Niels Hartvig's umbraco blog

I've decided to open up for donations to the umbraco project and at the same time made some simple guidelines when using umbraco for commercial purposes. I've taken this decision to ensure that I can spend most of my time on the contentious development of umbraco. There are so many exciting challenges and ideas in the horizon and I can't wait to seize them.

Through the last couple of years I've learned (the hard way) that I can't call me a businessman. My knack and motivation lies in the development and evangelism on umbraco. My original plan was to finance this through support contracts, but so far this hasn't generated enough income.

My experiences are that those who've bought support contracts have been very positive and also been pleasantly surprised on the potential and possibilities that umbraco offers. I've made it easier to buy support contracts online and I'll also make an effort to communicate the support possibilities better.

I've created pages at umbraco.org where you can read more on donating money and how to buy support contracts.

If you've any ideas or input, please let me know through mail - or even better: Comment on this post!

Hudson Maul from 113creative have made a draft on a new umbraco logo - what do you think about it - let's have a discussion.

Hudson Maul: The logo idea is supposed to be a "U" with wings almost like an angel to tie in with the whole developer/designer friendly cms theme, e.g. 'the friendly cms'".

At cms2005 I talked with Tony Byrne from CMSWatch about the architecture of umbraco and how we've focused on keeping umbraco slim and simple, and extending it through plug-ins. I claimed that umbraco was 10.000 lines of code (aka 10KLOCs), but as it was a while since my last check, I though I'd research it more thorough.

And it turned out to be a very nice surprise; actually umbraco is only 7.548 lines of code! And totally including the web editing client (complete with development environment, etc) and all default plugins and rendering the total is 25.258 lines of code.

That's around 25KLOCs for a complete web development framework including a CMS and a number of plug-ins that let's you create new functionality with out writing a single line of code, just using your mouse.

But to sum up - umbraco is only 7.5KLOCs and not 10! Less is really more ;-)

I did a seven minute demo yesterday showing off umbraco. I chosed to create a simple gallery application from scratch in five minutes - watch it in flash (no speak, video recorded by Pollas will come later).

I also managed to do some statements:

 

I participated in a panel today together with Percussion, Microsoft and Synkron on web communication. I tried to preach focus on simplicity, communication and presentation instead of tools. We were asked how the world of web communication looked like in 2010 (why are we always supposed to do the impossible ;-) ) and I claimed the death of Enterprise Web CMS and that people wouldn't be talking about tools (Andreas from synkron agreed).

When people start to focus on their needs they will realize the Emperor’s new clothes syndrome of some vendors. Yesteday in the demo panel, Interwoven claimed they couldn’t be compared with the rest of us, because they worked with huge projects with huge tools for huge clients. When it was my turn I had to add that umbraco are involved in projects being smaller because of clever tools yet still with companies of 10.000+ employees.

Technorati tag: cmf2005

Wonderful to see Tony mention tagging, simplicity, authenticy and other terms originated from the world of blogs.

I really believe (hope?) that this will be the biggest impact on wcms in the time to come. The organizations who believe in voice over control and who bring trust back to its employee will succeed. This shouldn't be something that the mattered for the systems, but apparently it is. After just a couple of hours at this conference I'm surprised how systems are being sold on control, control, control instead of tools for communication. Jeeeez...

Technorati tag: cmf2005

Janus Boye: "We spend all the money on the food, so we booked the cheapest band in the catalogue. Please be kind to them"

Technorati tag: cmf2005

I went to half of Tony Byrne's (cmswatch.com) tutorial on WCMS: Architectures and Products, and what struck me was the level of complexity that many of these systems seem to seek.

While I acknowledge that there definately are some organizations that needs huge amount of control, structure, workflow, big-brother-is-watching-even-more like features, I find it incredible that these systems really gives so much focus on this.

The approach in umbraco is much more "Write, Preview, Publish". That's our focus and this is why these things are in focus in our product. Sure we have audit trails, notification systems, permission management, etc but when you login, you only see on big button, and it says "Create". This is what it's all about - making it fun and intuitive to communicate...

Technorati tag: cmf2005

A couple of guys are doing a farewell evening for Mr. Rails.

I'll be there - and even though I more than tired of his kind-of childish way of evangelizing Rails (I think he should focus more on Rails and less on bashing everyone else), he definately deserves a huge applause for what he's done in bring bootstrapping back to development.

So I've updated my blog from blogger to umbraco. I haven't spend time converting the old posts, so if you need them, they'll keep being at 090978.org.

I did this to taste some more of my own medicine. Everyday brings loads of user feedback through the site, the mailinglist and just talking to people. But I also need to use the application more myself in a more experimenting manner than I can do at a site like umbraco.org

So this will be my playground as well as my blog. The first thing I'm testing beside the blog module is a stat extension for umbraco. You can see a screenshot here. It's very generic making it very easy to create a lot of different reports, just using a simple xml format. I've spend to much of my sparetime working on making the charts look decent - but some great projects on codeproject made all the great base work for them.