The main update in this package is the addition of a configuration GUI (see screenshot). The package now automatically creates the scheduled task that it requires so no manual configuration is necessary.

The configuration GUI is a sub project that renders any serialisable (.net) object as an HTML form. Changes made in the GUI can then be submitted back to the server. This GUI will be a standard part of any future packages.

When I have time I'll record a screen cast demonstrating how this works - including nested object collections to any depth. For now just check out the update to Feed Cache.

Comments, feedback and suggestions are welcome as always.

It turned out to be an amazing product! Detailed info and some screencast can be found on the official Contour product page.

You can also try Contour before buy, by installing a trial straight from the package repository.

This package will create the following files / directories:

/umbraco/css
colorpicker.css
/umbraco/js/colorpicker
colorpicker.js
/umbraco/images/colorpicker
*

Link: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/true-color-picker 

Screenshot:

Well, maybe you'd do better, but Jon and I made the most basic of errors. But despite this we had a great day - productive and enjoyable. So I thought I'd share a report on the day that you might find amusing, but also might help you if you decide to do something similar. It's basic as hell - but it's the little things that get ya!

1. Bring the power supply for your laptop (this one's mine - still can't believe I did this!). Thankfully there was another Dell laptop at the office that I could steal for the day. Schoolboy error number one.

2. Ensure that the power works in the room you'll be working in.

3. If there is a codebase in a repository somewhere already, then make sure each team member has logged in and has downloaded the latest codebase in preparation to hit the ground running. I'd logged in and changed my avatar - but hadn't changed my password, so I was locked out. Schoolboy error number two. Also, there is a difference between being able to log in and being able to download the code, depending on the granularity of the security settings of the system you're using.

4. Have plenty of refreshments on hand, and know how everyone takes their tea. A very important one this, and thankfully Jon was on it, plenty of tea flowing all day. (I know, real developers drink coffee, but we're just pretending to be geeks).

5. Ensure your codebase builds and is stable - no last-minute changes! The last thing you want is to be tweaking it while the other members of the team twiddle their thumbs while you fix your mistakes. Bring new code by all means, but don't commit until you're sure it's going to work - at least then you won't stop others from getting on with it. Basic SVN best practices.

6. Make sure you're using the database you think you are, and have the latest version online on your server (if you are running a demo site like we were). Messing about downloading database publishing wizards and the like is just more time wasted.

7. Have all of the tools you're going to need installed and working on your laptop. Make sure you have enough disk space free for the tools you'll need too (schoolboy error number three).

8. Have your usernames/passwords/connection strings/etc somewhere central that everyone can access them. Using a forgotten password link while everyone sits around waiting for the email to arrive is not very productive.

9. Factor in time for excited tweeting.

Timeline

09.30 - 10.00 Fun with power cables and SVN - WASTE.

10.00 - 11.00 Architecture chat.

11.00 - 12.00 Database issues, getting latest database onto the server, installing database publishing wizard and worrying about twindling disk space - WASTE.

12.00 - 13.00 Let the real work begin! Creating Umbraco document types, getting existing code onto server, getting site finally finally working. Started on user controls.

13.00 - 14.00 Excellent slap-up lunch. We deserve it.

14.00 - 16.30 Awesome burst of creation. Site grows and grows. Not much said, lots of tea drank.

16:30 User signup live and tested on live site! Can browse to members, their blogs and galleries, etc.

16:30 - 17:30 Testing, more development and wrap-up.

Completed

Member sign up, sign in.

Browse your blogs and image galleries.

Upload images.

Create blog entries.

Add comments to all content.

Summary

So we've created the bare bones of a social networking platform based on Umbraco in a matter of hours. This is a testament to Umbraco's ease of use rather than our programming prowess that's for sure. It shows you how much is possible with Umbraco in a short time - imagine if we'd actually been organised! We have a second day of SocialFront development planned for later in the month and hopefully we'll be releasing the lot before the end of the year. As I said in the Introduction to SocialFront we are hoping to provide the foundation for Umbraco developers to build on, and we're hoping that folk will get involved. Having both worked on a number of large social networking sites, and with Jon's extensive experience with the existing systems out there, and knowing what the Umbraco community is like, we are confident that we are starting the development of a system to rival the best of the paid-for social networking platforms out there. We have plenty of ideas for future development, but first step is to get the code out the door so people can see it and use it and get involved. Watch this space!

The Duct Tape Programmer (may as well get the controversial ones in there first!)

How to Contribute to Open Source (When You're Not Exactly Scott Hanselman)

The Myth of the Genius Programmer

The Humble Programmer

So you might get the impression that we are not hot-shot programmers - and you'd be right. We certainly aren't. But we have a good idea, and we're willing to give it a shot, and we're even willing to let the uber-programmers in the community see our "work". We are all about making a start, a foundation, for the work to continue from. We hope that people will like what we produce and find it interesting and useful enough that they will make use of it and perhaps even contribute to it themselves.

Initially we thought about developing the site in a number of different ways. We got bogged down in the latest and greatest technologies and even talked about IOC for a while. We both wanted to play with and learn to use this trendy new MVC stuff, and maybe we could use LINQ as well just to be cool. We got nowhere. We read a lot, learned a lot, be we developed squat. So the project kind of died a death for a while. Then we thought about what we were doing and realised that what we really needed to do was Keep It Simple. We also didn't really want to reinvent the wheel. And we both had plenty of good experience with Umbraco. I think you can see what happened next.

Anyway to get to the point Jon and I agreed to commit to two full days of coding with Umbraco to see what kind of magic we could come up with in that admittedly short timescale. And last Saturday was day 1.We learnt a lot, made plenty of mistakes, made plenty of progress, and had a lot of fun. (Non-geeks: fun is a relative term). We aren't about to release anything just yet, as we have a second day to do towards the end of this month, with a view to releasing an alpha (pre-alpha?) version by Christmas. Right Jon? But I thought I'd blog about it and share our experiences with the community over the next few blog posts, as a kind of teaser and lead-up to the release of the package itself. I don't want to big it up too much - but it's going to be AWESOME.

Look at http://our.umbraco.org/projects/ajaxcontroltoolkit-30930-for-umbraco

While working on my customisations to Tim Geyssens MailEngine I was looking for an accurate method of automatically creating a plain-text version of the HTML emails that were being sent out by the site. Further reading brought my attention to something called Markdown. After some hunting around with a little help from my friend Google I managed to find a markdown XSLT file. Using the XSLT I could transform my HTML email to plain-text with relative ease and accuracy. Of course in order to do this I would need a valid XML document and as my pages were already valid XHTML I had no problems there.

Here is my method for doing the conversion, all it requires is that you pass it the HTML you want to convert which must be valid XML:

/// <summary>
/// Converts to HTML to plain-text.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="HTML">The HTML.</param>
/// <returns>The plain text representation of the HTML</returns>
private static string ConvertToText(string HTML)
{ string text = string.Empty; XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument(); XmlDocument xsl = new XmlDocument(); xmlDoc.LoadXml(HTML); xsl.CreateEntityReference("nbsp"); xsl.Load(System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("/xslt/Markdown.xslt")); //creating xslt XslTransform xslt = new XslTransform(); xslt.Load(xsl, null, null); //creating stringwriter StringWriter writer = new System.IO.StringWriter(); //Transform the xml. xslt.Transform(xmlDoc, null, writer, null); //return string text = writer.ToString(); writer.Close(); return text;
}

Download the XSLT file I used from here:

http://symphony-cms.com/downloads/xslt/file/20573/

I would love to hear from anyone that does this differently or if you can find any problems with the method I have chosen to implement for this solution.

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Some months back Tim Geyssens was kind enough to send me the source for his MailEngine addition to Umbraco before he released it on his blog. I made some customisations to the source to allow users to select templates and changed the filtering options slightly but other than that it worked jut fine for what I needed.

There was however one problem that became apparent when this was used in production. Sometimes, and apparently randomly the sending of mail would freeze when going to more than say 150 recipients. After a long time trying to track down the reason I stumbled across a post linking to the ‘SmtpClient does not gracefully close the underlying TCP/IP connection‘ issue on the Microsoft Connect website. I guessed it couldn’t do any harm to set the MaxTimeout property of the SmtpClient to 1 so I tried it and it seemed to work – so far so good however you should note the recent comment from someone with regards to using this method on IIS7.

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However, after about three days on the interwebs, I decided otherwise. Bring on Akismet from Automattic. From their website, "Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again."

Sounds good to me, let's get started!

First, you will need a Wordpress account. You can then find your API key by clicking on Profile.

Next, you will need to download Akismet for .Net 2.0 from Codeplex and drop the included assembly into your bin directory. Now, time for some code.

I like the idea of saving every comment, but only publishing those that pass the spam check. So, my btnSubmit_Click event looks something like this (sorry for all the wraps):

 protected void btnSubmit_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { Akismet api = new Akismet(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["wordpressKey"], "", "Test/1.0"); if (!api.VerifyKey()) throw new Exception("Key could not be verified"); AkismetComment comment = new AkismetComment(); comment.Blog = ""; comment.UserIp = Request.UserAgent.ToString(); comment.UserAgent = Request.UserAgent.ToString(); comment.CommentContent = Server.HtmlEncode(txtComment.Text); comment.CommentType = "comment"; comment.CommentAuthor = Server.HtmlEncode(txtName.Text); comment.CommentAuthorEmail = Server.HtmlEncode(txtEmail.Text); comment.CommentAuthorUrl = Server.HtmlEncode(txtWebsite.Text); DocumentType commentDt = DocumentType.GetByAlias("BlogPostComment"); Document newComment = Document.MakeNew(txtName.Text, commentDt, new umbraco.BusinessLogic.User(0), Node.GetCurrent().Id); newComment.getProperty("name").Value = Server.HtmlEncode(txtName.Text); newComment.getProperty("email").Value = Server.HtmlEncode(txtEmail.Text); newComment.getProperty("website").Value = Server.HtmlEncode(txtWebsite.Text); newComment.getProperty("comment").Value = Server.HtmlEncode(txtComment.Text); newComment.Save(); if (!api.CommentCheck(comment)) { newComment.Publish(new umbraco.BusinessLogic.User(0)); umbraco.library.UpdateDocumentCache(newComment.Id); Response.Redirect(umbraco.library.NiceUrl(Node.GetCurrent().Id) + "#comment-" + newComment.Id.ToString()); } else { customError.IsValid = false; customError.ErrorMessage = "Your comment has been detected as spam."; } }

I have also thought about creating a new button datatype to enable me to submit unblocked spam and Ham (false positives) back to Akismet to help improve the algorithm, but have not gotten around to it and really haven't needed to. Akismet really does a great job for lazy folks like me. Their claim of 93% accuracy is looking pretty solid.

