Lee Kelleher

Archive for posts tagged with 'Umbraco'

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  1. Using ClientDependency Filters to manipulate HTML

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 3 minutes (441 words)

    On a recent Umbraco project, I needed to be able to manipulate the HTML contents before it was sent to the browser. Typically, on Umbraco projects you'd do whatever you need do within Razor templating, but in my case, I had to do after the entire page markup was built. (I won't go into details, as the requirement is specific to my client project.) My initial thought for the solution was using a Request.Filter. I'd…

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  2. Ending our UMCO Patreon campaign

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (349 words)

    This evening Matt & I posted on our Patreon campaign for UMCO. I'm cross-posting here for posterity... The UMCO Patreon campaign is ending Reflecting back on the past 2 years of running our Patreon campaign, we've had great success and gained quite a few backers (which we are extremely grateful for), but at the same time we've learned a few things about what running a successful campaign actually means for OSS and what the expectations…

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  3. 24 Days: Content Apps gold rush

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (69 words)

    I wrote an article for this year's 24 Days In Umbraco Christmas Calendar about a new Umbraco v8 feature called Content Apps. There is much interesting in their potential, but will this be done individually or by collaboration?

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  4. History of "Our.Umbraco.*" package names

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 5 minutes (612 words)

    Have you ever looked in your /bin folder and wondered why a bunch of Umbraco package assemblies are prefixed with "Our.Umbraco."? Let's find out about the history of that naming convention!

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  5. UMCO

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (77 words)

    I meant to announce UMCO a while ago. Matt has recently redesigned his company website and written a great introduction to UMCO on there.

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  6. Code Cabin 2016

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (125 words)

    Next weekend will be the inauguration of Code Cabin. If you haven't heard about Code Cabin yet, it's a weekend retreat for 20 developers; a chance to get together share ideas and hack some code. If you want to know more about the backstory, watch the uHangout episode when Matt announced it back in April. All the tickets for this Code Cabin sold out before the end of June, but if it sounds like something…

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  7. umBristol hiatus

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (311 words)

    At our recent umBristol meetup earlier this month, I announced that there wouldn't be another meet-up until after the summer, as I'll be away on extended holiday; plus, there's CodeCabin in early September. I proposed to the group that if they wanted to organise an umBristol whilst I was away, then I can give them organiser access rights on the Meetup.com group. Now, between you and me, I'm hoping that someone steps up to the…

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  8. Reflecting on predictions for Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 3 minutes (360 words)

    Last year a wrote a few predictions for Umbraco – for beyond 2014; a 5-year future. Reviewing those predictions, many things have happened in the world of web-development, so I would like to reflect on those. node.js The idea of switching Umbraco’s “server-side” codebase from ASP.NET to node.js was quite appealing. Out-the-box it would be cross-platform, high-performance, asynchronous – all win! Then Microsoft announced ASP.NET vNext! Bringing us… Roslyn! KVM! Cross-platform (Mono)! Async! NuGet! All…

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  9. umBristol: Hack Night (May 2014)

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 4 minutes (483 words)

    Last Thursday evening we held our first umBristol hack-night. We decided to leave the format of the evening to be an open/clinic style, where anyone could ask questions and guide the focus of session.  It turned out that there wasn’t much hacking, but there was a wealth of knowledge to learn and share. Jonathan started off by showing us an extension he’d been working on called AutoRouteTemplate – its aim is to provide a non-developer to access URL parameters…

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  10. uComponents: Days of Future Past

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 5 minutes (681 words)

    For a long time I have remained silent on the future of the uComponents project; please don’t mistake this for ignorance, it was not intentional. The truth is that it has been a struggle to lead the project through the transition from Umbraco v6 to v7 … and I’ve probably failed to do. The ongoing dilemma of the uComponents project is two-fold: where are we right now? and where are we heading? If you look…

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  11. Umbraco MVP 2014 Nominee

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (96 words)

    I’m honoured to be short-listed for the Umbraco MVP 2014 awards.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have won the MVP award 3 times before. In previous years, the nominations have been difficult to vote on, so many great people in the community – and this year is no exception – I had a hard time casting my votes! To cast your votes, go to: http://our.umbraco.org/people/mvps – voting closes at midnight on 10th April 2014. The winners will…

