After knocking out our company website in Umbraco 8 in an Agile manner (I don’t just mean we didn’t plan it or document it, there were real Agile bits & pieces) I blogged about some of the initial thoughts that came up. I thought I’d follow it up with, coincidentally, 8 more findings.

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I started this blog with www.agidea.uk on version 8.0.2 earlier in the week — so some issues are being cleared up all the time so some of these thoughts will age really quickly. But that was Monday morning, in the afternoon I found a spare 15 minutes & upgraded to 8.1.0.

ONE: Umbraco upgrades are brilliant. I’ve blogged separately about point upgrades, but it’s a really simple process — with the patch upgrades simply implemented without fuss on Tuesdays. So with point upgrades being so simple & patching automatic, there really is only complete version shifts to worry about.

TWO: Less good, document type switching has gone. A really important improvement available in Umbraco 7 was the ability to switch document types. Using alternative templates has been with us since version 4, but document type mobility was really cool. Hopefully will be fixed soon.

THREE: An odd error with images crops up if you choose to force a back-office editor to pick an image (as opposed to a file or a folder). I’ve got a feeling that this is related to the builder modes — but I’m not sure.

FOUR: On Builder Modes I wonder if the default PureLive model (which as default I guess will be in 90+% of Umbraco 8 websites) is a nod for the increasing dominance of front-end-dev-ery. Back-end devs aren’t happy without intellisense, which you don’t get on PureLive models — but perhaps defaulting to a setup that doesn’t require you to know anything about DLLs enables a lower barrier to entry for front-end devs. I’ll blog about transitioning between PureLive & a model setup that allow intellisense on Doc Type fields another time.

FIVE: Reordering document type fields is a pain, composites sometimes come before inherited items, sometimes new sections are & there seems to be no way to reorder them. There are ordering numbers but no edit option — perhaps a short-term bug. A workaround is to use F12 & take off the disabled = “disabled” on the HTML & you can reorder them — but save doesn’t work properly or consistently. Perhaps a short-term bug?

SIX: Training is becoming more online & the opportunity to meet people & the build the community is diminished as a result. The last Umbraco training I went on was way back in 2012, but at the time I met Darren Ferguson, Andrew Knox, Matt Brailsford, Paul Wright & others. Not the same opportunities to build a network through online training.

SEVEN: After speaking to our Umbraco account manager he confirmed that certifications hold for 2 versions so Umbraco 6 certifications are no longer valid. I would guess that Umbraco will now target a 2 year release cycle now they have a new code base & that would mean that Umbraco 7 certification will expire in 2021 — which will be a big shock to agencies that have built up 6 years of Umbraco 7 creds.

EIGHT: Since taking on the challenge of hosting 2 Manchester Umbraco meetups a year (heady responsibility) it’s clear that the engaged audience in Manchester has drifted away since that sultry night when Niels popped over. Perhaps that’s a function of rebooting a meetup that has slipped off the schedule for many devs, perhaps the lack of local training has made Umbraco shops more insular & less happy to share. Hopefully this can be reversed as I reckon meetup strength is a bellwether for the community strength.

NINE: Content porting from 7 to 8 has been added to Umbraco 8 since the early days of the release. Not used it but the word on the street is that it works — which is a big tick.

TEN: The auto-upgrading feature on Umbraco Cloud is a great feature. We went from 8.1.0 to 8.1.1 overnight without noticing. I wonder whether the future for Umbraco Cloud is to automate-all-the-things so that using other hosts or Cloud providers is financially & logically pointless.

ELEVEN: On the flip side Umbraco Cloud does seem to suffer from performance & slowdown issues most weeks. Our website isn’t complex or a high traffic site so this isn’t a concurrency issue. I think service reliability should be a higher priority for the service if it is to dominate Umbraco hosting — perhaps steal from AWS’s brilliant Well Architected Framework as a target?

TWELVE: (This is an off-topic rant) I don’t like how Medium handles numbered bullets — I may need to use a second paragraph on a point. Everything else is great!

Any thoughts?

8 even earlier thoughts.

(*) Under-promise / over-deliver

Published here first.