Now all I need is for Umbraco to implement a "Delete at" feature for documents so that I can set an expiration date for all of the unpublished spam nodes that I have in my content tree.

Overview

On a recent project we stumbled into an interesting problem. We had been asked to build a very simple website, however we wanted to allow the site to grow and develop so making it as flexible as possible was paramount. The site would have monthly publications which could contain 'assets'. It was likely the 'assets' would be used in future publications so we wanted to store these in their own folder.

The publication would show a preview of the asset & when it was clicked the asset would play at the top of the publication. This was done by passing the nodeID of the asset into the querystring of the publication page. The publication also showed a teaser which was associated to the asset.

This gave our client a very flexible solution. However our clients wanted to be able to link to other assets within the teaser (contentTeaser) field.

This presented us with a problem, the content editor could link to other assets. But when this link was parsed it would link to the other document. This was not the behavior we wanted, we wanted to access the nodeID and pass this in the query string to keep behavior uniform.

-

To do this we needed to interupt how Umbraco parsed the XML by Encoding the 'contentTeaser', accessing the link information, replacing it, and then decoding the data so it would be suitable for front-end render again.

We did this using XSLT, eXSLT, Regex and some C#.

References

our.Umbraco.org - Extend your XSLT with Custom Functions
eXSLT.org - Regex Replace
eXSLT.org - Regex Match (more useful examples)
our.Umbraco.org - Umbraco Library

The Code

This document has been broken down into six sections, at the bottom of this page is a link to download the XSLT.

1. Custom XSLT Function
2. Get the $currentPage URL
3. Get the $currentPage Content and Encode (variable)
4. Set the Regex String Replacement
5. Run Regex Replace
6. Get the Replace Output, Decode & Display.

1. Custom XSLT

This code has been referenced from the Umbraco Wiki you can find it here.

<msxml:script implements-prefix="htmlDecode" language="C#">
<msxml:assembly name="System.Web"/>
<msxml:using namespace="System.Web"/>

<![CDATA[ public string convertText(string text) { string decodedStr = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(text); return decodedStr; } ]]>

</msxml:script>

2. Get the $currentPage URL

We need the URL for the page we want to make the links reference too.
Using the 'umbraco.library:NiceURL(string)' function.

This URL is assigned the variable '$niceURL'.

<xsl:variable name="niceURL">
<xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:NiceUrl($currentPage/@id)"/>
</xsl:variable>

3. Get the $currentPage Content and Encode (variable)

Next we grab the content which contains our links. In this case the datatype was a richtext editor. To be able to process this with the eXSLT:Regex extension we needed to encode the characters in the HTML.

This is really easy to do using the 'umbraco:library:HtmlEncode(string)' function.

<xsl:variable name="assetTeaser">
<xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:HtmlEncode(data [@alias = 'assetTeaser'])"/> </xsl:variable>

4. Set the Regex String Replacement

For some reason I couldn't write the whole replacement string in the regex replace function. So I pull in the string I wanted by setting it as a variable. In anyone knows how to fix this please let me know!

<xsl:variable name="niceURLregex">
..<xsl:value-of select="$niceURL"/>
?clip=$1
</xsl:variable>

5. Run Regex Replace

Using a eXSLT function called replace would can feed in our content, find the {localLinks} and then replace these with the variable we set earlier.

in this case, we are looking for localLink and a 4 digit number. Its worth noting the number could be longer than four digits if your site has many nodes. We also inform the processor that it is dealing with a multiline input (m), a ungreedy pattern (U) and to treat each string as a single line (s); giving us 'mUs'.

We now need to feed the function the replacement information. As noted above I could not find a way to write what is stored in the variable directly. Because of this we simply pull the variable in.

This string tells is to;

• .. - move to the root.
• $niceURL - get the niceURL variable, defined in the top of the document. This is just the URL for the current page.
• ?clip= - add some static text
• $1 - add the string, e.g "1234" in /{localLink:(1234)}

<xsl:variable name="assetTeaserReplace">
<xsl:value-of select="Exslt.ExsltRegularExpressions:replace($assetTeaser, '/{localLink:([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])}', 'mUs', $niceURLregex )" disable-output-escaping="no" /> </xsl:variable>

6. Get Replace Output, Decode and Display

Okay so we've taken $assetTeaser, and using some regex we've updated the links. Now we need to Decode it. (we encoded it to start with). Its at this point we run the custom function we set at the top of the document which gives us the capability to decodeHTML.

<xsl:value-of select="htmlDecode:convertText(string($assetTeaserReplace))" disable-output-escaping="yes" />

-

You can download the XSLT for this here.

But this can easily be changed.

You can target the richttext editor with the class

.mceContentBody

So by appending this to the related stylesheet, you have more control over the styling in the richttext editor datatype.

(make sure to clear your browser cache, to view the result)

While building NCEExam.com, I used a different approach to solve this problem. While I am not sure this is the best way to accomplish file protection, it is very flexible and requires no configuration in IIS. If you have ever worked with DotNetNuke (first off, I'm sorry) you may recognize this.

First, simply add the file extension .resources to the end of any file you wish to protect. You can do this manually before uploading the file, or create a custom upload datatype to handle this for you. The .resources file extension is already mapped to the .NET runtime in IIS and, unlike .aspx, it is never served to the client.

Next, create a document type and add a generic property to it using the Upload datatype. You can leave the template empty. Now, use this document type to upload files anywhere in your content section.

You will need a user control to handle the file download. I have the following method in my user control to handle this:

private void ServeFile(string FileName)
{ string strFileName = Server.MapPath(FileName); string strFileId = strFileName.ToString().Replace(".resources", ""); string strFileExtension = Path.GetExtension(strFileId); FileInfo fInfo = new FileInfo(strFileName); Response.AddHeader("Content-Length", fInfo.Length.ToString()); switch (strFileExtension) { case ".pdf": Response.ContentType = "application/pdf"; break; case ".zip": Response.ContentType = "application/zip"; break; } Response.AppendHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" + Path.GetFileName(strFileId)); Response.Clear(); Response.TransmitFile(strFileName); Response.Flush(); Response.End();
}

Gather the file url from the generic property you created earlier and pass it to the ServeFile method (FileName). Next, strip off the .resources extension. Then, just set the content length and content type and transmit the file using Response.TransmitFile. You could easily extend the switch statement to handle any number of content types or even add a new generic property to your document type to store it.

Lastly, create a macro to serve this user control and slap it on the empty template you created earlier. Then, simply use the url of the document in the Content section (via Content Picker or manually) to serve the file. You could even add protection to the document for added security, but it is not required.

One drawback to this method is that every file you upload will have a document in the Content section. This is not a big deal, but something worth noting.

Prompted by @slace’s tweet:

i wish there was a way to use app_offline but still view from certain ip’s

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 major upgrade on a live site, we had done a couple of test upgrades on dev and staging, all was successful. But since there was various parts of the site that we need to regression test, I felt it best to take the entire site offline whilst we upgraded.

Usually creating an “App_Offline.htm” page in the root of your web app is enough to take it offline. However that was no good for testing… so what to do?

This is where ISAPI_Rewrite is your best friend, (or .htaccess to be precise). We needed to configure the site to allow access for us and redirect everyone else to a “Site under maintenance” page. I found a few examples across the web, but to save you all that hassle, here are the .htaccess rules that we use:

# BEGIN Maintanence Mode
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/offline.html$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^82\.13\.23\.230$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /offline.html [R=302,L]
</IfModule>
# END Maintanence Mode

What does it do? The first “RewriteCond” rule checks that you are not requesting the “offline.html” page (otherwise you would end up in a constant loop!) The second “RewriteCond” checks the IP address of the visitor – in my case it was “82.13.23.230″ (remember to escape the dots). If those two rules aren’t satisfied, then the “RewriteRule” is used, redirecting the visitor to the “offline.html” page.

As always, I am open to any suggestions or improvements!

CTRL + > or you can use SHIFT + ALT + F10

Here is an example of a new custom Application tree I was implementing for the Umbraco CMS:

namespace ProlificNotion.Umbraco

{

public class MyNewTree : umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.BaseTree
{

}
}

With your cursor at the end of the class signature you can then press CTRL + > or SHIFT + ALT + F10 and you will get a smart tag offering to implement the abstract class or interface, hit enter and the result is as follows:

namespace ProlificNotion.Umbraco
{
public class MyNewTree : umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.BaseTree
{

protected override void CreateRootNode(ref umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.XmlTreeNode rootNode)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}

public override void Render(ref umbraco.cms.presentation.Trees.XmlTree tree)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}

public override void RenderJS(ref System.Text.StringBuilder Javascript)
{
throw new System.NotImplementedException();
}
}
}

A simple example of something that can be a huge time saver particularly when the inherited class or interface has a large number of methods to implement!

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The package essentially adds a new context menu item to the Umbraco CMS dashboard to allow media items to be sorted alphanumerically. The Media Sorter is something I originally developed to save myself and my clients time when working with large media repositories in Umbraco. It helps keep things organised and makes media items quicker and easier to locate if they are kept in some sort of order.

