface controllers that have bespoke logic in them

I'll not only go through how to do things the Umbraco way but I'll also show you some techniques I've picked up over the years:

• How to wireframe up a design

• The usefulness of dependency injection

• A generic Email Service for sending out different template driven notifications

• How to interop with APIs - using Twitter as an example

• Utilising Bootstrap (v4) to get a head start with layout and utilise components

• Registration and Membership process

I'll be using Umbraco V8 for the duration of this course - which was the latest version as we went to print.