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  12. Deploying complex Property Editors (Archetype) with Umbraco Courier on UaaS

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 5 minutes (711 words)

    TL;DR; I wrote a Courier DataResolver for the Archetype property-editor. The code is currently only available on GitHub and has only been tested against Umbraco-as-a-Service. We’re very fortunate that with our latest project at Umbrella we are getting to develop with cutting-edge Umbraco technologies: Umbraco v7, Umbraco as a Service (UaaS) and the Archetype property-editor. If you haven’t yet heard about UaaS yet, then be sure to catch-up with the recent uHangout episode where Niels Hartvig…

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  13. uComponents: Moved to GitHub

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 3 minutes (368 words)

    Hey uComponents fans, a little status update on our version control repository move from CodePlex over to GitHub. We’d been talking about moving over to GitHub for a long time, (even before Umbraco core moved over), but the timing was never right – either we were in the middle of a major release or our day-job workloads were in high demand.  Luckily since our own v6.0.0 release, we have found the time to make the…

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  14. Predictions for Umbraco - beyond 2014

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 4 minutes (596 words)

    With Umbraco 7 release imminent, the community will be eager to see its adoption. For those who have been following the progress of its development, the entire back-office has been re-built from the ground up – from UX concepts to the introduction of the AngularJS framework.  (For technical details, see the Belle documentation website.) The introduction of AngularJS is a major shift for Umbraco – it is also a bold statement – that web-technology is…

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  15. Downgrading uComponents

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (251 words)

    A question was asked on the Our Umbraco forum about how to downgrade a version of uComponents (from v5.4.0 to v4.1.0 – as they were using Umbraco v4.7.2). There may well be other reasons that you would want to downgrade uComponents to a previous version – whether that be for Umbraco compatibility or maybe even you don’t use the package any more and just want to uninstall it. Firstly, DO NOT uninstall the package from…

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  16. uComponents: 50,000 downloads!

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (101 words)

    Ah uComponents, it seems like only yesterday that we reached the huge milestone of 10,000 downloads! Now look at you… 50,000 downloads! Wow how you’ve grown. .@hendyracher Compare #uComponents d/load stats to last year (46k) http://t.co/TRn58axeai Our #umbraco: 50,000 CodePlex: 15,000 NuGet: 4,500 — Lee Kelleher (@leekelleher) September 11, 2013 I’d like to give my uttermost appreciation to the uComponents team for all their hard work over the past few years – and a massive…

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  17. Manipulate XSLTsearch

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 7 minutes (848 words)

    When developing websites with Umbraco, I always use the XSLTsearch package to handle the search solution. As well as being easy and quick to install, it is customisable and very fast in searching content nodes. As much as I love XSLTsearch, the one dilemma I always face is having to modify the HTML output that is generated.  Given the way I work; with a much better front-end developer providing the mark-up; I am faced with…

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  18. Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco 5

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (108 words)

    First migration of my Umbraco packages to the newly released v5 (Jupiter), I am proud to announce… Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco 5! The majority of the re-development was done during the #umbWeekend (last weekend – 27th January). It was fun to explore the new codebase and APIs for Umbraco v5; creating tree nodes and building the editor.  Then a few evenings this week to polish-up the UI, etc. For any developers wanting to know more…

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  19. Want to help develop Google Maps Umbraco package?

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (143 words)

    There are 2 outstanding bugs in the Google Maps for Umbraco package. Would you like to help us fix these bugs and collaborate on the project? My current workload is high and I am aware that there are 2 major bugs that need fixing on the Google Map data-type. With my heavy involvement on the uComponents project, it’s unlikely I will fix these bugs any time soon, hence the ‘call for help’. If you have…

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  20. uComponents: 100 karma votes and 10,000 downloads!