I enjoy(ed) working on this project because I learnt a bit more about Umbraco Package Actions and found some limitations with the currently available Package Actions. As a result of the limitations I developed my own package action ‘Update Application Tree Package Action for Umbraco‘ to fulfil the requirements of my package.

I have released the source for this package on CodePlex under the Umbraco Extensions project.

Many thanks to Kim Andersen for his patience while I ironed out some issues he was having with the initial releases on .net 2.0.

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Until recently I have created .net macros for even simple functionality that I would have preferred to put in an easily-maintained XSLT macro. Why? Because I couldn't access a needed namespace from within XSLT.

An example: file level operations

A recent site I worked on needed to display the size of a file. If the file were in umbraco's Media section this would be easy with the built-in umbracoBytes property. But in this case, the file was uploaded rather than placed in umbraco's Media section. Thus, the usual umbraco metadata was not available.

Various solutions presented themselves:

• Add an 'umbracoBytes' property (of type label or static text) to my document type. Umbraco will auto-populate this property when a file is uploaded (this is VERY cool and a great tip to remember!). In my case, however, I had four upload fields in the docType and whatever file was uploaded last would have its filesize placed in the 'umbracoBytes' field. I needed a solution that would work for all the files uploaded.
• Create an event handler setting a unique uploadFile1_umbracoBytes, uploadFile2_umbracoBytes, etc. property when uploading the file. This seemed like too much effort and I would be sure to forget to update the event handler should a fifth upload field be added to the docType later on.
• Create a custom XSLT extension to get the filesize information. This is a good solution but a whole extension seemed rather over-kill for a few lines of C# code.

The C# function I wanted to use was very simple, taking the path to a file and returning the filesize in kilobytes. This could certainly be done as an XSLT extension:

public String uploadFileSize(String filePath) { if ((filePath != null) && (filePath.Length != 0)) { String localFile = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(filePath); if (File.Exists(localFile)) { FileInfo fileinfo = new FileInfo(localFile); return String.Format("{0:#,###,###.##}", (fileinfo.Length / 1024)); } } return null;
}

Using .NET namespaces in your XSLT macros

What I really wanted to do was augment my XSLT macro with that bit of C# code to get the file size from within the XSLT file itself, without needing to create a .NET control, some app_code, an event handler, or custom XSLT extension.

Unfortunately, file level access and many other fun capabilities are not allowed in your umbraco XSLT macros. Not by default, that is. But it's really simple to add that ability with in-line C# (a topic we'll cover in another post) in your XSLT macro.

<msxml:script language="CSharp" implements-prefix="ps"> <msxml:using namespace="System.IO" /> <msxml:assembly name="System.Web" /> <msxml:using namespace="System.Web" /> <![CDATA[ public String uploadFileSize(String filePath) { if ((filePath != null) && (filePath.Length != 0)) { String localFile = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(filePath); if (File.Exists(localFile)) { FileInfo fileinfo = new FileInfo(localFile); return String.Format("{0:#,###,###.##}", (fileinfo.Length / 1024)); } } return null; } ]]>
</msxml:script>

The msxml:using and msxml:assembly statements are the important bits. The msxml:assembly loads the assembly like adding a reference in a .NET project. The msxml:using makes using the functions shorter with no prefix required, just as using System.IO; and using System.Web; in your C# code would do.

I found System.IO was already available so I didn't need to add the assembly statement for it. System.Web was not available so I added it with the msxml:assembly statement.

Completed XSLT macro with in-line .NET code

Here is a complete (and very simple, rather hard-coded) XSLT file. Your macros would probably have more logic in the main template, possibly set the uploadedFile variable with a macro parameter (using a propertyPicker data type), and include additional checks for errors. 

<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [ <!ENTITY nbsp "&#x00A0;">
]>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxml="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:ps="urn:schemas-percipient-studios" xmlns:umbraco.library="urn:umbraco.library" exclude-result-prefixes="msxml ps umbraco.library" > <xsl:output method="xml" omit-xml-declaration="yes" /> <xsl:param name="currentPage"/> <!-- =========================================================== --> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:variable name="uploadedFile" select="$currentPage/data[@alias='uploadedFile']" /> <xsl:if test="string($uploadedFile) != ''"> <p> The size of the uploaded file is: <xsl:value-of select="ps:uploadFileSize($uploadedFile)" /> kb </p> </xsl:if> </xsl:template> <!-- =========================================================== --> <msxml:script language="CSharp" implements-prefix="ps"> <msxml:using namespace="System.IO" /> <msxml:assembly name="System.Web" /> <msxml:using namespace="System.Web" /> <![CDATA[ public String uploadFileSize(String filePath) { if ((filePath != null) && (filePath.Length != 0)) { String localFile = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(filePath); if (File.Exists(localFile)) { FileInfo fileinfo = new FileInfo(localFile); return String.Format("{0:#,###,###.##}", (fileinfo.Length / 1024)); } } return null; } ]]> </msxml:script> <!-- =========================================================== --> </xsl:stylesheet>

Conclusion

As you can see, extending your XSLT macros with a bit of .NET functionality is very simple and will help you make the most of your macros. And because XSLT macros are compiled, performance is not a problem, though I also cached this macro heavily as well just to be on the safe side.

So I’ve added the sourcecode to the poll project page on our.umbraco.org (attached files).

Enjoy!

In Umbraco I had a need to force the user to be redirected to another page, the easiest way is to create a asp.net control (macro) and put it on the template and there you go. But why this is expensive as it has to go all the way through the umbraco context which uses additional resources. So how do I get around this….

Research
First i did a bit of research and found a redirect package but this just wasn’t what i wanted, so the next thing i did was look at the HttpModules that are found for Umbraco well what i found is that these modules do very little of the processing, and all the processing is actually handled on the page, to me this just seems like a silly idea but i guess the it’s got it’s reasons for this. I then used reflector to have a look at how the page is determined, security, etc.

What i found is that i can actually do most of this manually in a HttpModule but it also showed that what it could also do is allow a Pipeline of such for the HttpRequest to be created just like Sitecore (i have used Sitecore for a very very long time since 2002) and this approach is so easy for developers to tap into.

Visual Studio
So how did I go about implementing this solution well firstly I opened up visual studio and my solution.

1. Created a new class which i called “ForceRedirectModule”.
2. Register this class to the “IHttpModule” interface.
   1. Make sure you implement the interface which will give you “Dispose” and “Int” methods for the class.
3. In the “Init” method we want to register to the “HttpApplication” “AuthenticateRequest” event handler, and for this example I’ve used “ForceRedirect_AuthenticateRequest”.

So once you’ve done that you class should look something like below:

public class ForceRedirectModule : IHttpModule
{
#region IHttpModule Members
public void Dispose()
{
//throw new NotImplementedException();
}

public void Init(HttpApplication context)
{
// we use AuthenticateRequest so we have access to the user
context.AuthenticateRequest += new EventHandler(ForceRedirect_AuthenticateRequest);
}
#endregion

void ForceRedirect_AuthenticateRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//throw new NotImplementedException();
}
}

The reason why we have to register to the “AuthenicateRequest” instead of “BeginRequest” is that by the time BeginRequest fires the system has worked out if the user is valid or not, i personally don’t like this but it’s the only way to do this at the moment without re-writing the full front end (cough cough i might have already started doing).

Next what we’ll do is setup some local variables which we will use a bit later on:
private HttpApplication httpApp;
private const string ForceRedirect = “forceredirect”;
private const string MemberForceRedirect = “memberforceredirect”;

We want to modify out Init code to be the following:
public void Init(HttpApplication context)
{
// we use AuthenticateRequest so we have access to the user
context.AuthenticateRequest += new EventHandler(ForceRedirect_AuthenticateRequest);
httpApp = context;
}

What we are doing is just registring the context so we can use it later on for ease.

Next we want to create a private method called IsUrlValid which will be used to help filter out pages we don’t want to redirect on, this is crude but it work:
private bool IsUrlValid(HttpContext context)
{
string url = context.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri;

// make sure it only uses if required
if ((url.IndexOf(“.aspx”) > -1) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/umbraco/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/bin/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/umbraco_client/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/usercontrols/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/xslt/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/scripts/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/masterpages/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/install/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/umbraco_client/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/data/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/config/”)
)
{
return true;
}

return false;
}

Next we need to start adding some code to out ForceRedirect_AuthenticateRequest handler:
void ForceRedirect_AuthenticateRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpContext context = httpApp.Context;

if (IsUrlValid(context))
{
string[] paths = context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.Replace(“.aspx”, “”).Split(‘/’);

 // make sure we have data
if (paths.Length > 0)
{
// build the dynamic path from the root
System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();

// process the nodes
for (int i = 0; i < paths.Length; i++)
{
if (!paths[i].Equals(string.Empty))
{
// make sure we have the first instance so it works correctly
if (sb.Length == 0)
{
sb.Append(“.”);
}

sb.AppendFormat(“/node[@urlName='{0}']“, paths[i]);
}
}

if (sb.Length > 0)
{
string domainName = context.Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_NAME"];

if (umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Domain.Exists(domainName))
{
System.Xml.XmlElement domain = umbraco.content.Instance.XmlContent.GetElementById(umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Domain.GetRootFromDomain(domainName).ToString());

if (domain != null)
{
//string currentId = node.Attributes.GetNamedItem(“id”).Value;
System.Xml.XmlNode currentNode = domain.SelectSingleNode(sb.ToString());

if (currentNode != null)
{
string redirectUrl = ForceRedirectCheck(currentNode, 0);

if (!redirectUrl.Equals(string.Empty))
{
httpApp.Context.Response.Redirect(redirectUrl);
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}

Now what does this do, it’s quite simple it gets the current page and finds the node for this, it then doesn’t some checks to see if everything is fine, the bulk of the additional processing is done in the ForceRedirectCheck method.
The ForceRedirectCheck method makes sure that the page firstly has the fields required, if not it does nothing, but if they are found and not empty then it starts processing the calling page to try and see if that page requires a redirect, this will continue until it finds a page which doesn’t redirect, yes it means you could put this into a circular dependency, but you know what that would be your own stupid fault.
Below is the code for the ForceRedirectCheck:
private string ForceRedirectCheck(System.Xml.XmlNode currentNode, int loop)
{
System.Xml.XmlNode forceRedirect = null;
string returnData = “”;

