Umbraco

I describe Umbraco as "the best thing since sliced bread" but the official website has a more accurate description labelling it as “a fully-featured open source content management system with the flexibility to run anything from small campaign or brochure sites right through to complex applications for Fortune 500's and some of the largest media sites in the world.”

According to sources the history of Umbraco spans back to 1997 when founder Niels Hartvig began to learn about Content Management Systems in his first job after leaving high school. It was whilst working at ‘Snabel & Co’ in Denmark that Niels took what he had been learning and began to prototype a simple framework that he could use for building and maintaining websites. I’m unsure whether Niels knew at the time but I believe this was the moment that Umbraco was unofficially born!

The first version of Umbraco (v1) was released in 2003 and contained many of the concepts such as Document Types, Macros and XSLT that are still available in today’s version (v7.x). However, it is regarded by many people within the community that the official birth year is 2005 which is when version 2 of the CMS was released and made Open Source. This was also the first year that the first Umbraco conference called ‘CodeGarden’ was held which invites fellow ‘Umbracians’ to come together and discuss what’s going on.

How I Got into Umbraco

Whilst I was completing my final year of my degree at Glyndwr University I applied to many local companies for unpaid web based work placements so that it could help me obtain valuable real life experience. I was fortunate that Roger the founder of H4interactive, a North Wales based Web Design and Web Development Agency kindly took me under his wing and provided me with a fantastic opportunity that turned out to be exactly what I needed.

Upon joining H4Interactive I had never heard of Umbraco and for all I knew it could have been some kind of Allen Key or something ;) but it was thanks to Roger who introduced me to the CMS for the very first time. Since that day, I have always utilised Umbraco and what it has to offer for all of my personal and client projects that I have developed. In addition, I also made the decision to use the platform as the basis for my final year dissertation project which turned out to be a good choice as I was awarded a First Class. I don’t think I could have done it without Umbraco :) so credit where it’s due.

To be continued…..