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (92 words)

    Very proud and happy to announce that uComponents has reached 100 karma votes and 10,000 downloads! (that’s not including the additional 4,000 download from our CodePlex project) I just downloaded the 10,000th copy of uComponents. is.gd/ZVxhfy #H5YR #Umbraco — Douglas Robar(@drobar) September 7, 2011 A huge thank you to the uComponents team for developing a great set of Umbraco components – and an even bigger THANK YOU to the Umbraco community for use it! #h5yr

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  21. uComponents: Render Macro data-type

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (17 words)

    Developed a new data-type for uComponents called Render Macro. Watch the screencast for a brief demonstration.

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  22. Running Umbraco from a USB drive

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 4 minutes (550 words)

    With the release of Umbraco 4.6 (Juno), users now have the option of using Microsoft’s new embedded database engine, SQL CE 4. This means that you don’t need to depend on using a database server (such as SQL Server [Express] or MySQL), you can run Umbraco exclusively from the file-system! Also recently released is IIS Express 7.5, (another Microsoft web technology, as part of their WebMatrix framework), which offers a lightweight version of IIS –…

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  23. How to use umbraco.library GetMedia in XSLT for Umbraco v4.5

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (138 words)

    This is a quick follow-up on my previous blog post: “How to use umbraco.library GetMedia in XSLT“.  At the request of fellow Umbraco South-West UK developer, Dan, that I should update the code snippets for the new XML schema in Umbraco v4.5+ First a quick notice; if you are using v4.5.0, then please upgrade to v4.5.1, as there was a tiny bug in GetMedia that caused great confusion and headaches – you have been advised!…

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  24. ASP.NET System Information for Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (104 words)

    Released a new Umbraco package today, that integrates the ASP.NET System Information Prober into the Umbraco back-office. What is the ASP.NET System Information Prober? It is a single page that tries to get as much useful hosting information about your web-server. The concept is similar to PHP’s native phpinfo() function. Installing the package will add a new node tree to the developer section. Here is a quick demo video: http://screenr.com/2YC Installing this package will add…

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  25. Working with XSLT using new XML schema in Umbraco 4.1

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 3 minutes (393 words)

    Most of the Umbraco community are aware that the XML schema in the upcoming Umbraco 4.1 release has changed. Instead of each document being a node element, the element name is the node-type alias, same with property values; they no longer use data elements with alias attributes. Here is a quick example, comparing the old/legacy with the new: <node id="1066" parentID="-1" level="1" nodeName="Home" ... nodeTypeAlias="Homepage" path="-1,1066"> <data alias="bodyText"><![CDATA[<p>Welcome to my homepage.</p>]]></data> </node> <Homepage id="1066" parentID="-1" level="1"…

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  26. Bit.ly Url Shortener DataType for Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (46 words)

    Over the weekend, I coded up a little treat… a Bit.ly Url Shortener data-type for Umbraco! The new data-type lets you shorten your Umbraco page URLs using the Bit.ly API service. For more information, go to the project page over on Our Umbraco.

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  27. Updated Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (109 words)

    Last night I released version 2 of the Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco. Changes & new features: Restructured the package files, they all live in a folder called “robots-txt” (still under the /umbraco folder – but self-contained) Errors are now displayed using the Feedback control (as opposed to the Speech Bubble in the bottom-right corner). Robots.txt editor has buttons for adding new User-Agent and Disallow rules, as well as comment/uncomment functionality. Changed the Robot icon… courtesy…

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  28. How to use umbraco.library GetMedia in XSLT

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 4 minutes (513 words)

    From time to time I notice a reoccurring post over at the Our Umbraco forum; how to display an image (from the Media section) in XSLT? A quick answer can be found on the Our Umbraco wiki for the umbraco.library GetMedia method. For most uses, the last example in the wiki works great.  But I want to show you a “super safe” way of dealing with GetMedia in XSLT. Where I find a lot of…

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  29. Putting your ASP.NET Web Application in Maintenance Mode (using ISAPI_Rewrite)

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (331 words)

    Prompted by @slace’s tweet: i wish there was a way to use app_offline but still view from certain ip's — Aaron Powell (@slace) September 29, 2009 I replied with a suggestion that we’ve used in the past. Aaron said I should blog about it… so here I am (again)! A while ago we needed to do an Umbraco upgrade (from v3 to v4) on a production server – in my opinion it was a pretty…

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  30. Umbraco: Ultimate Picker XSLT Example