// try member force redirect first
if (httpApp.Context.User != null && httpApp.Context.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
{
forceRedirect = currentNode.SelectSingleNode(“./data [@alias = '" + MemberForceRedirect + "']“);
}

if (forceRedirect == null || forceRedirect.ChildNodes.Count <= 0)
{
forceRedirect = currentNode.SelectSingleNode(“./data [@alias = '" + ForceRedirect + "']“);
}

if (forceRedirect != null && forceRedirect.ChildNodes.Count > 0)
{
int redirectId = 0;
if (int.TryParse(forceRedirect.ChildNodes[0].Value, out redirectId))
{
returnData = ForceRedirectCheck(umbraco.content.Instance.XmlContent.GetElementById(redirectId.ToString()), loop + 1);
}
}

if (returnData.Equals(string.Empty) && loop > 0)
{
returnData = umbraco.library.NiceUrl(Convert.ToInt32(currentNode.Attributes["id"].Value));
}

return returnData;
}

That’s all the code, so here is what you should have:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;

namespace TestProject
{
public class ForceRedirectModule : IHttpModule
{
private HttpApplication httpApp;
private const string ForceRedirect = “forceredirect”;
private const string MemberForceRedirect = “memberforceredirect”;

#region IHttpModule Members

public void Dispose()
{
//throw new NotImplementedException();
}

public void Init(HttpApplication context)
{
// we use AuthenticateRequest so we have access to the user
context.AuthenticateRequest += new EventHandler(ForceRedirect_AuthenticateRequest);
httpApp = context;
}

#region IsUrlValid
private bool IsUrlValid(HttpContext context)
{
string url = context.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri;

// make sure it only uses if required
if ((url.IndexOf(“.aspx”) > -1) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/umbraco/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/bin/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/umbraco_client/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/usercontrols/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/xslt/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/scripts/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/masterpages/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/install/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/umbraco_client/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/data/”) &&
!context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.StartsWith(“/config/”)
)
{
return true;
}

return false;
}
#endregion

void ForceRedirect_AuthenticateRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpContext context = httpApp.Context;

if (IsUrlValid(context))
{
string[] paths = context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.Replace(“.aspx”, “”).Split(‘/’);

// make sure we have data
if (paths.Length > 0)
{
// build the dynamic path from the root
System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();

// process the nodes
for (int i = 0; i < paths.Length; i++)
{
if (!paths[i].Equals(string.Empty))
{
// make sure we have the first instance so it works correctly
if (sb.Length == 0)
{
sb.Append(“.”);
}

sb.AppendFormat(“/node[@urlName='{0}']“, paths[i]);
}
}

if (sb.Length > 0)
{
string domainName = context.Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_NAME"];

if (umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Domain.Exists(domainName))
{
System.Xml.XmlElement domain = umbraco.content.Instance.XmlContent.GetElementById(umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Domain.GetRootFromDomain(domainName).ToString());

if (domain != null)
{
//string currentId = node.Attributes.GetNamedItem(“id”).Value;
System.Xml.XmlNode currentNode = domain.SelectSingleNode(sb.ToString());

if (currentNode != null)
{
string redirectUrl = ForceRedirectCheck(currentNode, 0);

if (!redirectUrl.Equals(string.Empty))
{
httpApp.Context.Response.Redirect(redirectUrl);
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}

#endregion

#region ForceRedirectCheck
private string ForceRedirectCheck(System.Xml.XmlNode currentNode, int loop)
{
System.Xml.XmlNode forceRedirect = null;
string returnData = “”;

// try member force redirect first
if (httpApp.Context.User != null && httpApp.Context.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
{
forceRedirect = currentNode.SelectSingleNode(“./data [@alias = '" + MemberForceRedirect + "']“);
}

if (forceRedirect == null || forceRedirect.ChildNodes.Count <= 0)
{
forceRedirect = currentNode.SelectSingleNode(“./data [@alias = '" + ForceRedirect + "']“);
}

if (forceRedirect != null && forceRedirect.ChildNodes.Count > 0)
{
int redirectId = 0;
if (int.TryParse(forceRedirect.ChildNodes[0].Value, out redirectId))
{
returnData = ForceRedirectCheck(umbraco.content.Instance.XmlContent.GetElementById(redirectId.ToString()), loop + 1);
}
}

if (returnData.Equals(string.Empty) && loop > 0)
{
returnData = umbraco.library.NiceUrl(Convert.ToInt32(currentNode.Attributes["id"].Value));
}

return returnData;
}
#endregion
}
}

Web.Config
The code has been done and compiled fine, to use this you have to place the http module in the correct location.
Open up the web.config file and drill down to the httpModule section and add this in the following location:

<httpModules>
<!– URL REWRTIER –>
<add name=”UrlRewriteModule” type=”UrlRewritingNet.Web.UrlRewriteModule, UrlRewritingNet.UrlRewriter” />
<add name=”umbracoRequestModule” type=”umbraco.presentation.requestModule” />
<!– UMBRACO –>
<add name=”viewstateMoverModule” type=”umbraco.presentation.viewstateMoverModule” />
<add name=”umbracoBaseRequestModule” type=”umbraco.presentation.umbracobase.requestModule” />
<!– FORCE REDIRECT –>
<add name=”forceRedirectModule” type=”TestProject.ForceRedirectModule, TestProject” />
<!– ASPNETAJAX –>
<add name=”ScriptModule” type=”System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35″/>
</httpModules>

Umbraco
Now that the code has been finished we have to update umbraco so we can use it, simply go to the required document type and add the following fields:

• “forceredirect”: link
• “memberforceredirect”: link

That’s it just save the doc type and update the required node and publish.
Now when your a public user and you hit the page you will be redirected to where ever, and if your a member and hit the page you can also be redirected to a different locaiton agian.

Conclusion
As you can see it wasn’t to difficult to create a http module but in the end it should of been a lot easier, but now it saves the resources that would be handled by the page and the redirecting occurs with out any hassels.

So instead of releasing a package I’ll share the sourcecode and I’ll give an overview of how to use it.

Installation

Once you have ABCpdf installed (it’s possible to download a trail and you can also apply for a free license) the installation is just a mather of dropping some files in your umbraco instance.

• Drop PDFGen.dll in the /bin folder
• Drop PDFGen.aspx in the /umbraco
• Drop PDFGen.config in the /config folder

Setup

First you’ll need to define a pdf template, this can be done in the PDFGen.config file which should
be in the /config folder.
Lets look at an example config file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>

<PDFGen PermitPrint=”False” PermitExtractContent=”False”>

<!– Header–>

<Text FontName=”Arial” FontSize=”12″ FontColor=”0,0,0″ X1=”20″ Y1=”40″ X2=”500″ Y2=”700″

IsRecurring=”true”>my header text</Text>

<Image File=”/media/950/joblistpdfhead.jpg” X=”20″ Y=”670″ Width=”570″ Height=”100″ IsRecurring=”true”/>

<!– Content –>

<Property RequestParam=”test” PropertyAlias=”title;@createDate” FontName=”Arial” FontSize=”18″

FontColor=”0,0,0″ X1=”25″ Y1=”620″ X2=”500″ Y2=”650″ IsRecurring=”false”>{0} - {1}</Property>

<Property RequestParam=”" PropertyAlias=”info” FontName=”Arial” FontSize=”11″ FontColor=”0,0,0″ X1=”25″

Y1=”180″ X2=”530″ Y2=”630″ IsRecurring=”false”></Property>

<Property RequestParam=”" PropertyAlias=”linkURL” FontName=”Arial” FontSize=”11″ FontColor=”0,0,0″

X1=”40″ Y1=”715″ X2=”520″ Y2=”740″ IsRecurring=”false”></Property>

<!– Footer –>

<Text FontName=”Arial” FontSize=”6″ FontColor=”0,0,0″ X1=”25″ Y1=”20″ X2=”500″ Y2=”30″

IsRecurring=”true”>Copyright mysite 2009 — All Rights Reserved.</Text>

</PDFGen>

After the xml declaration (yes the config file is an xml file) you have the PDFGen root node.
On this node you can set wether the generated pdf files are printable and if it is possible to extract
content (copy,paste).

<PDFGen PermitPrint=”False” PermitExtractContent=”False”>

The child nodes of the root PDFGen node will be used to define the pdf. There are a couple of
possibilities:

• Text
• Image
• Property
• RenderedOutput

Text nodes

<Text FontName=”Arial” FontSize=”12″ FontColor=”0,0,0″ X1=”20″ Y1=”40″ X2=”500″ Y2=”700″

IsRecurring=”true”>my header text</Text>

A text node is used to add some static text on the pdf document it has several attributes

• FontName: name of the font family that will be used
• FontSize: size of the font
• FontColor: color of the font
• X1,Y1,X2,Y2: these are the coordinated used to define a box where the text will be placed
• IsRecurring: if this is set to true the text will appear on each page (used for headers and
  footers)
• The inner text is the static text that will be placed on the pdf (it is possible to add html).

Image nodes

<Image File=”/media/950/joblistpdfhead.jpg” X=”20″ Y=”670″ Width=”570″ Height=”100″ IsRecurring=”true”/>

An image node is used to add an image to the pdf document.

An overview of it’s attributes:

• File: path to the image
• X,Y: coordinated of the image
• Width: width of the image
• Height: height of the image
• IsRecurring: if this is set to true the image will appear on each page (used for headers and
  footers)

Property nodes

<Property RequestParam=”test” PropertyAlias=”title;@createDate” FontName=”Arial” FontSize=”18″

FontColor=”0,0,0″ X1=”25″ Y1=”620″ X2=”500″ Y2=”650″ IsRecurring=”false”>{0} – {1}</Property>

A property node is used to add umbraco content node property data to the pdf document.

