Myself and two of Prodo’s developers attended this year’s Umbraco UK Festival on Friday 21st November. The festival is in its 5th year and is the 2nd biggest Umbraco festival, 2nd only to Code Garden which is held in Umbraco’s mother land, Denmark.
Knowing that tickets usually sell out fast, this year we kept our eyes on Twitter to see when tickets were on sale!
At Prodo, we love developing with Umbraco – we’ve been using it for 5 years and we’re proud Gold Partners! We also love the Umbraco community, so we had big expectations of the event, what we’d learn and the people we’d meet.
Worth the early start to London town!
It was an early start for us, hopping on the train at 6am so we could get to the event which was being held at Skills Matter, London.
We arrived in perfect time to catch Doug Robar’s inspirational opening speech. Doug talked us through some interesting principals on work-life balance: that we should focus on what we’re good at and what we enjoy.
Sneak preview of Umbraco’s latest features
Feeling suitably inspired, the next item was the Keynote, delivered by Mr Umbraco himself, Niels Hartvig. Niels talked us through some of the latest impressive stats about Umbraco, Umbraco’s development roadmap and performed a live demo of some of the new features to be released in the latest version of Umbraco.
All very exciting stuff! Niels is a great presenter, always very passionate and funny.
The UK Umbraco community is second to none. Love coming back. #h5yr #umbUkFest
— Niels Hartvig (@umbraco) November 21, 2014
Umbraco is getting easier to use with each version
Dave Woestenborghs talked us through how easy it is to create custom sections in Umbraco V7. Over the years, Prodo have developed many custom sections and it has always been the part of Umbraco which often requires a lot of manual work at the beginning. Dave talked us through how in V7, this can be done with a few lines of code and it’s now a lot easier to use Umbraco data types using custom validation with the use of Angular.
We got the chance to see the excellent new forum package developed by Lee Messenger. If you’re looking for a comprehensive forum for your Umbraco site, then this is the package to use. The package is full of useful and brilliant features, and will undoubtedly be one for us to use in the future.
And then there were mullets…
One talk we particular enjoyed for its humour and interesting ideas of changing the way we work with Umbraco was ‘The Umbraco Mullet’ talk by Kyle Weems. He talked us through using Umbraco for managing the content and structure of our data but then using Angular for the full front-end rendering. This approach would result in a faster site and better user experience and is quicker as less data is transferred back and forth with the server. But along with all this, we enjoyed an in-depth talk on the history of the mullet.
The final talk we attended was the much awaited V7.2 Umbraco Grid. This was presented by two members of the Umbraco HQ team, Per Ploug and Rune Hem Strand.
Talk of the grid had been rumoured in the Umbraco community for a good while along with talk of how this would revolutionise the way content editors will use Umbraco in the future. Within minutes, Per and Rune had set up a grid on a page in Umbraco and were able to easily move around different types of content with a few click-and-drags.
Thanks, Team Umbraco!
For all of us, the whole event was packed with useful information and certainly whetted the appetite for new features in upcoming releases. We made some new friends and bumped into a lot of other Umbraco developers that we know. We found ourselves inspired to build bigger and better websites in the best CMS out there. Watch this space!
Image credits: With thanks to Doug Robar from Percipient Studios for his excellent pictures of the event which you can see more of here.
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