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 6 minutes (755 words)

    Chatting with Dan (my partner-in-code at Bodenko) about the Ultimate Picker data-type in Umbraco, we realised that we couldn’t find any examples of how to use the data in XSLT. So obviously needing an excuse to write-up a new blog post, here we go. If you need a quick overview about the Ultimate Picker data-type, see Tim Geyssens’ blog post. For my example, using a default Umbraco install (with Runway), we will create a new…

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  31. Robots.txt Editor for Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (227 words)

    Following up on my recent post of using Robots.txt with Umbraco, I decided that it would be nice to be able to edit the robots.txt directly from the Umbraco back-end.  (Also I wanted to play a bit more with the BaseTree/ITree classes). This afternoon I had a few hours to spare – actually I was procrastinating on another job, (don’t tell my client – I’ll finish it off later tonight) – so I got down…

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  32. Add YouTube Plug-in to Umbraco/TinyMCE

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 3 minutes (427 words)

    Update: Following on from Dirk and Ismail’s comments, I found out that this YouTube plug-in does not work with TinyMCE v3 (which is the default richtext editor in Umbraco v4). This guide is written to works  for Umbraco v3 only, (using TinyMCE v2). If you are looking for similar functionality in Umbraco v4, (TinyMCE v3), then all you need to do is enable the ‘Flash/media’ button in your Richtext editor data-type and embed the YouTube video…

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  33. Robots.txt for use with Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (279 words)

    I originally posted this over at the Our Umbraco community wiki. [Robots.txt for use with Umbraco] I am only posting it on my blog as a cross-reference. The Our Umbraco wiki version will evolve with the community’s experience and knowledge. The Robots Exclusion Protocol has been around for many years, yet there are a lot of web-developers who are unaware of the reasons for having a robots.txt file in the root of their websites. There…

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  34. Source Code Released for User Control File Tree Umbraco Package

    Posted on . Estimated read time: under a minute (94 words)

    A few months ago I released the User Control File Tree package for Umbraco, this allowed developers to edit the front-end code/mark-up in their ASCX user-controls from the Umbraco back-end, (remotely), rather than editing them directly on the server via a text-editor. Today I have released the source-code on the Umbraco Extensions project (on CodePlex) and created a project page on the new Our Umbraco community website. If you have any comments, feedback or suggestions…

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  35. Integrating ELMAH with Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 5 minutes (667 words)

    Update: For the latest details on how to integrate ELMAH with Umbraco, please read the article over on the Our Umbraco wiki. I have a few Umbraco projects that have a lot of custom .NET code, mostly in they are in the form of user-controls and XSLT extensions.  As far as I’m aware Umbraco doesn’t have an extendable mechanism for exception handling and sending out notification emails, (there is the umbraco.BusinessLogic.Log, which writes to the…

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  36. Umbraco Package – User Control File Tree

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (309 words)

    A few months ago, Tim Geyssens (aka Umbraco rockstar) released a package that gave you access to the *.config files in the /config/ folder. This has been a lifesaver in those few times where I have only had web-access to an Umbraco install and needed to tweak some config settings. Recently I found myself in the same situation, but this time I needed to quickly update a few text changes to an ASCX user-control. Due…

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  37. Convert XmlReader to String

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 2 minutes (286 words)

    I was in the middle of developing a member look-up AJAX function for an Umbraco project, when I ran into a slight problem, (confusion rather), about how to pull the XML back from SQL Server and return it to the browser (AJAX). The SQL statement was straight-forward, very simple, does a LIKE query against the members table, no problem there. Added “FOR XML AUTO” to return the result-set back as an XML data-type ... all…

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  38. Setting up Visual Studio to work with Umbraco

    Posted on . Estimated read time: 4 minutes (482 words)

    Over the last 12 months I have been involved with developing several Umbraco-powered websites. During that time I’ve experienced many development frustrations; specifically with debugging and version control. A while back I read Paul Sterling’s blog post on “Working with Umbraco in Visual Studio” – I used this as my basis.  I have added to his orignal suggestions: Have a clean, working copy of Umbraco – using the installer – on your machine.  I am…

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