An overview of it’s attributes:

• RequestParam: if this is empty the default request param id will be used, if you want to use
  another one define it here
• PropertyAlias: alias of the property (possible to add multiple separated by semicolon)
• FontName: name of the font family that will be used
• FontSize: size of the font
• FontColor: color of the font
• X1,Y1,X2,Y2 :these are the coordinated used to define a box where the text will be placed
• IsRecurring :if this is set to true the text will appear on each page (used for headers and
  footers)

The innertext can be used to add some static text around the property or if you have multiple
propertyaliases you must define how they will be placed (simular to string.format).

RenderedOutput nodes

<RenderedOutput RequestParam=”" Template=”" X1=”25″ Y1=”620″ X2=”500″ Y2=”650″ IsRecurring=”false” />

This will fetch the rendered output of a page, if no requestparam is used it will use the id one and if no template alias is defined it will use that default template of that page.

An overview of it’s attributes:

• RequestParam: if this is empty the default request param id will be used, if you want to use
  another one define it here
• Template: template alias to use, if this is empty the default template of the document will be used
• X1,Y1,X2,Y2 :these are the coordinated used to define a box where the text will be placed
• IsRecurring :if this is set to true the text will appear on each page (used for headers and
  footers)

Usage

Once installed and if you have a working config file. You can use pdfgen by calling /umbraco/pdfgen.aspx?id=1234 (the id is the id of the umbraco document).

If you have defined other RequestParams in your config file (like headerid) you just need to do:
/umbraco/pdfgen.aspx?id=1234&headerid=2345

It’s also possible to have multiple config files (just copy the pdfgen.config) if you want to use anohter config file you can do it like this:

/umbraco/pdfgen.aspx?id=1234&pdfconfig=pdfconfigcopy.config

pdfconfigcopy.config is the filename of the configfile (must be in the /config dir)

So today I was ready to waste a few hours on getting a proper captcha system implemented. I have always really liked reCAPTCHA because it's not only fighting spam, everybody filling one out is also helping to digitize books, cool.

I wish there was some complicated problems that I could explain here, but once you sign up for reCAPTCHA, you can go to the asp.net plugin page and follow the instructions. I was finished in a matter of minutes and now have an evil, but necessary captcha widget on my comment forms.

You can watch a demonstration here.

This update also fixes an import reference in the XSLT.

You can see a demonstration of the package here.

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 data-type using the Ultimate Picker, (let’s call it “Runway Textpage Picker“), we select the ‘Database datatype‘ to be “Nvarchar”; the ‘Type‘ as a “List Box”; The ‘Parent nodeid‘ is “1048″ and the ‘Document Alias‘ filter is “RunwayTextpage” – we also tick the ‘Show grandchildren‘ checkbox.

Ultimate Picker Data Type settings

Next, we will assign the new “Runway Textpage Picker“ data-type to a property of the Runway Textpage, we will call it “Related Content“. For more information about working with document types, please refer to the our.umbraco.org wiki page, (Working with document types).

Adding Ultimate Picker to a Document Type

Once the document-type is saved, we move on to the ‘Content‘ section. Select any of the Runway Textpages. You should now see the ‘Related Content‘ property panel, containing a list of all the other Runway Textpages. To select multiple items, hold-down the CTRL (or Command on the Mac) button. When you have finished, click the ’Save and publish‘ button.

Selecting related content

For the next part we get to the real meat of this blog post… the XSLT!

Create a new XSLT

Create a new XSLT called “RelatedContent” (without the .xslt extension), keep it ‘Clean’ and tick the ‘Create Macro‘ checkbox. Next a quick short-cut for you; copy-n-paste the following XSLT into the main editor window.

Copy-n-paste the XSLT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [ <!ENTITY nbsp "&#xA0;"> ]>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxml="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:umbraco.library="urn:umbraco.library" exclude-result-prefixes="msxml umbraco.library"> <xsl:output method="xml" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/> <xsl:param name="currentPage"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:variable name="preNodes"> <xsl:variable name="relatedContent" select="$currentPage/data[@alias='RelatedContent']" /> <xsl:variable name="nodeIds" select="umbraco.library:Split($relatedContent, ',')" /> <xsl:for-each select="$nodeIds/value"> <xsl:copy-of select="umbraco.library:GetXmlNodeById(.)"/> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:variable> <xsl:variable name="nodes" select="msxml:node-set($preNodes)/node" /> <xsl:if test="count($nodes) > 0">
<div class="related-content">
<h3>Related Content</h3>
<ul> <xsl:for-each select="$nodes"> <li> <a href="{umbraco.library:NiceUrl(@id)}"> <xsl:value-of select="@nodeName" /> </a></li>
</xsl:for-each></ul>
</div>
</xsl:if> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>

Here’s a quick explanation of what is happening in the XSLT. We are provided with a list of comma-separated nodeIds from the Ultimate Picker, which we need to parse/split – then pull back the XML node data, then we can transform it however we like!

The way we do this is 2-tiered, first we must loop through the comma-separated list, pulling back the XML node for each nodeId, adding it to an XSLT variable. Doing this will cause the XSLT variable to be a fragmented node-tree, which means that we need to convert the node-tree fragment into a node-set. (*Note: there are a gazillion ways to skin a cat – suggestions are welcome – this method works for me).

Once we have the complete XML node-set, we can transform into whatever HTML we like.

Now that we are done with the XSLT, we can edit our template in the ‘Settings‘ section. Select the “Runway Textpage” template. Somewhere after the ‘bodyText‘ property item, click on the ‘Insert Macro’ button. From the ‘Choose a macro‘ drop-down, select the ‘Related Content‘ option – this will add the macro code to the template.

Insert the macro into the template

Save the template and view the front-end page. We can now see the Related Content pages. Tada!

The end result! Related Content

ERROR CREATING CONTROL FOR NODETYPE: Media

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.ArgumentException: ERROR CREATING CONTROL FOR NODETYPE: Media

Source Error:

Stack Trace:

[ArgumentException: ERROR CREATING CONTROL FOR NODETYPE: Media] umbraco.cms.presentation.Create.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +415 System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) +15 System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) +33 System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +99 umbraco.BasePages.BasePage.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +12 System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +47 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1436

After a bit of digging I discovered the following Work Item on CodePlex and the following comment from jvisch which provided me with the solution:

1. Open the UI.xml file located in /umbraco/config/create
2. Search for the node with the alias ‘media‘
3. Change the alias to ‘Media’ with a capital M
4. Save the file
5. Restart the website by making a slight change to the web.config file and saving it

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In normal day-to-day use this is not a problem, but it becomes one when you try to programatically access the documentType by alias (DocumentType.GetByAlias("Folder")). I ran into this problem the other day and couldn't figure out why I was getting unexpected results until I had a look at what the ID actually represented, a media folder.

The first project is NCEExam.com, an online study and testing system for the National Counselor Exam. This is version 3 of the system and is the first version to run on Umbraco (V4). There were a lot of unique challenges in this project such as securing FLV videos and downloadable content, as well as a custom shopping cart and e-commerce interface.

We will probably convert our shopping cart to Commerce4Umbraco eventually. However, it had not even reached the alpha stage when this site launched.

http://www.nceexam.com

The second project is Tutt & Daggs, a company specializing in workplace training and motivation for educational institutions, large corporations and non-profit organizations.

A couple of neat features were incorporated into this project. I utilized a JQuery slider on the bios page along with a Light Box gallery for promotional photos. Thanks to Umbraco, the client has no trouble maintaining this site on their own.

http://www.tuttdaggs.com

It is always interesting to see how others are using Umbraco in creative or innovative ways. If you have any projects you would like to share, please pass them along.

I have been thinking about this subject for some time now, but todays tweets got me thinking and I thought I’d write up a post to hopefully stir up some discussion.

Maybe I should start off by saying that i’m not a money hungry developer, but I think that we can all agree that even though we are working with an open source CMS, we have to make money some how some way. Of course we get paid when developing a customer solution, but it seems to me that things are a bit different when developing addons, plugins, packages, datatypes and everything else that has been developed by and for the Umbraco community.

Currently there are two packages available for purchase in the Umbraco store, and I counted 68 packages on our.umbraco.org today.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that so many people are contributing with a lot of great stuff that is free to install and use. I personally used Warren’s CWS package to get up to speed on Umbraco v.4 after not having used Umbraco since v.3.0.3. I think it is a great resource, but I probably wouldn’t have bought it if it was only available for purchase in the Umbraco store. No offense Warren

I myself started a pretty big project (at least for a spare time project) by developing Google Analytics for Umbraco, which is open sourced and thus free for all I thought about different models for getting a bit of return on creating a fairly large project, but ultimately decided that it should be open sourced. Partly because Google Analytics is already free to use, so it seem to be the best incentive to make the Umbraco package free as well – even though it might have greater value for some. Another part of the decision has to do with installbase and getting the package out there – won’t go into details, but sometimes its just nice to share your shit.
Axendo, who have also created an Analytics plugin for Umbraco, have chosen to make a limited free version and a paid version, which I think is a cleaver thing to do. I hope the good guys at Axendo are not pissed of by me making my package open source and free, but hopefully they’ll still be able to sell their package, and they could actually use my source in their product should they want to do so in the future.
I would personally find it cool if someone would want to adopt my Google Analytics for Umbraco package, and I would encourage all Solution Providers and Developers to make some money on implementing the Google Analytics section in customer solutions. In my latest offer to a new client I included a couple of packages from our.umbraco.org, which I think will be a win win situation for all: the client will get some very useful tools (free) and we (the solution provider) got some extra hours in on implementation.

