I recently upgraded my blog from dasBlog to an Umbraco 4 installation. This
was partly because I've set a roadmap to discover more technology
this year, because as you move to manage more people, you get less
hands on, and that was something I wanted to change this year. But
more importantly, it was so I could start on that plan and get my
hands dirty on Umbraco 4.
The last time I used Umbraco in any serious deployment was for
an Umbraco 2 implementation, so it was fun to do a fresh install of
Umbraco 4. I wasn't really worried about keeping my old content -
from my Google
Analytics account I could see the most popular page was
actually where I'd uploaded an image of
lucky kitten - so it was an easy decision to start afresh.
It was a really painless exercise, and some of my findings are
listed below:
- The new installer is so much nicer than the old one - the new
Runway stuff is great, although we need some more modules (like
DNN or WordPress). Adding packages
has been easier than ever. So it was a simple as point and click to
add the blog module.
- The ASP.NET
Master Pages implementation
is awesome, and I'm glad the old template structure was so similar
as there is so little that needed to be changed. Job well done Niels ;) I actually grabbed a
template by Sam Karathanos
called pixeled
that was actually designed for WordPress and rolled it into
Umbraco in around 30 mins. Note to self - need to check out ASP.NET
themes living inside Umbraco.
- Since the URLs for dasBlog and Umbraco didn't match, I used the
really nice implementation of UrlRewritingNet to map some
of the old links to the new URLs. It was a simple as adding a few
lines like this:
<add name="blogCommentRewrite"
virtualUrl="^/blog/CommentView(.*).aspx"
rewriteUrlParameter="ExcludeFromClientQueryString"
destinationUrl="/blog"
ignoreCase="true" />
<add name="blogFeedRewrite"
virtualUrl="^/blog/SyndicationService.asmx/(.*)"
rewriteUrlParameter="ExcludeFromClientQueryString"
destinationUrl="/blog/rss"
ignoreCase="true" />
So even though its been a while since I had a chance to actually
do some Umbraco work, the version 4 updates are really easy to pick
up, and add a lot of neat new features.
