Once upon a time...

We didn’t have Umbraco 7 with the nice Angular-based backend. Instead, the Umbraco backend was built on ASP.NET webforms using usercontrols and webcontrols, which made it hard to tailor it to the specific needs of your editors.

People who have used older versions of Umbraco most likely have heard about a package called uComponents. For most of them this was the first thing they would install after setting up Umbraco.

The package contained a collection of very useful datatypes like Multi Node Tree Picker (MNTP), Url Picker, Character Limit, and Image Point.

But that’s not all. Other than datatypes it also contained other useful things like:

XSLT extensions

NotFoundHandlers

uQuery

uMapper

and more!

Some of uComponents features, like some of the datatypes and uQuery, have been integrated in the Umbraco core over time.

At that time multinode tree picker was the king of the content pickers.

But then the package massacre called Umbraco 7, aka Belle, was released and all the datatypes in uComponents became obsolete all at once. This is because all the .NET based datatype editors don’t work in the new angular based backend



The king is dead.