Making a package free, open source or paid is ultimately up to the developer. One might think that because the CMS is free so should the addons. Well, not necessarily! Take a great addon like uCommerce which will definatly not be free, this product has a clear incentive for customers to buy it. I won’t go into details about uCommerce but I would love to hear Søren’s thoughts on selling an addon for an open source CMS

Over the next six month I will be developing a couple of addons for Umbraco (got the ideas, just need the time), which will all be open source and made in my spare time. The main reason for these addons being open source is that the counter part or the part that will be integrated with Umbraco is also open source. I’m also hoping that the fact that the addons are free to install will help them spread and thus create a greater installbase. This could of course also be done with a limited free version and a paid full version, but I’m somehow not entirely sure that would work for the addons in question.
So how do I get paid for spending a lot of spare time creating great addons? Should I get paid? Isn’t the gift of giving enough?
Well, a sponsor-an-umbraco-dev program would be great but I don’t know who would actually sponsor my work, so maybe selling support/upgrades/feature request implementations would be a better solution?

I personally think that when the good guys at Umbraco start selling the Forms module, it will make it easier for other developers to sell their packages, addons, plugins or whatever. Would also love to hear Niels‘ thoughts on this – do you think that Umbraco Corp. in a sense will lead the pack and in some way encourage customers/users to pay for addons?
When a customer sees what great stuff he can get for a reasonable amount of money he probably won’t have a problem paying for it even though he “bought” an open source CMS in the first place, right?

So what do you think? Do you feel obligated to open source your Umbraco package or simply make it available for free? Are all the packages on our.umbraco.org not worth paying for? Are you hoping that all packages for Umbraco will always be free to install and use?

Please share your thoughts, as I would love to hear what others think about this subject.

Darren Ferguson, you are one of the few people with packages in the store. What are your thoughts?

Tommy Poulsen, you are making a great addon with the PDF creator. Do you intend to sell this addon or contribute it as a free to use package on our.umbraco.org and why?

Other package developers: Do you ultimately feel it depends on the content/usability of the package whether it should be free or paid?

I hope I didn’t make this post too much about money, but rather what makes developers or solution providers choose to make an Umbraco package free, paid or open source and how they get compensated for their work (via implementation for example?).

If you are a .NET developer and you have never heard of Umbraco, you really should check it out. In fact, this entire site is built on Umbraco and a modified version of the Blog for Umbraco 4 package by Tim Geyssens.

If you are familiar with Umbraco and need to get a blog up and running, I highly recommend starting with Blog for Umbraco 4. It will save you a lot of time and energy. You can find it in the Umbraco Package Repository.

I made some pretty major modifications to the Document Types, Master Pages, CSS, JS and XSLT. I also created a new comment form that better suited my needs. However, this was all extremely easy thanks to the flexibility of Umbraco and Tim's rather open architecture. Tim, if you ever read this, thanks a million for sharing!

One modification I made that I would like to pass along is in the XSLT for listing blog comments. Even though the current XSLT in the package specifies a height and width for the gravatars, these parameters are being ignored by the gravatar API because the XSLT is generating double ampersands between them.

As you can see below, I wrote what I consider to be a pretty ugly workaround.

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> <![CDATA[<img class="gravatar" src="]]>
</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="BlogLibrary:getGravatar(data [@alias = 'email'], 30, '{your default image}')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> <![CDATA[" alt="Gravatar of ]]></xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="data [@alias = 'name']" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> <![CDATA[" />]]>
</xsl:text>

CDATA everywhere!

If anyone has a better solution, I am all ears!

The good news is that Umbraco already uses UrlRewritingNet.UrlRewrite to create friendly URLs, so everything we need to get this working is already in place. After brushing up a bit on regular expressions I came up with the following two step solution.

First, I added the following filter to /config/UrlRewriting.config.

<add name="tagfilter" virtualUrl="^~/blog/tag/(.*).aspx" rewriteUrlParameter="ExcludeFromClientQueryString" destinationUrl="~/blog.aspx?filterBy=$1" ignoreCase="true"
/>

Then I modified BlogTags.xslt to generate the correct URL for each tag.

<a href="{link}/blog/tag/{current()}.aspx"><xsl:value-of select="current()"/> (<xsl:value-of select="@nodesTagged"/>)</a>

There you have it. Now my tag URLs are all search engine friendly and it only took about two minutes!

For example, if you use SyntaxHighlighter, you could use up to 21 brush scripts, plus the core script and theme style sheet. That makes for a lot of references in the head tag.  That is why I almost always add the following inside the <head> tag in my top lever master page between the style sheet and script references.

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder Id="head" runat="server">
<!-- extra references load from child -->
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

This allows me to specify any extra/temporary css or script references in the child template. In this example I even passed in the javascript function to generate a lightbox.

<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="head" runat="server"> <link href="/css/temp.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/jquery.lightbox-0.5.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function() { $('#gallery a').lightBox(); }); </script>
</asp:Content>

I know this isn't groundbreaking, but it is a really great tip for anyone just starting out with Umbraco or master pages.

You can download the Update Application Tree Package Action and with a bit of luck this issue can be addressed at some point in the future or my package action can be submitted to the PackageActionContrib project for consideration. Make sure you drop the dll into your bin folder before you need to use the action.

Example package action usage:

<action runat="uninstall" undo="false" alias="UpdateAppTree" treeAlias="media" treeHandlerAssembly="umbraco" treeHandlerType="loadMedia" />

Related posts:

1. Media Sorter for Umbraco The package essentially adds a new context menu item to...
2. Umbraco v4 Upgrade Problem with Plesk Hosting A project I am working on currently is hosted on...
3. Converting a Visual Studio Class Library Project to a Web Application Project I started working on a new Umbraco package a while...

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If you use IIS you can setup a new website to do such a permanent redirect, but that solution doesn’t scale well. For example, we run 42 websites using one install of umbraco, and consequently one IIS website. We’d need 42 new websites in IIS to use the built-in redirect feature.

One example site is http://en.culturalcare.com, and I want to make sure that if someone types in http://www.en.culturalcare.com they get redirected properly. The solution is to write a little generic URL re-writer yourself using the global.asax file.

< %@ Application Language="C#" %>
<script runat="server">
protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e) { string domainName = Request.Url.Host.Replace("www.", "").ToLower(); string sOldPath = HttpContext.Current.Request.Path.ToLower(); string sPage = "http://" + domainName + sOldPath; Response.Clear(); Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"; Response.AddHeader("Location",sPage); Response.End(); }
</script>

As you can see the code removes “www.” from the url and 301 redirects to the non-www version. It also passes the full path.

You could modify the code slightly to add www’s instead of removing them if that’s the desired effect:

< %@ Application Language="C#" %>
<script runat="server">
protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e) { string domainName = Request.Url.Host.ToLower(); string sOldPath = HttpContext.Current.Request.Path.ToLower(); string sPage = "http://www." + domainName + sOldPath; Response.Clear(); Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"; Response.AddHeader("Location",sPage); Response.End(); }
</script>

Download a full example for use with IIS.

To implement:

• create a new site in IIS and add host headers for all of the domains you would like to redirect
• extract the zip above to the directory setup in IIS
• setup wildcard application mapping in IIS to let the global.asax file handle all requests (not just ones that end in .aspx, etc). On windows server 2003 just go to Home Directory -> Configuration and paste in the aspnet_isapi.dll location in the wildcard application maps section. By default the path is C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll (uncheck “Verify that file exists”)

Seattle is a great place to visit in the Fall and we have secured a great facility at the Seattle Public Library in central Seattle.  We've found flights from places such as Denver, Chicago, and Houston for less that $200 round-trip and there are lodging options to fit every budget in Seattle.  Come a few days early (or stay on) and check out the Geeks Guide to Seattle or just enjoy our 'special' weather.

The course specifics are ( register here or send a message to us here with "Umbraco Course" in the message ):

Level 1 - Register Here

Teacher: Paul Sterling
Target Audience: Designers, Web Developers
Language: English
Date: October 19-20 2009 at 9.00 - 16.30
Price: USD 1200 with certification (save USD 275 with this bundle)
Location: Seattle Public Library ( map )
Requirements: To get the most of out the course, we recommend that you bring your own laptop. If you can't let us know.

Learn how to implement websites fast without compromising designs. This two-day course will go through the basics of umbraco from a designer/developer point of view. You'll learn best practices on multi-lingual sites, creation of re-usable navigations and lists, input via the AutoForm and even end up loving XSLT. We'll also go through some of the popular packages and other productivity tricks.

Agenda - updated to cover Umbraco 4 functionality:

• Understanding the umbraco basics - Runway/Modules, Document Types, Templates and Macros (including usage of the new Masterpages functionality)
• Creating a simple website from scratch
• Understanding XSLT - creating a news "module"
• Creating multi-language websites including coverage of Dictionary Items and Languages
• Advanced properties: Re-use of properties and recursive usage of properties
• Two-way feedback using AutoForms and Notifications
• Optimizing markup for Canvas Editing
• Great Packages: Implementing full-text searching and mail forms

In other word, after two hard days in the dojo, you'll be able to create multi-lingual websites, blogs, news sites and even two-way communication without any need for .NET skills

This course covers everything you'll need to know to pass the Umbraco Developer Level 1 Certification

Level 2 - Register Here

Teacher: Paul Sterling
Target Audience: .NET Developers
Language: English
Date: October 21-22 2009 at 9.00 - 16.30
Price: USD 1200 with certification (save USD 275 with this bundle)
Location: Seattle Public Library ( map )
Requirements: To get the most of out the course, we recommend that you bring your own laptop. If you can't let us know.

Learn how to integrate existing .NET applications into umbraco and how to customize umbraco using Microsoft Visual Studio. This two-day course will cover the usage of .NET controls in macros, event-programming in umbraco through the new Event model and how to integrate your own applications and logic directly in the umbraco interface.

Agenda - updated to cover Umbraco 4 functionality:

• Usage of .NET User Controls with umbraco
• Debugging XSLT and .NET Controls with umbraco and Visual Studio
• In-depth explanation of the umbraco object model and usage of the umbraco presentation APIs
• Creating, importing and modifying content from .NET using the API
• Usage of AJAX and umbraco
• Extending XSLT with custom .NET classes
• Custom event handling in umbraco using the brand new event handlers in Umbraco 4
• How to integrate legacy authentication systems using Membership and Role Providers

In other word, after two sweating days with umbraco, you'll learn that umbraco is a developer's best friend.

This course covers everything you'll need to know to pass the Umbraco Developer Level 2 Certification.

Questions

If you have any questions please contact Paul here.

Those of you based in the UK who have created Googlemap mash ups in your umbraco sites or any other site for that matter, may have come across geo coding issues for UK post codes. In some instances they can be out by quite a bit. The actual google website is accurate however doing a look up via the api sometimes is not. Its all to do with Royal mail licensing. Anyhow there is a hack and it works see here.

Everyone knows how upgrading a site can lead to problems, and sometimes work like this is just more hassle than it's worth. If this is your attitude, it's pretty simple to turn off the notifications by updating the following entry in your web.config:

<add key="umbracoVersionCheckPeriod" value="7" />

Set the value to zero to turn off the updates - the default value is to check for a new version
every 7 days. It's also worth noting that this popup only appears to administrator-type users of the site.

But in reality there's nothing to be afraid of, the upgrade process is pretty straightforward, at least for a minor upgrade such as the one I've just finished with the Web Garden site. You can find the latest version of Umbraco for download here along with all the documentation you could possibly need to ensure a smooth upgrade process. This includes install guides for a number of server setups, and an upgrade guide which deals with the various upgrade scenarios. Of course you should avoid upgrading your live site directly; upgrade your local or dev version first, do your testing, and then ftp the changes to the live server when you're happy it's all ready to go.

I've also installed Warren Buckley's Twitter4Umbraco package to display my latest tweet on the website. Once again Ashleigh at Ash Creative came up with the design in keeping with the look and feel of the Web Garden site and I think it brightens everything up a little. It's a great little package and very easy to use - a good example of how easy it is to extend Umbraco with packages. For many other excellent Umbraco packages, check out the Umbraco project hub which is filled with the latest code from the community.

The first step is to write a simple XSLT macro that will list out all of the points that you want to show. I'm not going to give that example here, but the output should look similar to the following:

 <h1>Service stations in Lancashire</h1>
<p>The following data is a list of latitude and longtitude points and a description for service stations in Lancashire</p>
<div id="map"></div>
<!-- Rendered from a simply XSLT Extension -->
<div class="point">52.94341429133642,-2.1892619132995605,17,A34-STONE ROAD TITTENSOR N/B</div>
<div class="point">53.029535856006525,-2.176837921142578,16,A50-POTTERIES WAY</div>

Note: The empty map div is a placeholder for the Google map itself.

Quite a few people have written to me asking how one would add several points to a single instance of my datatype and the short answer is you can't. You'll need to create an Umbraco node for every point you want to display on your map, each node containing an instance of my datatype.

In order to render the map you'll need some javascript similar to the following:

 var m= new GMap2(document.getElementById('map'));
m.setCenter(new GLatLng(0, 0), 0);
var bounds = new GLatLngBounds(); m.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
m.addControl(new GMapTypeControl()); var arrayList = $(".point"); // set of elements with class 'point' $.each(arrayList, function() { var value = $(this).html(); value = $.trim(value); var point = value.split(','); var lat = parseFloat(point[0]); var lon = parseFloat(point[1]); var desc = point[3]; var point = new GLatLng(lat, lon); bounds.extend(point); m.addOverlay(createMarker(point,desc));
}); // Creates a marker at the given point
// Clicking the marker will hide it function createMarker(latlng,desc) { var marker = new GMarker(latlng); marker.name = desc; GEvent.addListener(marker,"click", function() { var myHtml = desc; m.openInfoWindowHtml(latlng, myHtml); }); return marker;
} m.setZoom(m.getBoundsZoomLevel(bounds));
m.setCenter(bounds.getCenter());

For the above to work, you'll need to include jQuery and the Google Maps javascript API in your page. The resulting map should zoom and centre according to the points that you have added.

Accessibility alert: Please provide a header and description paragraph before your map point data as I have in my example in order to ensure that the data makes sense with javascript disabled or to screen readers.

I should have sat down and written my thoughts the day after but I've lazily let time drift and everyone else has gone about writing up the event in the meantime.

Paul Marden of Orcare has done a great job of putting together a press release about the event. Jon Marks at LBi and Bijesh Tank have also written up some thoughts here and here.

As with any Umbraco event, Doug Robar's camera was present and some great pictures are available to view on flickr.

Adam Shallcross and the guys at Cogworks put together some great artwork for a one off Umbraco London t-shirt (as pictured). This artwork has now been adapted to use as screensavers and desktop background.

Laurence Gillian and the team at Vodoodog also create some stunning desktop backgrounds and made them available to download.

On the day we were also helped out by Mo Braga and Bijesh from LBi, Niels who added some real value to the day by coming and talking about Umbraco. Gregory Roekens CTO of Wunderman also joined Niels and Doug to form our expert Umbraco panel for Q&A.

Adam Shallcross, Chris Houston and Gregory Roekens were also kind enough to step up and present some of their latest Umbraco innovations in an open demonstration slot.

Finally we need to thank Jon Marks for picking up on my speculative tweet looking for a venue and suggesting LBi as a venue.

No thanks to the London weather for dumping down a months worth of rain in the space of a few hours. But all in all a great day out.

Oh and I almost forgot, I think I conquered my fear of public speaking after dashing about in front of the crowd all day, so if you want me to come and talk about Umbraco or anything else, do let me know.

Finally, there was lots of talk along the lines of "We should do this more often", so I'm encouraging all of you who attended to come along to the Last Thursday CMS beers from time to time. I'm going to try and go along for the first time myself this month.

Lau

http://umbTop.voodoodog.com/

What's its purpose? It allows you to create a wiki. Users can then edit the pages on the site itself using the wiki-markup. There's no need for them to log in to the backend.

See it in action here (Don't spam too much please). Some people where allready enthousiastic. Please leave a comment if you think I need to take this further and release it as a package.

To make it easier to get started, I thought I would provide some starter sourcecode for a demo custom section.

Steps to get this running on your umbraco installation:

- Copy the assembly (CustomUmbracoSection.dll) to the \bin directory

- Copy the file custom.gif to \umbraco\images\tray\ directory

- Make a ‘custom’ directory in \umbraco and copy the editCustom.aspx page to \umbraco\custom directory

- Insert a new row in the umbracoApp table

INSERT INTO [umbracoApp]

 ([sortOrder]

 ,[appAlias]

 ,[appIcon]

 ,[appName])

 VALUES

 (9

 ,‘custom’

 ,‘custom.gif’

 ,‘custom’)

- Insert a new row in to umbracoAppTree table

INSERT INTO [umbracoAppTree]

 ([treeSilent]

 ,[treeInitialize]

 ,[treeSortOrder]

 ,[appAlias]

 ,[treeAlias]

 ,[treeTitle]

 ,[treeIconClosed]

 ,[treeIconOpen]

 ,[treeHandlerAssembly]

 ,[treeHandlerType])

 VALUES

 (0

 ,1

 ,0

 ,‘custom’

 ,‘custom’

 ,‘custom’

 ,‘.sprTreeFolder’

 ,‘.sprTreeFolder_o’

 ,‘CustomUmbracoSection’

 ,‘Trees.LoadCustomTree’)

- Update the \umbraco\config\create\UI.xml file, add:

 <nodeType alias=”initcustom”>

 <header>Custom</header>

 <usercontrol>/create/simple.ascx</usercontrol>

 <tasks>

 <create assembly=”CustomUmbracoSection” type=”Tasks.CustomTasks” />

 <delete assembly=”CustomUmbracoSection” type=”Tasks.CustomTasks” />

 </tasks>

 </nodeType>

After these steps are completed you will have to enable the new section for your user.

Then it should show up as the last icon in the sections (called custom, with a HAL’s camera eye icon).

In the custom section you’ll find this:

So just a sample node that will open a demo edit page.

• Full PDF documentation
• Source code available
• Refreshes feeds using AJAX on a configurable interval
• Fully customisable CSS
• Use your own XSLT to transform feeds
• Retrieve feeds from URL or local cache.

This initial release is relatively simple and just renders RSS. The next release will allow you to build customisable filters on top of RSS feeds by implementing some simple interfaces. This will allow you to do simple things like display most recent content from Umbraco and add edit/delete buttons.

Please feel free to send your feedback, comments or suggestions.

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 to some coding.

The source-code is available on the Umbraco Extensions project (on CodePlex) and created a project page on the new Our Umbraco community website. (Don’t forget to give it some karma points! ;-p)

A direct download to the package installer (zip) is available here.

Very special thanks to Dave Kinsella for providing the Robot icon – although I know Dave, it was great proof that Twitter really does work! (Thanks to Dan too for his Johnny 5 attempt! – Here was my attempt too! )

If you have any bugs, comments, feedback or suggestions – please feel free to get in touch with me via the Our Umbraco forums.

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 like any other Flash movie (swf) – more details in my comment below.

/End of update.

This approached worked fine, but we ran into problems trying to edit the YouTube video URL, along with that, my client had an additional step of selecting a macro, then entering the YouTube URL.

After a little researching, I eventually found a native YouTube plug-in for TinyMCE, (direct link to ZIP download).

Here is how I integrated in Umbraco:

1. Extract the contents of the youtube.zip archive to your /umbraco_client/tinymce/plugins/youtube/
2. In your /config/ folder, open the tinyMceConfig.config file.
3. Insert the following lines:
   After the last <command /> entry, add…

   <command> <umbracoAlias>mceYoutube</umbracoAlias> <icon>../umbraco_client/tinymce/plugins/youtube/images/youtube.gif</icon> <tinyMceCommand value="" userInterface="true" frontendCommand="youtube">youtube</tinyMceCommand>
   <priority>75</priority>
   </command>

   Then after the last <plugin /> entry, add…

   <plugin loadOnFrontend="false">youtube</plugin>

4. Once the XML config entries are in place, you will need to restart the Umbraco application – the quickest way of doing this is by modifying your Web.config, (literally open it, add a space, remove it, hit save).
5. The YouTube button is now available in Umbraco. However, it’s not quite ready yet, there is still one more step!
6. In your Umbraco back-end, go to the “Developer” section, expand the “DataTypes” folder and then select “Richtext editor”. In the “Buttons” section you should see a YouTube icon. Check the box next to the icon, and you’re done! If you don’t see the YouTube icon, then check that the did the config steps above, and/or check that the read permissions are set correctly on your /umbraco_client/ folder, (re-apply them if needs be).

The application is written around spring.net and is easy to get up and quickly. It is also very flexible allowing you to implement some simple interfaces in several areas of the application where you may want to customise functionality. Integration testing is already completed and my framework already provides licenses for two products in the Umbraco store.

Features include:

• Complete rewrite of my previous twitter package
• Configure multiple twitter accounts.
• Send multiple tweets per publish.
• Ensure documents are not tweeted on re-publish.
• Support direct messages and @mentions
• Send different tweets per document type.
• Filter tweets by domain.
• Includes full PDF manual.

So why is this useful? I use the package to publicise blog posts and to send me a direct message when a comment is left on my blog so that I can quickly check whether or not it is a spam comment and act accordingly.

I'll provide a demonstration screen-cast shortly. In the meantime I'd love to hear your feedback.

First of all, I thought I'd enable Windows authentication om my /umbraco folder. Couldn't be easier, right? Wrong.
Apparently, since I am using the .net 3.5 configuration to run Umbraco in integrated pipeline mode in IIS7, some weird problem was introduced:

I could not disable forms authentication on the /umbraco folder. Googling for this, did not get me a lot of good results. However, I finally figured it out and it was actually a quite easy fix, the following section in the web.config needs to be disabled:

 <authentication mode="Forms"> <forms name="yourAuthCookie" loginUrl="login.aspx" protection="All" path="/" /> </authentication>

After disabling the forms authentication section, I could easily enable Windows authentication on my Umbraco folder and disable anonymous access. Great!

This seems to be an unintentional "bug" that I've submitted (you can vote, if you care) to the core team for future consideration.

After that, I thought I'd also make it impossible to show the debug information on my live site. I had actually linked to an Umbraco book about this in an earlier post, so that should be easy, right? Wrong.

I immediately saw a glaring mistake in the rewrite code, it relied on me having ".aspx" in all of my URL's. But since I have set "useDirectoryUrls" to true (so that none of my pages end in ".aspx"), this would not work.

Maybe this book was written before you could even enable useDirectoryUrls, I'm not sure. I've made a new wiki article for it though.

The solution is as follows, any URL with a querystring in it, starting with umbDebug should be rewritten:

 <!-- Prevent the umbDebug querystrings from being used --> <add name="nodebug" virtualUrl="(.*)umbDebug.*" rewriteUrlParameter="IncludeQueryStringForRewrite" redirect="Application" destinationUrl="~$1" ignoreCase="true" />

Updated: Or... as Dirk and Shannon point out, in Umbraco 4 you can just disable the debugging by using:

<add key="umbracoDebugMode" value="false" />

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 have been many rumours around whether the bigger search engine crwalers (i.e. Googlebot) consider your website amateurish if you didn’t have a robots.txt – and if handled badly, could lead to your site being invisible on SERPs.

If you are happy for a crawler to crawl/index all of your website’s content, then you can use the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

However, when using Umbraco to power my websites, it is preferable to define which folders are accessible by the crawler. Personally, I would not like to see the contents of my /umbraco/ folder to be returned in Google’s SERPs.

Here is an example of the robots.txt that I have used on several Umbraco-powered websites.

# robots.txt for Umbraco
User-agent: *
Disallow: /aspnet_client/
Disallow: /bin/
Disallow: /config/
Disallow: /css/
Disallow: /data/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /umbraco/
Disallow: /umbraco_client/
Disallow: /usercontrols/
Disallow: /xslt/

From my perspective, there is no reason for a search engine crawler to be crawling/indexing files from any of the above folders – you may have a different perspective, to which you can amend your robots.txt accordingly.

For more information about the robots.txt standard, please refer to the official website: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Creating packages is easy, the built-in package creator makes it super simple and with package actions you can perform additional common tasks (like updating the xsltextensions) without having to write a single line of code.

It really takes a minimal effort to package something up that you made, even if it’s very project specific it should be possible to isolate the functionality and package it up.

Dare to share

Even a simple package can be a great help, so don’t hesitate and share

Naming

To avoid conflicts and overwriting other existing items when installing a package, make sure you have unique and meaningful names

• Assemblies

Starting these with your name or company name followed by a project name should be enough to make them unique
FE: Nibble.Umb.Poll

• Stylesheets, Scripts, Document types, Templates, XSLT files, Macros

A unique and meaningful name that links them back to the package, so it easy to see that they are part of a package
FE: not style.css but starrating.css
not list.xslt but bloglistposts.xslt       

• Usercontrols

placing these in a new unique folder inside the /usercontrols folder makes it easy to see that they are part of a package
FE: /usercontrols/Nibble.Umb.Poll/poll.ascx

• Config files

place these in the /config folder (again, with a unique and meaningful name)

Installation

Package are really easy to install but in some cases the package installation might fail. So it’s always great to provide some manual installation instructions, just in case.

Think ahead

You might have created a package with a simple site in mind, but don’t forget they can/will also be used on multilingual sites, site running a different database engine. Or in case it’s a datatype, will be used with Canvas, autoform, doc2form. It’s a great plus if this is taken into account.

What doesn’t work

If the package only works with a certain umbraco version and up or if it only works on sql server, don’t forget to mention this to avoid that people install it on non supported installations.

I’ve also added this post to the wiki on our.umbraco.org, if you have anything to add/change (or correct my bad spelling) please do so .

The package installs the following:

The document types (Polls, Poll, Poll Answer) will be used to setup the polls.

So you’ll have a Polls document that will contain several Poll documents and these will have several Poll Answer documents beneath it.

After you have setup a poll with some answers in your content area you can get the poll on your page.

First add a reference to the installed stylesheet (/css/Nibble.Umb.Poll.css) and then place the Poll macro on your template.

Please note that:

• The macro will have to be placed inside a form with runat=”server” attribute
• There has to be a scriptmanager on the page

The poll macro has several parameters:

• Poll Node Id: This is the id of the Poll content node that you want to display
• Display Only: Check this if you only want to display the results of a poll
• Submit On Select: Check this if you want to submit the vote when a user selects a answer
• Hide Submit: Check this if you want to hide the submit button
• Sort Results: Check this if you want that the results are sorted by number of votes
• Width Total Votes: Instead of the highest number of votes being equal to 100% width, the total number of votes is 100%
• Hide Question: Check this if you want to hide the question
• Random Poll: Check this if you want to display a random Poll, you’ll also have to update the Poll Node Id to the Polls document (containing the different polls)

So depending on the parameters (Submit On Select and  Hide Submit) your poll can look like:

or (with submit button)

The Results can look like this:

Sorted:

Width Total Votes:

You can download the package here: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/poll

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 – please feel free to get in touch with me via the Our Umbraco forums.

I done a talk on integrating sIFR into Umbraco with Mark Wubben, who is the brains behind the sIFR project.

Venue

The venue this year in Copenhagen was Kedelhallen and it was fantastic - plenty of space to interact and collaborate, a cozy cafe, lawns filled with chairs, and the weather was absolutely perfect (a Codegarden tradition).  Personally, I had a fantastic experience meeting many new people in the community and (finally) meeting people I interact with daily in Twitter and the Umbraco Forum.  I never had a minute where I thought 'what should I do now?' as friendly Umbraco people were eager to share, discuss, and chat - this is one of the things that makes Umbraco Codegarden unique among conferences. 

Real Time Input

Between the Core Team retreat and Codegarden the week spent with Umbraco people was exhausting, inspiring, and extraordinarily productive.  As many know already, one of my main projects is Commerce for Umbraco and I received excellent and relevant feedback from a number of attendees regarding items that work well and items that don't work as well.  This type of feedback is the most valuable for an open source project as it gives us a direction.  Based on the feedback and experiences of the project's users we expect a full release in approximately 60-days - hurray!

Umbraco Store

Another area that I focus some of my time and money in is the development of the Umbraco Store (http://store.umbraco.org/) and this received feedback as well.  During an open space session we discussed integrating the three current package repositories (projects on our.umbraco.org, package repository, and the Umbraco Store) into a  more unified user experience.  From this session we created very clear, actionable items with assigned owners and, with some luck and a bit of work, we'll have prototype of the integrated experience in a few weeks.  Look for more posts from me on this topic as we continue to develop it.  One interesting item is that the reluctance to commercialize one's work by selling packages in the Umbraco Store was noticeably absent in discussions this year.

Our Umbraco

As you no doubt already know, the new Umbraco community site was unveiled at Codegarden09 (http://our.umbraco.org/).  This site sets the standard for a much higher level of collaboration between members of the Umbraco community.  If you haven't seen it yet, go check it out now.

Umbraco ASP.NET MVC

Some of the biggest news is the announcement of Umbraco's adoption of the ASP.NET MVC framework for the v5 release.  At Codegarden this was the announcement that generated the greatest buzz.  At the Core Team retreat this was the focus of our discussions and some prototypes were created to prove the proof of concept.  This is a very exciting direction for Umbraco and one that you'll no doubt see many more posts and discussions about in the coming year.

Scale and Momentum

Finally, as an attendee of past Codegardens one could not miss that the scale of the event was actually, well, big.  I think this year (2009) marks the point at which the Umbraco Project is bigger than Niels, or the Core Team, it is truly a community project that is made by, and for, the people that use it.  I see this as a tremendous accomplishment and one that is irreversible. 

  See you next year!

As promised, here are the updated slides.